THERE would be many people today who are willing to talk about the future of India with both certainty and optimism. Their confidence cannot be faulted. In the twenty-first century every sixth human being will be an Indian. India is likely to emerge as the second largest consumer market in the world, with a buying middle class numbering half a billion. As rates of growth inch towards double digits, the burgeoning market in the country is expected to grow by one Australia every year. The country’s economy is already the fourth largest in terms of purchasing power parity. It is in the top ten in overall gross national product. With more degree holders than the entire population of France, we have found a place for ourselves in the field of information technology, and in several other internationally competitive industries. Indians – 500 million of whom are not yet 35 – want to see their country as a major world power, and the world’s largest democracy seems to be all set to fulfil their dreams.

But encouraging economic indicators are not enough to predict where India will be in 2010. A critical equilibrium combining several factors has to be in place for nations of the size and complexity of India to approach the take-off stage while remaining relatively stable. To my mind, at the turn of this new century, we have muddled our way to a critical equilibrium where, for the first time, four factors have come into complimentary interface. The unexpected survival of democracy, in a people not democratic by temperament or heritage, is one factor. Democracy has given Indians an institutional framework for the exercise of political choice and the freedom to express dissent. This has acted as an indispensable safety valve in an inequitable context with great discrepancies in the distribution of power and wealth.

A second factor is the new found acceptance of enterprise and entrepreneurship. Indians may rather like their spiritual halo, but the truth is that they are resilient entrepreneurs, with their feet firmly on the ground and their eyes on the balance sheet. A nation must generate wealth, and especially after 1991, the social sanction to entrepreneurship bodes well for the future.

Third, the birth of the knowledge era around the turn of the new century was a catalyst that came at the right time. If it had happened earlier, we would have been unprepared for it. If it had come later, it might have been too late to retain the faith of the army of technically qualified specialists the country was producing. In the evolution of a people and in the destiny of nations, timing is important.

Finally, a new India, whose people had built – on their own, gradually, imperceptibly and in spite of the state – a pan-Indian identity that has given every Indian in any part of the country more than one symbol by which he or she can identify with all Indians, was on hand when these developments came to fruition. If the salad bowl of India had not over the years begun to approximate a melting pot, or if the country was mired in internecine wars or debilitated by unresolved regionalisms, it would have been unable to take advantage of the other three factors.

 

Nations are allowed to occasionally go through self-congratulatory phases. Indians believe that they have for too long been denied their due role in the world, and when they perceive that the tide is finally turning their way, their legitimate pride often turns into unwarranted euphoria. I believe that while India’s fortunes are definitely on the upswing, there are three deficits which it must acknowledge and seek to overcome if it really wishes to emerge by 2010 as a nation that is not only powerful but also commands respect.

The first is the social deficit. A country is more than the sum of its economic indicators. A people are more than the aggregation of their wants. The degree of deprivation that surrounds the islands of affluence in India is visible immediately to a foreigner but remains mostly invisible to Indians. Can it honestly be said that there is in the middle and elite classes of India a sense of civic obligation, or corporate ethics, or social responsibility, which could foster a vision encompassing the welfare of the community as a whole, and prevent the gap from widening between the winners and the losers?

The laws that govern the impact of economic policies are not like the laws that operate in physics, bound by an unchanging truth of cause and effect. Many members of the privileged classes posit the inevitability of benefits from the opening up of the Indian economy, even for the poorest Indian, as conventional wisdom outside the purview of discussion. It is true that there is a percolation effect once the economic cake grows. The decade after 1991, when the growth of the economy accelerated, also saw the largest numbers redeemed from below the poverty line. However, the sheer numbers still of the absolutely poor and illiterate, who do not have access to even basic health care, is so large that economic growth can never be enough on its own.

An economically globalized India will be prosperous only if there is a quantum increase in the social sensitivity of those who give its policies shape and direction. For, as a leading American columnist (Anthony Lewis writing in the International Herald Tribune in March 1996, still the early days of economic liberalization in India) wrote: ‘One thing seems plain. A culture provides the values of community and caring; if the society does not supply them, the market certainly will not. If the society does, the market adjusts to them.’

