At the stroke of midnight on 14th August 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru made his famous speech wherein he referred to India keeping her tryst with destiny and awaking to life and freedom. To review the last three and forty years in an hour is like trying to see the Himalayas at night in one flash of lightning. One thing I promise you — I shall “nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice.” I would be dishonouring the memory of Pandit Nehru and of his mentor, Mahatma Gandhi, if I tried to be economical with the truth.
The greatest achievement of Indian democracy is that it has survived unfractured for forty-three years. Eight hundred and forty million people — more than the combined population of Africa and South America — live together as one political entity under conditions of freedom. Never before in history, and nowhere else in the world today, has one-sixth of the human race existed as a single free nation.
Three inestimable advantages
In 1950, we started as a Republic with three inestimable advantages.
First, we had 5000 years of civilization behind us — a civilization which had reached “the summit of human thought”. The trader’s instinct is innate in Indian genes. An Indian can buy from a jew and sell to a Scot, and yet make a profit!
Secondly, whereas before 1858 India was never a united political entity, that year the accident of British rule welded us into one country, one nation; and when independence came, we had been in unified nationality for almost a century under one head of state.
Thirdly, our Founding Fathers, after two long years of laborious and painful toil, gave us a Constitution which a former Chief Justice of India rightly described as “sublime.” It was the longest Constitution in the world till, a few years ago, Yugoslavia had the impertinence to adopt a longer Constitution.
The right to carry on any occupation, trade or business is again guaranteed right. The concept of “socialism” did not figure anywhere in the Constitution as originally enacted. On the contrary, the Constitution provided for the Directive Principle of State Policy that the State shall endeavour to secure that “the ownership and control of the material resources of the community are so distributed as best to subserve the common good” and that “the operation of the economic system does not result in the concentration of wealth and means of production to the common detriment”. These words rule out State ownership – the Monolithic State – which is the hallmark of communism, euphemistically called socialism.
India is the only country in the world where, in the States which are governed by the Communist party, human rights are fully respected — and that is only because the Bill of Rights is firmly entrenched in our national Constitution.
We can proudly say that our Constitution gave us a flying start and equipped us adequately to meet the challenges of the future. Unfortunately, over the years we dissipated every advantage we started with, like a compulsive gambler bent upon squandering an invaluable legacy. I am afraid, India today is only a caricature of the noble democracy which Nehru strove to bring to life and freedom in 1947.
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Shells of socialism and state controls
Successive governments imposed mindless socialism on the nation, which held in thrall the people’s endeavour and enterprise. They respected the shells of socialism — state control and state ownership — while the kernel, the spirit of social justice, was left no chance of coming to life. We shut our eyes to the fact that socialism is to social justice what ritual is to religion and dogma is to truth. The peacock is our national bird, but we could have more appropriately chosen the ostrich!
The Economist rightly remarked in January 1987 that socialism as practised in India has been a fraud. Our brand of socialism did not result in transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor but only from the honest rich to the dishonest rich.
We built up State-Owned Enterprises — called the public sector in India. The sleeping sickness of socialism is now universally acknowledged, — but not officially in India. No less than 231 public sector enterprises are run by the Union Government, and 636 by the State Governments. These have been the black holes of our economy. There is a tidal wave of privatization sweeping across the world from Bangladesh to Brazil, but it has turned aside in its course and passed India by.
The most persistent tendency in India has been to have too much government and too little administration; too many laws and too little justice; too many public servants and too little public service; too many controls and too little welfare. From the very first decade of the republic the steel claws of the permit-licence-quota raj were laid upon the national economy, and even today their grip continues with insignificant relaxation.
Today the situation remains unchanged, – only the number of files has increased a thousandfold. Millions of manhours are wasted every day in coping with inane bureaucratic regulations and a torrential spate of amendments.
Legal redress is so time-consuming enough to make infinity intelligible. A lawsuit once started in India is the nearest thing to eternal life ever seen on this earth. Close to two million cases are pending in the eighteen High Courts alone, and more than 2,10,000 cases in the Supreme Court for admission or final hearing or miscellaneous relief.
History will record that the greatest mistake of the Indian Republic in the first forty years of its existence was to make far less investment in human resources — investment in education, family planning, nutrition and public health — than in brick and mortar, plants and factories. We had quantitative growth without qualitative development. Different parts of India still live in different centuries so far as basic amenities and cultural awareness are concerned.
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Still plagued by three problems
Small wonder that after forty-three years of independence, we are still plagued by three basic problems — poverty, unemployment, and foreign exchange trade deficit.
India has 15 per cent of the world’s population, but only 1.5 per cent of the world’s income. In the four decades since we became a republic, our per capita income in real terms did not even double but increased by only 91 per cent. Today we are still the twenty-first poorest nation on earth.
Perceptive observers in foreign countries where Indians work and prosper are baffled by one question — how does India, with its great human potential and natural resources, manage to remain poor? The answer is that we are not poor by nature but poor by policy. You would not be far wrong if you called India the world’s leading expert in the art of perpetuating poverty.
Most of our politicians and bureaucrats, untainted by knowledge of development in the outside world, have no desire to search for genes of ideas which deserve to be called “a high-yielding variety of economics.” We are smugly reconciled to low yield from high ideals.
India is rattling — and rattling violently — with spare human capacity. More than 30 million are registered on our 840 Employment Exchanges. According to objective estimates, there must be at least 20 million other unemployed who are not registered.
In 1950, India ranked sixteenth in the list of exporting countries of the world; today it ranks forty-third. Using another yardstick, in 1950 India had 2.2 per cent of the world export market; today its share stands reduced to 0.45 per cent.
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Hope for the future
There is no instant solution for our multitudinous problems and the short-term prospect may only be of shadows lengthening across the path, an objective overview would justify confidence in the long-term future of the country. In the affairs of nations, as in the world of elements, winds shift, tides ebb and flow, the ship rocks. Only let the anchor hold.
The vitality of India is remarkable. The country does not have a powerful economy, but has all the raw materials to build one. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Indian economy is a sleeping giant who, if awakened, could make an impact on the global economy.
A nation’s worth is not measured merely by its gross national product, any more than an individual’s worth is measured by his bank account. Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith remarked that while he had seen poverty in many countries of the world, he found one unusual attribute among the poor of India — “There is richness in their poverty.”
It is true that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. But it is true, in an even deeper sense, that eternal responsibility is also part of the price of liberty. Excessive authority, without liberty, is intolerable; but excessive liberty, without authority and without responsibility, soon becomes equally intolerable.
De Tocqueville made the profound observation that liberty cannot stand alone but must be paired with a companion virtue: liberty and morality; liberty and law; liberty and justice; liberty and the common good; liberty and civic responsibility.
The day will come when the 26 States of India will realize that in a profound sense they are culturally akin, ethnically identical, linguistically knit, and historically related. The greatest task before India today is to acquire a keener sense of national identity, to gain the wisdom to cherish its priceless heritage, and to create a cohesive society with the cement of Indian culture. We shall then celebrate the 15th day of August not as the Day of Independence but as the Day of Inter-dependence — the dependence of the States upon one another, the dependence of our numerous communities upon one another, the dependence of the many castes and clans upon one another — in the sure knowledge that we are one nation.
This essay is part of a series from the Indian Liberals archive, a project of the Centre for Civil Society. It is an excerpt from a monograph titled ‘Forty-three years of Independence’ published by the Forum of Free Enterprise in 1991. The original version can be accessed here.