Gautam Mukherjee
Advocates and cat’s paws of change are trying it on social media, virally growing in importance in India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a major presence on it, directly tweeting his observations, without distorting filters and interpreters. Opposition leader and Modi-baiter Rahul Gandhi is a more reluctant participant, using others in his ‘office’ to do his tweeting for him.
The Prime Minister, a hugely modern and technologically switched-on man, has instructed his whole Cabinet to take social media seriously. And the BJP has competent media cells to monitor the boisterous feedback as well.
The pace, comparatively, has substantially quickened. Not only do we boast of the highest growth rate in the world but are making dents in missile technology, space exploration, nuclear and solar power, rebooting infrastructure befitting our aspirations, radical reformation of the subsidy regime, vast strides towards banking and cellphone/Aadhar-based financial inclusion, big plans for universal housing and farm sector/ rural modernisation.
Some reflection of this new India in the making is not only communicated but tested on the web. One manifestation, not yet official, is the proposition that currency notes should perhaps depict a whole pantheon of great Indians. The purpose being to move on from the pervasive presence of the one and only Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
There are facsimilies of Rs100, Rs500 and Rs1,000 notes with Subhas Chandra Bose, Bhagat Singh and others depicted on the front face, circulating on Facebook. There are blogs and articles on the issue in the digital media. Ordinary people are being asked whether they would like to see such changes on their currency notes.
Will MK Gandhi move to the flip-side or disappear altogether? Why has he, even as the ‘father of the nation’ been allowed to be the sole repository of national identity on currency notes for so long?
The US is simultaneously polling the possibility of putting African-American abolitionist Harriet Tubman, and early anti-segregationist/civil rights activist Rosa Parks on one face of a $20 bill, moving President Andrew Jackson or founding father Alexander Hamilton to the flip-side. The dollar bills in other denominations are also being discussed. America has come to this point after more than three centuries. It is, after all, the world’s oldest democracy, even as India is the most populous one.
In both places there are stirrings of maturity, the need to cast a wider net. India has come to the same place in just 70 years. And coincidentally, the two countries are also drawing ever closer, more than ever before, due to the exigencies of regional and global geopolitics.
Much of the old ways are being discarded, here as well as there, as the presidential campaigns in America suggest. Our self-image though, is perhaps the first point that needs adjustment. In the often heated discourse on a wilful saffron rearrangement of priorities and perspectives, there is a fear, in some quarters, that the very ‘Idea of India’ is being revamped. And indeed, it is.
The present regime is rendering and renovating our positioning, with changed emphases, from what it was, to what it needs to become. And clearly, to attribute all progress since independence, to the vision and work of a handful, to the near exclusion of all others, is seen as an open travesty.
Other charges, almost sneers, of this present regime being under-educated, and its camp followers being anti-intellectual and of ‘low quality’, are, in context, motivated barbs from the long ensconced Left-liberal establishment. Today, their prominence and once pervasive influence is diminished. And this, almost for the first time, not through the calls from voices in the wilderness, but from a party, an alliance and a Government in power, and those who support it.
The polity itself has rejected the main planks of the old arguments, lethally voting its displeasure to bring about tectonic shifts. But for a lot of the decades since Independence, information and its flow, could be controlled and manipulated, mistakes air-brushed, propaganda made to stick. Nowadays, technology and competition has put paid to all that, besides providing speed, instant access, and importantly, multiple sides to any story. Even films from Bollywood have given up the ghost on socialist style ‘nation-building’ and ersatz patriotism, and turn out crowd-pleasers or realism instead.
Other changes, mostly towards a majoritarian idea of India, without however, queering the pitch for the minorities, are now afoot. There is a new bias towards a considerate capitalism, plus a more productive, teach-a-man-to-fish welfarism. This, is now seen as a corrective, an even playing field for all.
But such nuanced ideas were not allowed to flourish earlier. It was a statist model then, controlled by the infamous Licence-Permit Raj. Even quaint and impractical notions, often downright faddist, like some of Gandhi’s more quirky prescriptions, and internationalist gaffes, as in Nehru giving away India’s UNSC permanent seat to China as a vacuous goodwill gesture; went unquestioned. That there were not enough clear-headed nation-building ideas beyond USSR-style state ownership of heavy industry, for example, could not be challenged.
Other propositions, often more dynamic in hindsight, held out by early stalwarts such as Patel, Bose, Krishnamachari, Tata, and others, were relegated to the margins, or brutally suppressed.
At least, that is, till 1991, when, at an absolute nadir, on the point of national bankruptcy, and sovereign default, the Congress Government, made a series of momentous, and some say, World Bank-dictated, changes in policy. But, it turned out to be a happy day indeed. Now, with the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty’s intellectual vigour and political strength, at least as a national party, depleted, its fringes in the States breaking away, seemingly every day; the old prescriptive engines have ground to a near halt.
A change of the old order therefore, engineered by the only national party on the map, is in the complete fitness of things. Our newly independent country had no difficulty, after all, in rejecting many of the shibboleths of the British Raj. Substituting them, perhaps in keeping with the then prevailing wind, with a diluted Marxism, and the atheist’s world view of Nehru.
But along with the ideological emphases he adopted, came its economic consequences. Today, many recognise that decades of the misnamed ‘Hindu rate of growth’, which was actually a failed Soviet-model socialism, was also an avoidable humiliation.
It accounts for, we know in hindsight, our failure to manifest anywhere near our full potential, and speaks for much of the still abject poverty that afflicts at least a third of the population around us.