 

The project here is the arousal of social concern in the long-term interests of both the privileged and the deprived. Can the well-to-do, long immune to anything but their own interests, overcome this social deficit? The key issue that will determine the emergence of India in the coming decades as a united, democratic, stable and prosperous country – in conformity with the ‘great power’ vision of its middle and elite classes – will be the ability of better-off Indians to forge a national consensus, a strategy of progress and development that involves all Indians. Unless this consensus develops, and subsumes the narrow, short-sighted agenda of the privileged as it exists today, no policy of economic renewal will succeed within a sustainable time frame.

As I have argued in my study of the Indian middle class, a nation is not a hot-house plant that can be made to grow on the fevered fantasies of its better endowed citizens. A nation to grow must derive its sap from the fertile soil of care and concern that nurtures all its citizens, especially the poor and vulnerable. There can be no intervening miracle of technology, or revolution in productivity, that will be able to effectively bridge the gap between the two India’s – the upwardly mobile and the unacceptably deprived. The only factor that can make a difference is a change in the attitude, in their own interests, of the privileged themselves.

 

The second deficit is ethical. The fact that India has a functioning democratic system is of critical importance in ensuring the accountability of rulers. Indians are not, as they like to believe, intrinsically democratic, but the improbable survival of democracy has over the years given to the weak and dispossessed a stake in the system, and acted as a watch dog against actions and policies which do not correspond to the largest interests of the people. However, under the awning of the world’s largest democracy, there is an ethical void that ill-becomes a nation aspiring to become a significant world power.

One reason for this is that we are as a people far more concerned about the ends than the means. Partly I feel this is a result of our heritage. India’s most well-known treatise on statecraft, the Arthashastra, written by Kautilya almost two thousand years ago, wastes little time on the moral underpinnings of power. On the contrary, it advocates a compellingly unsentimental recipe on how to seize power through means fair or foul. Nor is the Arthashastra the only text of its kind. The ‘Shantiparva’, a section of the Mahabharata devoted to the elaboration of statecraft, can have few rivals in the history of political theory for its hardbitten pragmatism.

 

The essential point is that Hindu tradition has always allowed for a conveniently fractured response to the moral imperative. There is no binding or universal code of conduct that gives unequivocal primacy to the moral dimensions of power. Dharma is an undefined and ephemeral ideal, too subtle (sukshma) to be etched in stone – as Yudhishtara, the very symbol of rectitude, himself says in the Mahabharata. In everyday life, it is in fact noteworthy for the exemptions it grants to correct behaviour as normally understood. A man can do no wrong if he acts to protect his svadharma, conduct that is right for his jati or station. He cannot be held accountable for actions that are a part of his ashramdharma, conduct that is right for one’s stage of life. He cannot be penalized for transgressions made in the interests of kuladharma, conduct that is right for one’s family. And finally, almost anything he does would be justified in a situation of distress or emergency, when he would be guided by his appadharma, conduct that is right in moments of crisis.

On such ideological foundations the only consistent concern is the end result. In the pursuit of the desired goal, morality is not so much disowned as it is pragmatically devalued. The consequence is a down-to-earth relativism, a flexibility of approach, a willingness to prune absolutisms in the interests of a larger purpose. Success, visible in terms of status, power and money, matters. It subsumes moral niceties. But failure attracts great moral opprobrium, for it symbolizes wasted action and a deficiency of worldly wisdom. Such a worldview undoubtedly makes Indians incredibly focused about achieving desired goals through any means and, often, in the most difficult circumstances. But it also makes them particularly susceptible to the pernicious vice of corruption.

Corruption is, of course, not unique to India. What is unique is its acceptance, and the creative ways in which it is sustained. Indians do not subscribe to antiseptic definitions of rectitude. Their understanding of right and wrong is far more related to efficacy than to absolutist notions of morality. An act is right if it yields the desired end; it is not if it does not.

For all the condemnation that corruption publicly provokes, Indians appear to be ambivalent about the practice. They consider it bad if they have to bribe when they don’t want to; they consider it good if a bribe gets them what they want. In this sense, corruption is like litmus paper: it takes on the colour of the specific experience. The immorality associated with it is subsumed by an ingrained inclination to be worldly wise. Not surprisingly, the Berlin based organization, Transparency International, in its annual survey of global corruption, has placed India for several years in a row near the bottom of a list of over a hundred countries.

