Independent India is 35 today. This is not much of an age, for a nation. Even so, 35 years of existence as a free self-governing entity is long enough to enable us to make at least a tentative judgment whether we are likely to take an honoured place in the world community in the near future or remain, to use a phrase from the vocabulary of the pre-independence era, drawers of water and hewers of wood.
An assessment of performance, however tentative, depends on the yardstick or yardsticks, one uses. For some reason which is rather obscure, our age (the post-war period) has come to prize economic achievement above all else. In terms of this yardstick, we are not among the front-runners.
Economic performance is measured in terms of the average rate of growth over a period of time and of reduction in inequalities of incomes. In neither aspect has our performance been as impressive as that of some other countries.
We are neither, another Japan nor another China. We have neither multiplied our national wealth several score times over as Japan has done, nor removed the grossest forms of inequality and poverty as China has done to a substantial extent. This has adversely affected not only our image abroad but also our self-esteem. A lot of us have come to believe that we are a failure as a society.
This is an absurd conclusion. We have not fared badly at all if we compare our rate of growth with that of any country in the 19th, and early part of the 20th century. Even Britain, Germany and the United States never exceeded our 3 to 3.5 per cent growth rate in that period.
And witness the details. The average life expectancy has almost doubled in 35 years and so has the population. Even if. we accept that 40-45 per cent of the population is below the poverty line, over 400 million people, over 50 million more than the country’s total population at the time of independence, are above it, most of them having moved there since 1947. These may well be the first 35 years in our history when millions of people have not died as a result of either starvation in a famine or of an epidemic. And in the face of the truly remarkable expansion of the middle class, the talk of the rich having become richer and the poor poorer is plain rhetoric. The poor have certainly not grown poorer, if only because there was little scope for it.
We have not moved towards a socialist society. We could not have, without the loss of personal liberties as in China and the Soviet- bloc countries. Social democracy or democratic socialism is possible, but only in highly industrialised countries and that too in a period of rapid economic expansion. But talking of the “socialist path of development” we have obscured our achievements and confused both ourselves and the outside world. Even so, the achievements are not unimpressive.
Most Indians living today have no experience of famine. To them it is an abstraction like cancer or nuclear war. Most of us do not know our history and are therefore, not aware that famines have been a regular feature of our history. For us to have banished famines and death by starvation is itself an achievement.
But this has not been our sole achievement. We have not just increased our food output by over two-and-a-half times. We have built an impressive infrastructure and created a poof of scientific and technological manpower which, at least in quantitative terms, is the third largest in the world.
Again, most of us have no idea what these figures mean because we have no knowledge of how backward we were in these fields at the time of independence. Men and women of our generation could not even fix a fuse. And, of course, most towns had no electricity up to the ’thirties.
In recent years, support for the concept of a mixed economy with an ever-expanding public sector in control of the commanding heights of the economy, has declined and the belief has spread that we would have done much better than we have if Nehru had not chosen the path he did. Going by the experience of other societies, there is merit in this proposition. But this view is not sui generis. It has not risen as if out of nothing. It is an expression of the fact that a large self-confident entrepreneurial class has arisen in the country and that a lot of Indians are now prepared to place their trust in this class which they were not prepared to do even a decade ago. Incidentally, the concept of centralised planning has also got discredited in recent years as the impression has grown that no centrally planned economy is doing too well.
There is another aspect of the problem which has almost universally been misunderstood. Nehru’s decision to opt for a mixed, economy has been seen as the result of foreign influence – Fabian socialism and Soviet centralised planning. Perhaps he himself saw it in that way.
But Nehru was always searching in every facet of his life and activity for the middle path which Lord Buddha had commended. His policy of non-alignment with its accent on negotiations and mediation is one expression of such a temperament, and so also his concept of secularism which did not deny the life of the spirit and all that it implies. His preference for a mixed economy falls in the same category. He genuinely believed that this path would help promote economic growth and social peace at the same time. No one can possibly claim that his total approach, – a mixed economy, secularism, democracy and non-alignment – has not been productive of results. It is a tribute to Nehru’s foresight that unlike most Third-World countries, we are still a functioning democracy, and a reasonably humane society where the rulers feet obliged at least to profess high standards of public morality.
I am emphasising the essentially Indian origins of the concept of a mixed economy in order to make the point that we can deviate from the search for a middle path for long only at the cost of grave violence to ourselves. The forms may differ. But the search for a middle path between capitalism and socialism has to go on. A Latin American type of economy and society is inconceivable, in India.
Of the two greatest architects of independent and modern India, Gandhiji emphasised tradition and continuity more than the need for charge and Nehru the need for change more than that for continuity. But just as Gandhiji was not a status quoist wanting to freeze India in its stagnant state, Nehru was not a rootless, wandering, cosmopolitan, contemptuous of his and his people’s past. The two used different vocabularies. Their prescriptions for India’s renewal differed, some would say, violently. But basically they were engaged in the same search – the search for raising India without tearing it away from its past. And Gandhiji and Nehru were not mere individuals; they embodied the aspiration of a whole people.
No foreigner, however sympathetic, can possibly handle this yardstick of judging how far and well India has moved into the present without forsaking the past. He cannot avoid either applying his yardstick based on his society’s experience and the value system resulting from it or adopting a condescending and supercilious attitude, as if we were an inferior people who should be judged by an inferior and less exacting standard. The tragedy is that many of the educated Indians also tend to do the same. They too see their country through the eyes of foreigners.
