06-29-2008, 03:35 PM
<b>DISCOVER INDIA'S PAST TO FIND ITS FUTURE</b>
<b>
S. Gurumurthy</b>
Modern Indians, including Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru who argued the case for a modern India with Mahatma Gandhi, could neither own nor reject Indiaâs past. Nehru bluntly told Mahatma Gandhi once that <b>he did not consider Ram Rajya of the past, revered by the Mahatma, as the ideal road map for Indiaâs polity, nor did he want it back. But with most Indians refusing to snap their links with the past, many modernists, silently â and some, even openly â had written off India as a lost cause, almost agreeing with the likes of Max Weber who asserted that Hindus and Buddhists who believed in karma and rebirth could not develop in a modern world.</b> But it is now evident that India, once written off, has more than just survived, with loyalty to its past reasonably intact. Today it is perceived as a rising global power. <b>If India could handle the future without disowning its past, is it not time that Indians also debated whether it was their past that is wrong, or their adjudication about it?</b>
Begin from the run-up to Indiaâs freedom. Winston Churchill predicted that free India would slip into anarchy; he even counselled the British âto leave India to God; and, if that is too much, leave her to anarchyâ. <b>But India did not oblige Churchill. Instead, within a couple of years, it formulated a Constitution based on the rule of law on which the British had based their right to civilise, even rule, others. India unfailingly conducted elections, installed elected governments.</b> More. When Indira Gandhi attempted to undo this, the Indian villagers, whom the West and the Westernised in India â like Nehru did in his letter to Mahatma Gandhi way back in 1928 â despised as illiterate and uncivilised, handed an unforgettable defeat to her and restored democracy.
Some two decades after Churchill, another accomplished Westerner, but from the United States, J.K. Galbraith, confirmed India as an âanarchyâ, but a âfunctioningâ one. Galbraith, US Ambassador to India, was an admirer of Nehru, who proudly confided to Galbraith that he, Nehru, would be the last English Prime Minister of India! (Nehruji should be happy in heavens that he was wrong!) Many in the West believed that âanarchicâ India would function only till Nehru was around. <b>A leading American journalist, Welles Hangen, even wrote a book titled After Nehru, Who? (Err..India is despite Nehru, not because of Nehru) which concealed the implied question, what after Nehru â anarchy?</b> But India has, by now, seen after an inevitable Nehru, two more inevitables from the Nehru stable, and many non-Nehrus, as Prime Ministers. It has proved that it could do business with even a Deve Gowda, a farmer, or Inder Gujral, a refugee from Pakistan, or Manmohan Singh, a World Bank pensioner, as Prime Ministers. Far from one Nehru or one party in charge, coalitions of two dozen parties have been running governments successively for full terms, something which an Italy, which is some 2% of India, could not do; and Japan â less than a tenth of India â did not; which is something unthinkable for a Britain, that is about 5% of India; and is something that might even break the United States.
<b>
Free India has handled a Constitution that is based on an Anglo-Saxon worldview, with marginal indigenous input. The Indian Constitution instituted parliamentary democracy, but Indian polity has formalised dynasty; it preaches secularism, but our politics patronises communal vote banks; it celebrates socialism, but our economy functions on free market; it proscribes caste-oriented discrimination, but our polity prescribes caste-based differentiation; it is centred on individuals, but our politics is built around crowds; it makes Hindi the link language, but India is branded as the worldâs second largest English-speaking nation. What does this mean? Indian civilisation seems to possess unbelievable flexibility to handle these seemingly irreconcilable contradictions. Destiny has given India a durability which it seems to have denied to its cousins in the West and Middle West. There is no Greek or Roman or Egyptian or Babylonian or Arab or Persian civilisation today. Spiders weave a web where Caesars ruled, said Swami Vivekananda. Yet, more than a century ago, he foresaw Indiaâs rise, when no one suspected it would ever happen.</b>
India is now seen, even by those who had earlier written its obituary, as a rising geopolitical, economic power. Responsible analysts assert that three decades from now, India is likely to rank on par with the US as the second largest economy in the world; and as one of the top three world powers â the other two being US and China â reducing Germany, England, France, Japan and Russia to just regional status. Is this the rise of a backward nation?
