Arshad Shaikh describes how India’s journey as an independent nation has been a mixed bag of enviable successes and gigantic failures and only a reboot will help us reignite our quest for glory.
On 15 August 2021, India will complete 74 years as an independent nation and celebrate its 75th Independence Day. According to an official communique, “The Government of India has taken a decision to commemorate 75 years of India’s Independence which falls on 15th August 2022 in a befitting manner at national and international level in the form of ‘Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav’.”
There is no disputing that it is a day of monumental proportions and its associated imagery is permanently etched in the collective memory of all Indians. Naturally, it is a useful custom on this occasion for the media to describe India’s journey after Independence through their editorials and opinion pieces.
A cursory glance at the various articles written by political commentators of repute on our history since we gained freedom from the British, highlight two conflicting paths that we as a nation appear to have traversed. One is the upward trajectory towards material prosperity and technological progress and the other is the steady decline in living up to the standards and values to which our founding fathers and the makers of our Constitution aspired. However, if there is one resounding lesson to be learned from the ‘rise and fall of nations’, it is the fact that the moral downfall of a nation almost inevitably leads to the sapping of the energies of its people and to an ebbing in its ‘worldly’ fortunes and takes it down the path of dilapidation and ignominy.
THE COMMANDING HEIGHTS
India’s rise to become one of the biggest economies in the world is indeed remarkable. As the British left India, our share of the global income had shrunk from 22.6% in 1700 to 3.8% in 1952. With a population of about 36 crores in 1951, only about 12% of India was literate. Today, with a population of more than 135 crores, our literacy rate is 77%. In urban areas, it is almost 88%, while the rural population is about 73% literate.
India’s nominal GDP in 1950 was merely around $ 30 billion while now we are aspiring to be a $ 5 trillion economy and boasting of an economy that is much bigger than many advanced countries with a contribution of almost 17% to the global GDP. At the time of independence, our savings rate was merely 8% of GDP while now it is nearly 30% of GDP.
From a country that was dependent on food aid and one that faced frequent food droughts, we now rank second worldwide in farm outputs. India is the largest producer in the world for fresh fruit, lemons and limes, buffalo milk, jute, bananas, mangoes, guavas, pulses, ginger, chickpeas, papayas, chilies and peppers to name a few.
India is the second-largest producer in the world for wheat, rice, fresh vegetables, sugarcane, groundnuts, lentils, garlic, cauliflowers, broccoli, cow milk, tea, potatoes, onions, indigenous goat meat, cabbages, pumpkins and many others.
India is the largest tractor market in the world. We rank second in the world when it comes to steel and coal production and third in electricity production.
In terms of mobile use, we get the second rank globally and have the fourth-largest number of television broadcast stations.
Our military expenditure is the third largest in the world with the Indian Army possessing the enviable tag of being the largest ground force in the world. Many of our achievements are truly astonishing especially in the field of technical education, software development, automobile sector, telecommunications, space research, nuclear science, social media reach and usage, railways, air-travel, film production and computerisation of different services provided by the government.
The Indian diaspora, the largest in the world at 18 million is serving hundreds of countries and contributing to the development of the entire world. The National Stock Exchange (NSE) has a total market capitalisation of more than $ 3 trillion, making it the tenth largest stock exchange in the world.
THE STUMBLE AND THEN THE FALL
Despite these impressive economic gains in the last seven and a half decades since our Independence, we have faltered many a time and made some grave mistakes that continue to haunt and torment us as a nation. The economic prosperity that we have achieved has come at an enormous cost. Look at the income inequality figures.
According to reliable data, the top 10% of wealthy Indians held 74% of the total national wealth while the bottom 50% held only 2.8%. According to IMF data, India’s debt to GDP ratio increased from 74% to 90% during the Covid-19 pandemic.
India is now facing what some call a civilizational crisis. Millions of farmers are not able to sell their produce at a price that gives them a profit or at least a break-even. Instead of solving this agrarian crisis, the government has come up with farm laws that experts say will exacerbate the crisis further by ending the minimum support price (MSP) mechanism and pave the way for corporates and multinationals to dictate prices in the market.
Our global position in some of the most important indices is a reflection of the imbalanced nature of our growth and development and the priorities pursued by our political representatives. For example, we have the following international rankings: life expectancy (134/195), infant mortality (113/223), global hunger index (94/107), human capital index (115/152), literacy rate (168/234), education index (145/191), world happiness report (139/156), human development index (129/189), global gender gap report (108/144), corruption perception index (86/179), press freedom index (142/180).
REBOOT REQUIRED
Besides our poor performance in these specific and calculated parameters, we have slid significantly as a moral and just society. Alcohol consumption in India is set to touch 6.5 billion litres. Prostitution is an $ 8 billion a year industry with as many as 10 million commercial sex workers. We are now among the top three most porn watching countries in the world.
The other significant corrosion in the moral fibre of our society is the manner in which we have treated each other in the common struggle for our legitimate political rights and social space. This degradation has been captured by Prashant Jha in an article in the Hindustan Times (dated 14 August 2020) where he states: “There has been a turn towards majoritarianism in Indian politics. Minorities, particularly Muslims have a sense of being excluded from power structures, with their lifestyle, food habits, and cultural symbols becoming objects of suspicion. Arguably, Hindu-Muslim division is at its deepest today than at any point in the last seven decades, with the State itself seen as taking one side.
“Caste, too, remains a fundamental reality, with the political assertion of the marginalized not translating into their economic empowerment. Inter-caste marriages may have increased but are still not the norm; atrocities against Dalits are only reported to be rising according to official data; and social divisions persist.”
India today stands at the crossroads of history as it turns 74 after gaining freedom from a colonial power. It will take a complete reboot in how Indians view life, moral principles, and adherence to basic norms of justice, equality, freedom and fraternity for our nation to navigate its way to glory. Anything less will push it on the road to serfdom.