Advertisement
Advertisement

Raising India's pulse without selling its soul

With the clockwork regularity befitting a nation aspiring to modernity, India will celebrate the 61st anniversary of independence on Friday with the usual stirring ceremony harking back to the nation's mixed ancestry. But this might be the last time that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh - the man who has almost singlehandedly revived India - is at the centre of the celebrations.

With elections looming, Dr Singh might have to pay the price for imaginative policies decisively implemented. He did so in his previous incarnation as finance minister, opening the economy to the international financial system and saving India from defaulting on international debts.

Though his Congress Party lost the next elections (largely because voters baulked at his sweeping reforms), leading international investment banks, hedge funds and technology firms are today flocking to India only because Dr Singh had the courage to move to the next stage of development.

India remains, philosophically, a socialist state, practising positive discrimination in schools and earmarking half of all government jobs for the poor.

Dr Singh is perceived by outsiders as a capitalist who undid a socialist system. He did not. As finance minister, he only reinvigorated the economy; as prime minister, he strongly encourages the private sector to also practise some form of positive discrimination when hiring. The corporate world is slowly taking note of his advice.

His nuclear deal with the United States is also misunderstood. The treaty secures India's energy future, rolls back half a century of western discrimination amounting to 'nuclear apartheid' and makes India the only country permitted to participate in nuclear commerce and legitimately develop a nuclear arsenal despite refusing to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Unsurprisingly, the US expects much of India though Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's suggestion of an Indo-US alliance was met with a smart rejoinder by the Indian Foreign Service. She can be forgiven for imagining that the deal will buy Indian support for US aims - notably countering China - since even many Indians succoured on alien academic theories are limited to thinking in black and white. Hence their charge that Dr Singh has sold out to the Americans.

At the heart of this confusion lies the inability of people raised on simplistic academic concepts to appreciate that 'Indians have a special, and perhaps unique faculty for adjusting themselves to foreign ways without themselves ceasing to be characteristically Indian', as the noted School of Oriental and African Studies law historian J. Duncan M. Derrett puts it.

By adapting to contemporary expectations, Dr Singh transformed his country, but his actions were rooted in India's distinctive and pervasive civilisational traditions. He has shown that India will be a modern great power, without aping the west, Japan or China.

Deep Kisor Datta-Ray is a London-based historian and commentator on Asian affairs. [email protected]

Post