British historian William Dalrymple sees rising India as merely claiming back its original status as a leading global power. Pre-colonial India was the leading economic powerhouse of the world. But, led by the colonial view that India had no proud past, distant or recent, free Indiaâs leadership worked, unsuccessfully, to bury the past which it found difficult to handle. Worse, it trivialised its past by labelling the slow progress of the nation under a socialist regime as the âHindu rate of growthâ, implying that Indiaâs past was holding down its growth rate. But the truth is the other way round. If the label Hindu rate of growth is acceptable in economics, it has to be equally conceded that it had made India the leading economic power for 17 centuries. <b>A study of global economic history by Angus Maddison, adviser to OECD, has confirmed that from the dawn of the Common Era, till 1700 India was the global economic leader. Maddisonâs study says that, in 1725, China overtook India, but India was the next, with France and Britain much lower down. This order continued till 1800. Later, the deepening colonial exploitation pushed India to the third position, and slowly, with the rise of the US and other countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, India was pushed into backwardness. It was colonialism, as Dadabhai Nowrojee substantiated first and as Will Durant eloquently articulated later in his paper, âThe Case for Indiaâ, that ruined India.</b>
It is not over yet. The education system that free India adopted from colonialists kept these facts away from young Indians and instead addicted them to self-flagellation and negativism, making many of them feel shy, rather than proud, of their past. Result? <b>Most Indians, finance minister P. Chidambaram included, are unaware that India was the global economic topper till the 18th century and that it lost that position only due to colonial assault. Recently the finance minister even chided those who maintained that India that was once prosperous was ruined by colonialism. Free Indiaâs leaders had blamed its underdevelopment on its past, trusting Western sociologists like Max Weber who certified in the 1920s that India was unfit for socio-economic development on modern lines as it believed in caste, karma and rebirth.</b> But today in many American universities, says the International Business Week, capitalism aligned to the philosophy of karma is being taught as the way out of the current corporate capitalist mess.
Back in India, a Harish Damodaran from the Marxist stable, being the grandson of E.M.S. Namboodiripad, and others write books on how different castes â not just Vaishyas or other Savarnas, but also OBCs and even Dalits â have risen up on the development ladder. And thanks to their entry, business has generated a mass entrepreneurial movement in India. The Global Entrepreneur Monitor Study [2002] identifies that 18% of the Indian people in the age group of 16 to 64 are entrepreneurs, while in China it is 12% and in the US it is 10%. That is why the growth story of India, with foreign investment less than 2% of its total investment, is regarded as entrepreneur-driven, while Chinaâs is seen as largely foreign investment-driven.
Finally, India has only 12,404 police stations, as per Indian home ministryâs statistics for December 2004, to supervise thousands of towns and lakhs of villages, and yet it has the lowest crime rate, according to UNDP. <b>Evidence is mounting against those who blamed Indiaâs past to escape all blame for the present.
William Dalrymple is right when he says that for India it is back to prosperity, not backwardness to prosperity. Hence the question: Is its past that is to blame for Indiaâs underperformance for half a century after freedom, or was that just an alibi for a leadership that did not perform?</b>
<b>
S. Gurumurthy</b>
Modern Indians, including Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru who argued the case for a modern India with Mahatma Gandhi, could neither own nor reject Indiaâs past. Nehru bluntly told Mahatma Gandhi once that <b>he did not consider Ram Rajya of the past, revered by the Mahatma, as the ideal road map for Indiaâs polity, nor did he want it back. But with most Indians refusing to snap their links with the past, many modernists, silently â and some, even openly â had written off India as a lost cause, almost agreeing with the likes of Max Weber who asserted that Hindus and Buddhists who believed in karma and rebirth could not develop in a modern world.</b> But it is now evident that India, once written off, has more than just survived, with loyalty to its past reasonably intact. Today it is perceived as a rising global power. <b>If India could handle the future without disowning its past, is it not time that Indians also debated whether it was their past that is wrong, or their adjudication about it?</b>
Begin from the run-up to Indiaâs freedom. Winston Churchill predicted that free India would slip into anarchy; he even counselled the British âto leave India to God; and, if that is too much, leave her to anarchyâ. <b>But India did not oblige Churchill. Instead, within a couple of years, it formulated a Constitution based on the rule of law on which the British had based their right to civilise, even rule, others. India unfailingly conducted elections, installed elected governments.</b> More. When Indira Gandhi attempted to undo this, the Indian villagers, whom the West and the Westernised in India â like Nehru did in his letter to Mahatma Gandhi way back in 1928 â despised as illiterate and uncivilised, handed an unforgettable defeat to her and restored democracy.
Some two decades after Churchill, another accomplished Westerner, but from the United States, J.K. Galbraith, confirmed India as an âanarchyâ, but a âfunctioningâ one. Galbraith, US Ambassador to India, was an admirer of Nehru, who proudly confided to Galbraith that he, Nehru, would be the last English Prime Minister of India! (Nehruji should be happy in heavens that he was wrong!) Many in the West believed that âanarchicâ India would function only till Nehru was around. <b>A leading American journalist, Welles Hangen, even wrote a book titled After Nehru, Who? (Err..India is despite Nehru, not because of Nehru) which concealed the implied question, what after Nehru â anarchy?</b> But India has, by now, seen after an inevitable Nehru, two more inevitables from the Nehru stable, and many non-Nehrus, as Prime Ministers. It has proved that it could do business with even a Deve Gowda, a farmer, or Inder Gujral, a refugee from Pakistan, or Manmohan Singh, a World Bank pensioner, as Prime Ministers. Far from one Nehru or one party in charge, coalitions of two dozen parties have been running governments successively for full terms, something which an Italy, which is some 2% of India, could not do; and Japan â less than a tenth of India â did not; which is something unthinkable for a Britain, that is about 5% of India; and is something that might even break the United States.
