A few months back, India that is Bharat, that is secular, that is free, that is liberated, that is liberal will celebrate its 74thh year of independence with a pensive mood overtaking the senses…..
India is an irritating country. It refuses to be bound by any stereotype. It has the constitution of the first world and the poverty of the third ; it has the oppression of the 18th century along with the promise of the 21st ; like the Earth, there is a rage and a fire in its belly but fertile placidity on the surface; it has an educated middle class which is colonizing the great multinationals via the finest universities and the greatest numbers of illiterates of any country in the world ; it has a history of wealth which brought traders from comparatively impoverished cities like London to the gold-paved streets of Murshidabad (Clive’s phrase when he first entered the capital of Bengal after winning the battle of Plassey) ; it has the beauty of a philosophy which has nourished the mind ,heart and the soul from the birth of civilization and the ugliness of corruption that eats away the core of life like a poisonous worm; it has the capability of challenging the world in missile technology and the inability to construct a proper road ; it has the pride of a confident people and the insecurity of a generation uncertain of its true place in a swiftly-changing world.”
All these make India human: both vulnerable and exciting. The potential is magnificent, even if littered with questions. A nation can change its future; it cannot change its past; although if it has the sense, it can learn from the mistakes of history instead of luxuriating in the irrelevance of myth. Most of India’s contradictions are the consequence of a three way conflict between the burdens of the past , the demands of the present and the dreams of the future. There are countries which have risen above their history: there can be no better example than Western Europe which has exchanged centuries of devastating war for a shared prosperity that makes it a credible claimant for economic supremacy in the world. There are also countries which have been so defeated by their past that there is neither a present nor a future: Africa, sadly, seems to be overburdened with such examples. India has escaped that which so many of its ill-wishers had predicted but it is still in transition.”
After 74 years what does the balance sheet read like? The one glowing asset is democracy. Americans, who introduced democracy to the world, tend to take it for granted. Europe has had a more chequered relationship with the concept. The French may, through their revolution of 1789, have laid the ideological framework for the future but they soon slipped back into monarchy and worse very rapidly. In fact, for most of this century, Europe was largely fascist or feudal. When the great builders of our nation, therefore, promised democracy as the bedrock of our faith, they were not being imitative or following a fashion. In fact, no other former colony in the developing world had the courage to even contemplate the price that democracy extracts from its practitioners. The fact is that capitalists prefer dictatorships or authoritarian governments who can muzzle newspapers and ensure a constant supply of undemanding labour. China is always “safer” than India. Stability is trotted as an awesome necessity, without anyone pausing to think about the new question being asked: are they talking of stable governments or are they discussing a stable country? Democracy ensures a stable society and nation preciously because it allows governments to be vulnerable to the shifts of popular and parliamentary mood. Britain’s consolidation as the world’s greatest power occurred in a century when for long spells of time the tenure of Prime Ministers were counted in months rather than years. And what a splendid democracy India has evolved into: Red in the East ; Saffron in the West; a different hue in virtually every state and all borne by the credibility that emerges from the most authoritative of all sanctions : the will of the people . Indians have lived, as Rabindranath Tagore dreamt they would, for 74 years without fear, afraid neither of the world’s powers nor of their own rulers, behind neither iron curtain nor bamboo curtain but in the full gaze of a world which has viewed them alternately with curiosity and jaundice.
“Now for the bad news. That brooding demon called famine might have been slain, but its attendant horrors are visible on every street of every city of this land. One terrible problem with being father of the nation is that so many things you say become clichés in a few decades, but if anyone’s memory is any good he will recall that the Mahatma defined freedom not in terms of release from the British but in terms of release from poverty. He wanted to wipe out the tear of hunger from every eye. Look out of your windows and those tears are still flowing from the eyes of children with the road as a bed, a canopy as a roof and merciless labour as their only hope of survival. Look at teenage girls slipping away into the relief of prostitution, feeding their stomachs by cannibalizing their bodies.
Poverty was not only an Indian phenomenon. Biographies are being written at this very moment of self-made billionaires or indeed of self-made crooks who started life as refugees from the snow-bitter countries of middle Europe, dreaming of a whole potato as the specialty of their single meal. Four decades ago, not more, Singapore, Korea and South East Asia were all still archetypal third world countries, struggling with slums and disease. But Asia has followed Europe towards American levels of prosperity and India stays at the edge of the precipice of possibilities, staring at the sea of probability. Nine hundred million Indians are waiting for 2030 to come because that is the year, their government informs them, India will have four percent of the world’s trade. Three hundred years ago, India had 23 percent of the world’s trade….. This of course is why white men came from London and Paris to conquer it. Who wants to conquer a land without gold? There is gold still but it is in the hands of just one-fifth of the country with the top of the crest shimmering with diamonds. Rich India booms while impoverished India whimpers and waits. Rich India owns property more expensive than that available in New York ; while Indian children born on the street graduate to membership of gangs which are their only sustenance and in which they can collectively give some expression to that deep….deep anger against a destiny that made them slaves of other human beings. If Indians did not believe in destiny, there would have been blood in the gutters of Mumbai and Kolkata. “Some day it will be all right, of course. Some day we will even win the world cup in cricket again.