Author: Pritish Nandy
Publication: Rediff on Net
Date: February 23, 2000
URL: http://www.rediff.com/news/2000/feb/23nandy.htm
There was a time when everyone frowned
on India. Including us.
Everything was wrong with India.
We hated her rags and yet, at the same time, we resented the rich and went
out of our way to harass those who created wealth. With unreasonable and
punishing taxes. With regulations that crushed all initiative and enterprise.
We complained about the roads, the
phones, the buses, the trains, the hospitals, the distribution of foodgrains.
Yet we insisted that all these should remain firmly in the hands of the
State. A lazy, corrupt, bestial State, as we described it. Yet we allowed
it to control everything and become more and more arrogant, more and more
corrupt, more and more wicked.
We were bitter about how government
servants, from the lowliest peon to the all powerful prime minister, were
busy stashing away personal wealth and ignoring the problems of the common
citizen. We complained about their callousness, their highhandedness, the
sheer brutality with which they treated us ordinary people. At the same
time, we wanted our children to grow up and join government service. Even
though we were so critical of the government, we applauded when the State
hijacked more and more powers, more and more authority in the name of socialism
and a welfare society. Ofcourse, the only welfare this society was interested
in was the welfare of its corrupt babus and criminal netas.
There was simply no doubt that India
was sick, very sick. Yet we were busy hanging up portraits of politicians
on our walls and telling our children how wonderful they were, how they
had fought for freedom and self reliance, how they were busy building the
temples of modern India. And what were these temples of modern India? Big,
ugly, polluting factories that churned out rotten, substandard products
and employed thousands of untrained people who emerged as vote banks for
those who provided them jobs. Jobs which they did badly even as they kept
upping their demands, rendering most of the factories sick and inefficient.
There was all round anger and resentment.
All round mediocrity. All round disappointment with the way we were going.
Those who lived here hated India. Those who came to visit India hated her
even more. She was a nation on the skid.
The nineties began to change all
that. Economic bankruptcy was no longer seen as fashionable. Liberalisation,
slow as it was, slowly began to change our attitude towards the creation
of wealth. And even though Narasimha Rao himself got trapped in the vortex
of his own corruption and bribery we were lucky that subsequent governments
persisted with the reforms he initiated. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow.
But the reforms continued, largely because weak, waffling governments at
the Centre made it impossible to roll them back.
India was lucky.
She was even luckier when Atal Bihari
Vajpayee came to power and, instead of succumbing to the internal pressures
groups within the BJP who were (once again) talking about swadeshi and
self reliance, euphemisms for going back to the licence raj where everybody
in government could make a fast buck, he pushed ahead with reforms and
in fact accelerated the pace of change. Dismantling more and more state
controls in the process and returning freedom, as it were, to the people
of India.
In retrospect, it is difficult to
say which were the worst years of slavery and colonization for India. Three
hundred years of Muslim rule or two hundred years of British imperialism?
Or, sadly, the 45 years of the Nehru-Gandhi dynastic rule when we lived
with the pretence that we were free. Dressed in elaborate chains, we spoke
of socialism and non-alignment with the ardour of slaves who were taught
that freedom was a dangerous idea that only helped the rich and the powerful.
Thank God, that is all over now.
Whatever may be the failures of the Vajpayee era, it will be remembered
as that period when India started dismantling a corrupt and lazy empire
of crime masquerading as a benevolent, welfare State and returned freedom
to her people. It was the time when enormous wealth was created, when taxes
were paid because they were reasonable, when people realised that profit
was not such a dirty word after all. When excellence entered our lexicon.
It was the time when India began
to realize her full potential. When she figured out that she was not a
Third World nation, as the Nehrus and Gandhis had preached, equating us
with Yugoslavia and Egypt. We realized that we had the talent, the wealth,
the ability to be a first world nation if we wanted to and the fact that
millions of Indians were still defecating on railway tracks or living below
the poverty line was not exactly inimical to change or success.
