If there is one thing that the recent India-China border violence has highlighted, it is the dangers of ‘externalising’ the internal rage of young Indians into a national policy, going beyond the domestic needs of electoral politics. This is independent of the way all Indians feel for our 20 martyrs and the vow the nation has taken to stand by the government and the armed forces, to defend every inch of territory to the last man and woman.
India’s inherent strength since Independence flowed from the nation’s ability to look and act inwardly after the dastardly Partition killings and the unanticipated assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Much of it owed to his inspiration, and a lot more to the urgent need for the nation to modernise itself on all fronts—from agriculture to industry, education to healthcare. Independent of the relative successes and failures through consequent decades, the early Nehruvian model of ‘democratic socialism’ gave India and Indians an internal agenda to work with and work on—even fight and vote over.
Even the political opponents of Nehru had enough in the model to criticise the issues and fight successive elections over them. Enemies, inside and outside: At present, there is a tendency among a section of India’s people to find enemies from within and without, to lend credence to their own ‘nationalist’ credentials. The very phrase ‘nationalism’ has acquired a new hue and meaning than was understood during the freedom movement and for decades later.
It is one thing to use ‘nationalist’ slogans and best practices to win freedom from a colonial power. It is another thing altogether to use the same term and sentiment to classify and de-classify fellow Indians as never before. As they rightly swear, India has remained united by geography and culture for centuries, but socio-political unity as understood now came about only with the Republican Constitution of 1950.
Definitely, there is an ‘internal, impotent rage’ in every Indian, that the nation has not reached the promised moon.
Individual causes and contexts may vary, but this rage could be touched and felt. Beginning with the freedom movement and later on, too, people gave expression to the unmet aspirations of the nation and its citizenry by taking to the streets. Thus far, the 21st century generation is content with expressing dissent through the ballot, which is the most powerful weapon available to the masses in a democracy.
Though Pakistan is for now a democracy on paper, as against the previous decades, India cannot take it for granted. Thoughts of China in this regard bring to mind memories of Tiananmen Square (1989) and the current realities of Hong Kong protests.
That is so even if one puts Mao Zedong’s regime and the ‘Cultural Revolution’ (1966-76) in the back-burner of memory. Despite the intervening Emergency (1975-76), India has remained a democracy, in form, content and spirit. Visionary leadership: Pakistan has lost out in the race with India, on all fronts, not because it did not have the wherewithal, including human and natural resources, at Independence. In the Cold War era, it also had the West willingly underwriting its spending, especially on arms procurement.
So much so, the US and the rest of the West looked the other way despite systemic Indian complaints that Pakistan was developing a nuclear bomb. Thus, one unmentioned/unintended result of India’s Pokhran-II nuclear weapons tests (1998) was that it forced Pakistan to acknowledge that it had a nuclear programme that had also reached the testing stage. The Chagai-I nuclear tests, just a fortnight after Pokhran-II, showed the world what the West had known, and India had suspected for a long time.
In the absence of a domestic socio-economic agenda to uplift the masses, comparing and competing with India became Pakistan’s only occupation. Like the recalcitrant child wanting whatever the other had, the nation has destroyed itself. In his time, Zulfikhar Ali Bhutto infamously declared that “we (Pakistanis) will eat grass, but will have the bomb”, just because India, with its ‘China threat’ still looming large, had them. Zia-ul-Haq wanted to “bleed India through a thousand cuts”, but his kind of cross-border terrorism too has not destroyed India. Both have destroyed Pakistan, from the inside.
Compare and contrast: In the post-Cold War era, the tendency among many Indians is to compare and contrast India with China, likewise. There is a need to acknowledge that China, having begun its economic recovery earlier (1978) than India and given the system of governance, is still marching ahead.
Indians need to hold the fire within, until we are really ready to take on China. The Chinese example has shown that they did not look outside the window until they became an economic superpower and there was space following the sudden exit of the Soviet Union. Rather than externalising the nation’s ‘impotent rage’ of the times, it will serve India’s larger cause only when we do not confuse aspirations and ambitions with realities and results on the ground.
N Sathiya Moorthy
Distinguished Fellow and Head-Chennai Initiative, Observer Research Foundation
(sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)