<b>
Free India has handled a Constitution that is based on an Anglo-Saxon worldview, with marginal indigenous input. The Indian Constitution instituted parliamentary democracy, but Indian polity has formalised dynasty; it preaches secularism, but our politics patronises communal vote banks; it celebrates socialism, but our economy functions on free market; it proscribes caste-oriented discrimination, but our polity prescribes caste-based differentiation; it is centred on individuals, but our politics is built around crowds; it makes Hindi the link language, but India is branded as the worldâs second largest English-speaking nation. What does this mean? Indian civilisation seems to possess unbelievable flexibility to handle these seemingly irreconcilable contradictions. Destiny has given India a durability which it seems to have denied to its cousins in the West and Middle West. There is no Greek or Roman or Egyptian or Babylonian or Arab or Persian civilisation today. Spiders weave a web where Caesars ruled, said Swami Vivekananda. Yet, more than a century ago, he foresaw Indiaâs rise, when no one suspected it would ever happen.</b>
India is now seen, even by those who had earlier written its obituary, as a rising geopolitical, economic power. Responsible analysts assert that three decades from now, India is likely to rank on par with the US as the second largest economy in the world; and as one of the top three world powers â the other two being US and China â reducing Germany, England, France, Japan and Russia to just regional status. Is this the rise of a backward nation?
British historian William Dalrymple sees rising India as merely claiming back its original status as a leading global power. Pre-colonial India was the leading economic powerhouse of the world. But, led by the colonial view that India had no proud past, distant or recent, free Indiaâs leadership worked, unsuccessfully, to bury the past which it found difficult to handle. Worse, it trivialised its past by labelling the slow progress of the nation under a socialist regime as the âHindu rate of growthâ, implying that Indiaâs past was holding down its growth rate. But the truth is the other way round. If the label Hindu rate of growth is acceptable in economics, it has to be equally conceded that it had made India the leading economic power for 17 centuries. <b>A study of global economic history by Angus Maddison, adviser to OECD, has confirmed that from the dawn of the Common Era, till 1700 India was the global economic leader. Maddisonâs study says that, in 1725, China overtook India, but India was the next, with France and Britain much lower down. This order continued till 1800. Later, the deepening colonial exploitation pushed India to the third position, and slowly, with the rise of the US and other countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, India was pushed into backwardness. It was colonialism, as Dadabhai Nowrojee substantiated first and as Will Durant eloquently articulated later in his paper, âThe Case for Indiaâ, that ruined India.</b>
It is not over yet. The education system that free India adopted from colonialists kept these facts away from young Indians and instead addicted them to self-flagellation and negativism, making many of them feel shy, rather than proud, of their past. Result? <b>Most Indians, finance minister P. Chidambaram included, are unaware that India was the global economic topper till the 18th century and that it lost that position only due to colonial assault. Recently the finance minister even chided those who maintained that India that was once prosperous was ruined by colonialism. Free Indiaâs leaders had blamed its underdevelopment on its past, trusting Western sociologists like Max Weber who certified in the 1920s that India was unfit for socio-economic development on modern lines as it believed in caste, karma and rebirth.</b> But today in many American universities, says the International Business Week, capitalism aligned to the philosophy of karma is being taught as the way out of the current corporate capitalist mess.
Back in India, a Harish Damodaran from the Marxist stable, being the grandson of E.M.S. Namboodiripad, and others write books on how different castes â not just Vaishyas or other Savarnas, but also OBCs and even Dalits â have risen up on the development ladder. And thanks to their entry, business has generated a mass entrepreneurial movement in India. The Global Entrepreneur Monitor Study [2002] identifies that 18% of the Indian people in the age group of 16 to 64 are entrepreneurs, while in China it is 12% and in the US it is 10%. That is why the growth story of India, with foreign investment less than 2% of its total investment, is regarded as entrepreneur-driven, while Chinaâs is seen as largely foreign investment-driven.
Finally, India has only 12,404 police stations, as per Indian home ministryâs statistics for December 2004, to supervise thousands of towns and lakhs of villages, and yet it has the lowest crime rate, according to UNDP. <b>Evidence is mounting against those who blamed Indiaâs past to escape all blame for the present.
William Dalrymple is right when he says that for India it is back to prosperity, not backwardness to prosperity. Hence the question: Is its past that is to blame for Indiaâs underperformance for half a century after freedom, or was that just an alibi for a leadership that did not perform?</b>