'I am quite satisfied with my views on India," Winston Churchill declared in 1930, "and I don't want them disturbed by any bloody Indians." A few weeks ago David Miliband, the foreign secretary, provided a measure of just how far Britain and India have travelled from hidebound imperialism of the Churchillian kind. With their growing economies and increasingly assertive elites, Asian countries such as India and China press upon the west as never before, and Miliband seemed to acknowledge this when he told a group of journalists that politicians of his generation who didn't understand what the world looked like through Indian eyes, weren't going to understand the world very well.
Miliband's curiosity most likely derives from India's growing economic strength. But the country's political and intellectual life, particularly its experiment with democracy and pluralism, has an equal bearing on Europe today. With its many religions and languages, and inequalities of caste and class, India possesses greater social and cultural variety than even Europe. Aware that the potential for conflict between religious and ethnic communities was immense, India's founding fathers hoped to build a pluralist democracy.
Much has happened since the bloody partition of India to taint their ideals. The vulnerability of Muslims, India's weakest and most oppressed minority, to majority nationalism was exposed early in 1948, when a Hindu nationalist assassinated Gandhi, believing him to be too soft on Muslims. Ethnic and religious minorities in Punjab, Kashmir and the north-east have rebelled against what they see as a Hindu-dominated state - and have been crushed brutally. Political and religious militancy has claimed tens of thousands of lives. As recently as 2002, the Hindu nationalist BJP presided over the massacre of more than 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat.
The scale of political-religious violence in India dwarfs anything suffered by western Europe in the postwar era. Yet India's unique liberal tradition, which respects minority identity and community belonging, remains central in the country's intellectual life. Indian economists, historians, sociologists, philosophers, novelists and journalists are deeply divided on many political and economic issues. But, apart from a minuscule few, they remain wedded to India's founding vision of pluralism.
Not surprisingly, these postcolonial Indians are bewildered to see liberal politicians and intellectuals in Europe embrace a majoritarian nationalism, recoiling from what, by Indian standards, seems a very limited experience of social diversity and political extremism. Acts of terrorism in the post-9/11 period have shocked many Europeans into a new awareness of an alienated minority group in their midst. It is clear that recklessly globalising capital and technology, and the failed modernisation of much of the formerly colonial world - of which religious extremism and migration are consequences - pose daunting challenges to European societies. But instead of facing them squarely, many Europeans have retreated into old insecurities about Islam and Muslims.
Thus the Turkish community seeking to build a mosque in Cologne has come up against widespread German fears of being "swamped" by Muslims. The Netherlands and Denmark already have draconian laws that discriminate against non-white foreigners. Lamenting his country's inadequate laws, Germany's interior minister last month proposed "targeted killings" as a measure against terrorists. Some liberal intellectuals have vigorously protested about this deteriorating political climate - what even the Economist was moved to denounce as "bigotry" last month. But many others seem to have joined opportunistic politicians in assaulting the straw man of multiculturalism or, as Martin Amis demonstrated in the Times this week, the even flimsier effigy of liberal relativism. Still looking at the world through the ideological simplicities of the cold war and longing to give battle to another evil "ism", they have found a worthy enemy in the conceptual conceit called Islamofascism. Presenting themselves as defenders of western civilisation, they speak a great deal about "our superior values", variously termed British, European, or western.
If this disturbs Indian intellectuals, it is because they are accustomed, from bitter recent experience of the BJP, to see strident rhetoric about values as a rightwing ploy meant to channel middle-class anxiety over seemingly insuperable problems into xenophobia.
As a survey on Muslims in Europe this month in the Financial Times shows, columnists raising the spectre of "Londonistan" and "Eurabia" are victims of paranoia. And those accusing liberal relativists or the left of being in bed with Osama bin Laden seem to resort to a tactic honed by Senator Joe McCarthy. But fear and prejudice appear to have struck deep roots when someone like Amis confesses to an "urge" to strip-search Muslims.
"To an Indian," as the novelist Mukul Kesavan recently pointed out in the Calcutta daily, the Telegraph, "this isn't language that even the BJP would use in public". What makes much of the western liberal response to the post-9/11 world such a depressing spectacle of the trahison de clercs is, as Kesavan wrote, the way "in which the case for the illiberal, coercive and even punitive treatment of Muslims is made, the way in which the demonisation of Muslims as a matter of public policy is presented as a properly liberal project for all but softheaded, bleeding hearts".
Kesavan may seem to exaggerate when he points to an "ideological convergence in the ideas of the muscular European liberal and the militant Hindu fascist". And it is likely that just as the militant Hindu is usually an upper-caste man fearful of assertive low-caste groups, the non-relativist muscular European liberals are no more than a few middle-aged pundits rattled to see their assumptions defied by the upstart regimes of Iran and Venezuela, as well as India, China and Russia.
In any case, claims to superior values are likely to fall on deaf ears in a world where the chasm between moral grandstanding and actual conduct is quickly exposed. Last century, Indian thinkers pointed to this credibility gap. Indeed, much of Gandhi's strategy of non-violent persuasion consisted of alerting the British to the contradiction between their claims of fair play and the reality of imperial rule. Asked for his opinion of "western civilisation", Gandhi replied: "It would be a good idea." It sounds like a cheap jibe, but he was in earnest. Civilisation, he implied, is never a fixed achievement, as Europe's own frequent descent into barbarism in the 20th century proved; it has to be maintained, primarily by a high degree of awareness about its fragility.
Gandhi's warning came during the interwar years in Europe, when liberal democracy proved feeble before demagogic nationalism. It is no less relevant today, as opinion-makers berate what appears to be the latest of many minorities Europe has found indigestible. Intellectuals may balk at learning from a supposedly inferior Asian country. The lesson, however, from an embattled and resilient Indian liberalism in the 61st year of India's existence is clear: liberal values will prove their superiority by not collapsing before the challenge of pluralism and political extremism.
Pankaj Mishra, the author of Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Beyond.