 

The third deficit is cultural. There is little doubt that Indians are the legatees of a great civilization which goes back to the dawn of time. It is a heritage which is remarkable for the level of its refinement and the myriad influences with which it has enriched itself. But a few centuries of colonial rule seem to have wrenched Indians from their cultural roots. The most telling illustration of this is language. The British did not propagate English in India to add to the IT skills of Indians in the new millennium. For them language was a means to consolidate their colonial rule.

Lord Macaulay had stated the colonial agenda with complete clarity as far back as 1835: ‘We must at present do our best to form a class of persons who may be interpreters between us and the millions we govern; a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.’ In a country whose culture and civilization was thousands of years old this was an audacious statement of policy. But Macaulay could not, even in his wildest dreams, have predicted how successful his policy would be.

 

Of course, it was not unusual for a colonial power to succeed in moulding the attitudes and lifestyle of the native elite. But what makes India unique is the ease with which this objective was achieved, and the enduring ideological hegemony of the colonial power long after its defeat. The pursuit of English was the most visible symbol of this cultural emasculation for it was entwined with a deep sense of racial inferiority in the presence of the white-skinned rulers. Thus, while many other subject nations made the attempt after Independence to reverse cultural colonization, or at least to reassert the relevance and priority of indigenous cultural roots, Indians flocked to English medium schools with greater vengeance after the British left, and drifted away from their cultural roots in direct proportion to the extent of their ‘education’. In time, the knowledge became a status symbol. People were judged on the hierarchical scale by their ability to speak English with the right accent and fluency. The British aim to not only physically subjugate the natives but also to colonize their minds was a spectacular success.

This is not an indictment of English. On the contrary, there can be little doubt of the international reach of the language and its utility as a second language or a link language. It is, though, a comment on the Indian elite, and the ease with which they made the language meant to rule them their first language. It is a comment too on the neglect of Indian languages, many of whom have languished in the shadow cast by the pursuit of English.

A language is not only a utility; it is a symbol of a culture, the repository of the heritage of a people, an indispensable mark of identity. The Japanese have done quite well for themselves but their mother tongue remains their first language; so does it for the Russians or the Chinese. But, in India today, linguistic shoddiness is a disfiguring scar on a nation that has few peers in the richness of its linguistic heritage. The country is littered with instances of spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, pronunciation howlers and incorrect phraseology. Those who think they know English take pride in their distance from their mother tongue; those who speak English inadequately claim to know it well. The result is a nation of linguistic half-castes, insecure in English and neglectful of their own mother tongue.

 

It is true that Hindi, the national language, is gaining ground today for commercial reasons: it is spoken and understood by the largest number of people, and advertisements go to those in the media who have the largest reach. But the mental colonization that associates knowledge of English with social superiority persists; the inferiority complex that our interaction with our erstwhile rulers engendered is still a reality; the mimicry and lack of confidence of our westernized elite continues to cast its baneful shadow on the new generation; and, for most educated Indians, knowledge of their culture even now rarely goes beyond tokenism and the ritual glorification of the past.

 

To be a credible world power in 2010 India must overcome these three deficits. A foreigner who lands in Mumbai, the commercial capital of our Republic, is overwhelmed by the unending stretch of slums extending from the airport and by the pervasive stench of poverty. Indians in board rooms, and those participating in the heady play of the stock market, must pause to think that the outsider notices what we mostly take for granted, and that his assessment of our reality and our aspirations for great power status internalizes this reality.

The corruption woven into our national fabric needs also to be tackled far more vigorously through more effective systems of accountability, the strengthening of such watchdog institutions such as the Election Commission, and the intervention of technology to replace the discretionary venality of human intermediaries. Recent steps such as the Right to Information Act are a step in the right direction. And, finally, as the legatees of a rich and ancient civilization, we must reassert our cultural identity, not through a misplaced xenophobia, but by eschewing mindless mimicry and re-embracing the symbols of our heritage on the basis of pride and knowledge.

Undoubtedly, we must equip ourselves with the tools to interface with a globalised world, but hobbling into the 21st century on the crutches of Hinglish – for all its advantages of communication – is not the way to do this. If by the year 2010 we have begun the battle to tackle these three deficits, then alone will we be the credible and significant world power we all aspire to be.