That is why you see less Indians
complaining today. You see them going out and doing things and doing them
so well that the whole world has woken up to our talent. Leading international
corporates, global banks are now headed by Indian professionals. The sexiest
start-ups in Silicon Valley are spearheaded by Indians. Some of them first
generation literate. Some of the richest men in the world are, in fact,
Indians today. Measured dollar for dollar, wealth for wealth.
The fact that apna Azim Premji who
lives in Bangalore is richer than the Queen of England or Gururaj Deshpande
(having created a new start-up, barely a year old) has acquired wealth
faster than the Sultan of Brunei in the past year are indications that
Indians are a lot smarter, a lot more hard working and a damned sight more
ingenious than most. Give us one more generation of free Indians and you
will see how the pattern of wealth changes globally.
What is doubly satisfying is the
fact that most Indians who have succeeded overseas are ready to share their
ideas, their wealth with people back home. In other words, the Great Indian
Diaspora is growing. Give us five more years and you will find an amazing
change in our equation with the rest of the world.
Five years ago when I persuaded
Captain Krishnan Nair of The Leela to set up India's first cybercafe little
did we realize how quickly and fundamentally dot com would change India.
The critics carped and said it would take us a century to catch up with
the internet population in the US. Today Indians use e-mail more than any
other community in the world. There are more Indians working for the knowledge
economy than any other people. Soon all businesses requiring talent, skill,
ingenuity, technology, service will not be able to do without us. We can
leave making steel and cement to the rest of the world.
All this has happened because we
chose freedom and democracy as the key metaphors of change. Unlike our
neighbours. This is what set us apart. We did not chase short cuts. We
stuck to democracy and the rule of law. Yes, we faltered. We faltered many
times. We made many mistakes. We allowed, at times, fundamentalist ideas
to flourish side by side with liberal convictions. We banned Rushdie when
he hurt Muslim sentiments. We rapped Husain on the knuckles when he painted
Saraswati naked.
But whatever our failures may be,
we allowed a thousand flowers to bloom, a hundred schools of thought to
contend. This is what has now paid off. We are today right in the midst
of a flourishing new era, an era of far greater self confidence than we
have ever had. That is possibly why we get so worked up with Deepa Mehta.
We have nothing against her films but we are sick and tired of a mindset
that sees only squalor and disease, pain and failure in modern India and
wants to export this image to the rest of the world.
No, George Lucas, this is no lone
individual's battle against an insensate, unreasonable, fascist State.
It is, in fact, exactly the opposite. It is an attempt to commercially
exploit a false, misleading image of India to win encomiums in the West.
A West that loves to see us as we once were. A nation of losers.
We are no longer losers. We are
no longer a sick nation, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and shackling
its people to a cantankerous, obsolete socialist ideology. We are a free
nation today, trying to redesign our future and our lives. There is still
much to be done, ofcourse. I am sure there are many lonely wives finding
solace in each other's arms. I am sure there are many poor widows in Varanasi
whoring for a livelihood. There is no shame in admitting that.
But surely there is much more to
India today than its failures, its aberrations and that is why there are
many people like me who are neither bigots nor religious fanatics nor supporters
of the VHP who feel that Deepa Mehta must stop selling such sick, prejudiced
pornography to the world, as Katherine Mayo once did, to make India wince
in public.
The idea is not to curb Mehta's
free spirit as a creative artist. She is most welcome to peddle her brand
of pornography wherever she wants. She is welcome to see India through
the eyes of a drain inspector. But, then, she must also be ready for the
backlash of public opinion. In a democratic society you have to live with
that. You can mock such opinion as traditional, unduly conservative. But
it reflects in its own way, as it ought to, what people feel about their
country, their society, their religion, their values.
It is fashionable for the creative
elite to treat such opinion with contempt. But then they must be also ready
to face the consequences. We are poor. Many among us are uneducated. Some
of us may even be lesbians and whores. But we still love India and will
not allow it to be denigrated by someone out to make a quick buck.