As we celebrate independence day once again it is only natural that we should be asking ourselves whether we have made good use of our freedom in the last 36 years. Answers to this question will differ, as they have always differed. But it should be possible to agree on certain points.
India, it cannot be seriously denied, is one of the freest societies in the world. So free in fact that it is ridiculous to call it a third world country. It compares favourably with West European and north American nations. In this regard we have kept faith with those who struggled and won independence for us.
Most of us have no idea what a marvelous achievement this preservation and expansion of liberty is. For, most of us do not care to remember that even in Western Europe, Portugal, Spain and Greece have only recently managed to become democracies and that they continue to be besieged by problems which threaten to overwhelm freedom. Liberty remains as rare in this last part of the 20th century as it has always been and we are among the lucky ones who possess it.
We have of course, had a brief lapse between June 1975 and March 1977. The most important point about the emergency, however, is not that it was proclaimed and enforced but that those who did it were so utterly devoid of the conviction that it could last. And last it did not. Mrs. Gandhi was a reluctant dictator. The ghosts of Nehru and the Mahatma haunted her. She had to go to the people to regain legitimacy in her own eyes. More, important, that brief experience with perhaps the mildest form of authoritarianism has strengthened our commitment to liberty to a point where it has become fashionable to criticize those in authority. Hardly does anyone pause to ask whether and how far the criticism is justified.
Bias for liberty
Marxists would call ours a bourgeois democracy though mercifully they have stopped calling it a formal democracy, the implication is that the Indian State is controlled, indirectly if not directly, by the rich and is run essentially in their interest. This is a travesty of the truth. The Indian bourgeoisie is weak and fragmented, it has not even tried seriously to manipulate the political process, leave alone dominate it. In the fifties it promoted a party which preached the 19th century concept of free enterprise. The party (Swatantra) did not get off the ground.
While the rulers are forced to recognise economic compulsions and offer certain incentives from time to time to industrialists and rich and middle-income peasants to persuade and enable them to step up production, their natural bias has been different. Political power in India has rested on the support of the weaker sections of society. And equally pertinently, by and large the Marxists too have been infected by the liberty virus.
Our second achievement is equally fabulous and, as it happens, it is equally ignored in our discussions except when we run into rough weather as currently in Punjab. We have preserved our unity. Only those who are old enough – India is a young country with more than 50 percent of the population below 30 – can realize what this means. Perhaps not even they. So used have we become to taking our unity for granted that we have forgotten all the dire predictions and our apprehensions in this regard. No, we have forgotten even Assam which worried us no end till only a few months ago. And we shall put the Akali agitation out of our mind as soon as some solution is found, or the Akalis, like the Assamese, just get tired and suitably divided. This is, however, no mere complacency. The confidence is justified. We have more or less mastered the art of staying together and at the same time preserving our religious, linguistic and cultural identities.
Sagacious Leadership
The main key to this success is democracy. We have, of course, an impressive array of institutions such as the all-India services, the vast communication and transport networks, and the integrated national market which are helpful. But as the break-up of Pakistan and the experience of much smaller countries such as Ethiopia, Nigeria, Yugoslavia, Iran and Iraq will show, it is much more difficult to contain tension arising out of ethnic, religious and linguistic differences in a non-democratic system than in a democratic one. It not just a question of letting out steam, though that is important in itself. The democratic system has built into it a mechanism which adjusts rival claims and pressures. This is not an automatic process. It calls for a reasonably competent and sagacious leadership which India has been lucky enough to possess. But it works. Any regional leader would think and behave differently if he were to move to Delhi or even to wish to get there.
Independent India’s third achievement falls in the same category as the first two, that is, it is equally impressive and it is equally ignored or taken for granted. India has been and is among the few genuinely non-aligned and therefore truly independent countries in the world.
The concept of non-alignment has been greatly watered down. Today, one can hold joint exercises with a superpower, concede bases to it covertly or even openly, get arms from it free for services rendered and provide it troops to promote its cause in some third country and still call oneself non-aligned. But even among countries which do not violate the spirit of non-alignment so blatantly, India stands out. It wavered only once – in the wake of the Chinese aggression in 1962 when it agreed to hold joint air exercises with the United States and Britain and to allow Voice of America broadcasts from it soil. But it did so, briefly. It did not repeat the exercise and it cancelled the agreement for VOA broadcasts. Indeed, two years later, it turned to the Soviet Union for its supply of sophisticated military hardware.
In interested Western quarters, there has been a lot of talk of India tilting towards the Soviet Union since 1949 when in the face of the communist victory in China Mr. Nehru refused to join the US-led anti-communist crusade. But this has been so much nonsense. Discerning Westerners themselves have known it to be so. It was, for instance, not long after India concluded the friendship treaty with the Soviet Union at the height of the Bangladesh crisis in 1971 that Mr. Kissinger said that Mrs. Gandhi was too tough a nationalist to subserve Soviet purposes in her part of the world.
Other Western leaders must also know, above all from their own experience of dealing with this country, that it does not surrender its freedom in return for aid, however large the aid and however urgent its need for it. India, for example, refused to lend any kind of support to the US-backed Saigon regime in 1966 and 1967 despite Washington’s pressure and its dependence on American wheat supplies (20 million tonnes in two years) on account of widespread drought. Similarly, in 1971 when it desperately needed Soviet support to ward off Chinese intervention in the impending armed conflict with Pakistan, New Delhi refused to endorse Mr. Brezhnev’s concept of Asian collective security which, as can easily be imagined, was intended to weaken US influence in the region.
India, to use Mao Zedong’s famous phrase, has stood up – in its dealing with the rich and the powerful. And, unlike in Mao’s China or, for the matter, in Mr. Deng Xiaoping’s China, the Indian people have stood up in relation to authority at home. These are historic changes the like of which have seldom been witnessed in history. Millions of us are still bowed under the burden of poverty. But the concept of human dignity has begun to permeate the weakest sections of our society. The Harijans and the tribals have begun to fight for their rights.
Notable successes
Our aspirations race ahead of our achievements. It is not a surprise – the revolution of rising expectations is sweeping all lands – and it need not be a cause for worry. For it produces the discontent which stimulates and sustains effort. But when we take stock of our overall performance, we much not fail to take note of our successes.
We have, for example, almost tripled our food production in the past three decades. We have banished famine; no one has died of starvation for at least the last 20 years. We have increased our industrial output manifold to become perhaps the eighth or ninth biggest producer of industrial goods. We have raised a large entrepreneurial class and the third largest pool of scientific and technological manpower in the world. We design, produce and run our nuclear reactors and we manufacture most of our military hardware even if in collaboration with others. We have almost doubled our life expectancy – from around 30 at the time of independence to over 52 now.
We have, of course, not done as well as some other Asian countries in the economic field and in some ways we are a less equitable and just society than many others, especially in the West. But in view of the size of our population and the relative scarcity of resources, we can be compared in the economic field only with China which has not fared significantly better despite the harsh communist dictatorship. It is phoney to compare India with South Korea or Taiwan or Singapore. We can and must do better. But we need not beat our breasts as if we are facing a disaster.
The Times of India, 15 August 1983