Sense of identity should shape India’s vision

A nation that can’t imagine a future for itself is doomed to stumble about in history till it falls over. The only role left for it in this globalised world is to try to please those who have been able to imagine a future for themselves and are busy working towards that end. Unfortunately, India today seems to be stuck in trying to live up to the vision of other people, rather than having one of its own.

Advertisement

The best that Indians have been able to do in the past 100 years regarding imagining a future is to come up with the idea of ‘Ram Rajya’, an amorphous idea that means nothing when one starts seeking out its details. The best that the socialist India did in this direction was to create a Five-Year Plan, whose focus for the first 15 years was to ensure that Indians saved at least a quarter of their earnings. After that, the Plans became merely a device for the Centre to control the states rather than a device for achieving any goals. Even in the rather limited goal of making money, pretty little was achieved as was evident in the continued poverty and the almost total absence of industries that could service the needs of the nation and its people.

Very little was done to ensure that people became capable. And the costs of this have been extremely high. In terms of capability-building, about all that was done was to create five IITs, one AIIMS and one JNU. Between them, these temples of higher learning enrolled just about 1,500 students each year. This meant that very few would get a chance for this privileged education. The rest simply lapsed into torpor. No wonder, the moneyed people took the first opportunity to send their children to the West for higher education as soon as the government removed constraints on such out-migration.

Today, of course, India pays heavily for such lapses. According to data collated by the RBI and the MEA, Indian students spent about $7 billion in 2018-19 to study abroad. Most of them did so because they did not get a chance to enter a good college within India.

In contrast, at least the US and China have often stated what they wanted to achieve in the future. Those visions, often rooted within the system of higher education, have frequently guided their actions in real life. In the US, such grand imaginings started as early as the 1800s, when the USA was but a strip of land, 50 miles broad, extending from up north to the south, where it was stopped by the territories of the Spanish empire. Alexander Hamilton wrote of how America should oppose European intervention in the Americas. A few years later, this idea emerged as the Monroe Doctrine, in which the US promised to ensure that all debts owed by Latin American countries were paid back to their European principals and, in return, asked the Europeans to never intervene militarily in the Americas. ‘A very big bark from a very small dog,’ remarked the foreign ministers of Europe as they dismissed American bravado.

What is important is that the vision did impact the minds of the US residents and urged them to form themselves into a nation which was good and independent. In the decades that followed, the conflict over what was good created rifts and a punishing civil war. But the vision of achieving greatness remained alive.

This found expression in the Mahan Doctrine, advocated by Captain Mahan, a professor at the Naval War College, who was promoted to Rear Admiral after retirement. Writing in the early 1890s, he recommended that America focus on dominating the oceans as a first step towards emerging as a great power. This was a time when America had a handful of warships and a few thousand sailors, mostly foreigners. America’s military might have remained what it was, yet by the end of the decade the Americans had defeated the mighty Spanish empire and taken over many of its territories.

The point, of course, is about having a vision. Visionless people are destined to flounder about and seek approval from anyone who seems powerful at the moment. Much like the Indians of today.

What does the future hold for India? This is a question that thinkers have ignored for too long. Of course, we have had Five-Year Plans in plenty, a few 15-year Perspective Plans and some Grand Plans. But they are all focused only on making money and ensuring sundry ‘millennium development goals’, which the United Nations has foisted upon us. We have done no thinking about creating goals that are suited to our own conditions and requirements.

Thus, one of the associated goals was something called the Gross Enrolment Ratio, which focused on enrolling school passouts into college. No one bothered to ask what they would do in college. We ended up creating for ourselves a babysitting programme for adults rather than a system of higher education which would train these adults to stand on their own feet, earn their own livelihood, and if possible, add some value to society. It was almost as if we were waiting for further guidance from the UN, which in those days was under the control of the US.

Now that the UN’s control seems to be moving into the hands of China, there is a likelihood that if we remain as unthinking today as in the past, our goals too would change; this time to suit the hopes and aspirations of China. Surely, the present involves the steps that we take to achieve a vision of the future. To that extent, the present is based on how we see the future.

A vision for the future is more than dreams of prosperity, of a universal basic income and an end to poverty. No doubt, greater prosperity is an excellent goal. But surely, great nations are defined by something more. For what that ‘more’ may be, for such a vision to emerge, a nation should have a sense of its own identity and of the ideas that move the people. Such an identity and vision cannot be borrowed from other countries.

For a country like India, achieving that sense of self has been a long and difficult journey. Even today, Indians remain dogged by low self-esteem and a perpetual tendency to articulate what ‘Indianness’ might be in terms of the supposed beliefs borrowed from the western world. Any such effort is doomed to failure. Nations must define themselves in terms of their own lived experience and not the lived experience of someone in a foreign land.