A nation that awoke at the stroke of midnight on August 14, 1947, to embrace a new “tryst with destiny”, has resonated to a call for a renewal after 65 years of independence. Corruption that rots the system may be the theme around which the current agitation launched by Anna Hazare revolves. Yet the way it has galvanised millions of people into a grassroots movement against the status quo seems to be propelled by deeper undercurrents _ the fears, hopes and aspirations of a people staring into their global future.
The causes for the call of a national renewal are directly related to the liberalisation begun 20 years ago and to the long-held lofty ideals of Indian democracy: “Mera Bharat Mahan.” (I am proud to be an Indian.) Liberalisation has brought economic relief to the new middle and upper-middle classes.
The spigot of direct foreign investment has been opened like a tube well on a drought-infested farmland. But the relief has not reached the majority of the population, especially, the lower middle classes and the rural poor, which constitutes the majority of Indian population.
Economic reforms were supposed to usher in liberalisation. But liberalisation has actually meant big bucks for corrupt politicians. The scale of some of the corruption scandals over the past few years is staggering. The total amount of black money — funds earned on the black market on which income and other taxes are not paid — is estimated at over US $1.4 trillion. The underpricing of the 2G spectrum by the Department of Telecommunications has resulted in a loss to the exchequer of about $ 39 billion. Costs for the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi ballooned from the millions of dollars to the billions, largely due to inefficiency and corruption.
India’s new wealth has brought forth a disorientation of deeply cherished Indian values. The flush of new capital has made economic disparities very stark. The common man, a peasant or a villager, the aam aadmi, feels insulted walking on the streets of Delhi. The imported cars, BMW, Mercedes and now Rolls-Royce, have driven them off the footpaths. The new India may attract medical tourists from the affluent west but it does not relate to everyday citizens on the street and to the new generation. It belongs to the oligarchs and industrial elites who have hijacked the state.
According to Transparency International, India ranks 87th on last year’s report on international corruption, from 72nd in 2009, and it could fall even further after the major scandals mentioned above.
It is this stark contrast within the country, which boasts of having the largest number of billionaires without feeling ashamed of hosting the largest number of people below the poverty line that has attracted the masses toward veteran Gandhian Anna Hazare. His memory may have faded with time but Gandhi remains the totemic father figure in the Indian political psyche. Just as Americans will never get over George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln as the moral architects of a nation, Indians will never get over Gandhi.
As Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi’s ardent follower and closest associate, was fond of reading the American poet-laureate Robert Frost, India now faces a fork in the road. Will it become a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate, multinational and materialist interests? Or will it retain some semblance of a cultural identity, ethical determination and the idea of a national suffrage? This is India’s Faustian bargain.
Nehru beckoned Indians to a better future, but not at the cost of selling out their souls.
The future beckons to us. Whither do we go and what shall be our endeavour? To bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman.
Given India is now adept at cultural borrowing, relying heavily on Western scripts in their docudramas, movies and plays, it is appropriate to draw out the Faustian bargain between Mahatma and Mephistopheles, the devil reincarnate in Goethe’s Faust.
Every Indian political and cultural elite must now face the Faustian bargain. In the race to catch up with the West, will India choose an expedient path towards development and simply jettison its backward villages, where most of Hazare’s poor, tribal and downtrodden populations live? If Indian policymakers were to choose this path, they would soon discover, not unlike their Western forerunners, that they bargained their souls to achieve a chimerical goal of modernisation, where every modern comfort is available but happiness is in short supply.
After all, this is one of the key lessons India must adopt from the West. Gross Domestic Product growth does not translate into happiness in a linear and straightforward manner.
As Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has shown, in a critique of neo-classical economics, human capital is just as important as financial capital and building communities and families is just as central to development as building financial resources.
Building economic capital at the expense of human capital leads to anomie and loss of meaning, dysfunctional families, alcoholism, drugs, violence and a downward social drift. Surely, India does not want to replicate the century-long travails of the West by winning the world but losing its core values in the process.
India’s founding fathers, almost all of whom were trained at elite Western universities, knew the strengths and pitfalls of the European enlightenment project, which the rapid pace of development often accompanies.
In the age of globalisation, if Indians were to forget the hard-won lessons of the Independence struggle, India might lose both “the home and world” in the 21st century. And this time it will not be because of colonialism. It will be simply because India lost its way. Now, following on the Mahatma’s footsteps, Anna Hazare is showing a path out of the quagmire and many Indian people are willing to follow his lead.
Speaking at the golden jubilee celebrations of the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that economic liberalisation has nothing to do with corruption. This is only partially true. For though the end of licence and permit raj has done away with traditional forms of corruption, the corrupt organisations and institutions that were put in place have found ways to carry on long after they lost their function. The withdrawal of the State from economic sphere has resulted in new forms of politician-bureaucrat-corporate nexus.
In trying to make globalisation and liberalisation work in India, keeping a vision of what development is about is important.
As Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz has aptly pointed out in the context of India, “One has to have broader vision of sustainable and democratic development.”
Upendra Nath Sharma is a sociologist. Email: upendrasarojsharma@yahoo.com