This is not a plea for charity or generosity, though no one can understand a society, much less a civilization, without these qualities of the heart and the mind. This is a plea for recognition that we are different from other major civilizations – the modern European one fashioned by the interaction between their Graeco-Roman and their Judaeo-Christian heritage, the Chinese one and the Arab-Muslim one – that we should remain different and that a determined effort to obliterate these differences can make caricatures of us, unworthy of the respect of others.
The modernisers, whether of the Liberal-Western or the Marxist-Leninist line, have no interest in the integrity of the Indian personality and would, therefore, wish to see the pace of change accelerated so that India becomes a copy of some western model. And we, on our part, have no clear perception of how to handle the enterprise of combining continuity with change.
We have been lucky in some ways. Since independence we have had as our leaders proud who have refused to subordinate themselves and the country to any alien agency, whatever the cost. Non-alignment has not been and is not a balancing act. It is not an exercise in either equidistance or equi-nearness. It is not a clever trick to increase our leverage with the superpowers and our attractiveness to other Third World countries. It is a plain and simple assertion of our right to shape our policies and lives in accordance with our own personality and with our perception of our interests. And gradually this assertion has become part of our nature. In this sense, if not in others, we have stood up and lived up to the message of August 15. We have been truly independent.
This independence in foreign affairs has not been a small achievement. Much stronger and richer nations cannot claim as proud a record in this regard as we can. It should be enough to recall that we did not compromise our independence and agree to go along with the Americans on China in the wake of the Chinese attack on us and on Vietnam in 1966 and 1967 when we depended on their munificence for our very survival. We imported 10 million tonnes of cereals each year (one-seventh of our production) in order to avoid a disastrous famine. As it happens, we have asserted the same independence in the economic field. Though we have forgone enormous foreign aid and investment, we have learnt to be self-reliant and demonstrated that we cannot be pushed, around.
All this would, of course, not have been possible if we had not possessed a state capable of resisting encroachments on its freedom of action and of evolving and pursuing coherent policies. We have possessed such a state, which is a marvel. For no society at our level of economic development and amidst a social transformation of our magnitude has ever in history established and preserved democratic institutions.
This state is now in peril. As the saying goes, if the fence begins to devour the field, no one can possibly protect the crop. This is happening to the Indian state. Many of those in charge of its machinery have begun to use it to advance their petty interests at the cost of the future of the country. To say that corruption has become a way of life is to understate the magnitude of the problem. There was corruption before. It has now become loot. One of the well-known practitioners of this no longer fine art used to boast to business magnates: “My predecessors were fools. They were content with a 10 per cent share in your profits. I believe in taking 90 per cent, leaving only 10 per cent for you”. The others are not so boastful but are equally venal and rapacious.
It is a sign of intellectual weakness to explain this phenomenon in terms of the so-called decline in moral standards. We have to view it in the context of larger social developments – the rise and expansion of a property-owning middle class, the consequent determination of social status in money terms, the bypassing of absurd and frustrating rules and regulations by this class and the growth of a parallel economy which now accounts for almost 40 per cent of the economy in urban centres, the decline of the Brahnimical order with its emphasis on austerity and learning, the birth of the .bourgeois order with its glorification of financial success and so on.
There is, of course, the other side of the story. If by some chance, the Indian state had survived as we inherited it from the British and as the Western-educated and left-inclined (Brahminical) intelligentsia sought to shape it, it would have stifled economic growth and produced a different kind of crisis. As such it is not an altogether bad thing that the more adventurous among us have succeeded in bending it to their purpose because the social, good too has got advanced in the process. If some individuals have made crores within or without the law, often without the law, they have also invested crores in business and industry. But things have gone too far. Almost the entire political class has got discredited. In the Nehru era, the people expected the politicians to push and control the hidebound bureaucrats to make them respond to their needs and urges, and to compel the judiciary to speed up the process of justice. Today the people expect the bureaucracy to stand up to their political masters and the judges to preserve the Constitution and the rule of law against assaults on them by the politicians.
Clearly this does not augur well for the future of Indian democracy. The danger will be seen to be particularly serious if it is recognised, as it must be, that almost all political parties, including the most important of them all, the Congress (I), are in disarray and there does not appear to be a chance that they will be able to put their houses in order in the foreseeable future.
Where do we go from here? No one can say. But we can say that the process of correction must begin. Perhaps it has begun, judging by the Antulay case. But it has to be pushed much farther to be effective in saving the Indian state from being eaten up by the human equivalents of white ants. This is a complex process and it has to be handled with care.
In secular terms, August 15 is the greatest day in our history not only because we secured our independence on that day but also because in the process we won an opportunity to accomplish the tasks our forefathers had failed to accomplish – to integrate our society and to build a state which could attend to and fulfil our needs – national defence, economic development, social justice and peace, educational and cultural advancement, social change which would at once be in conformity with our national genius and the spirit of the age in which we live. We shall have failed if we do not try and build such a state. We cannot afford to fail once again. This time the price can be even higher than on previous occasions which was high enough. We live in a small and cruel world anxious to pass on its burden to the weak and the unsuccessful.
The Times of India, Sunday Magazine, 15 Aug 1982