It will be idle, indeed dishonest, to pretend that we can begin to move towards an order which can be called Gandhian, however much we may stretch our definition, even if Rajiv Gandhi is able to perform the miracle of substantially reducing the scope and rigour of controls over the economy. The movement in the direction of industrialisation is irreversible. Indeed, so is the drift towards modernisation of agriculture.
The citizens of independent India have found a way of reconciling their traditions with the changes which the West-induced modernisation is forcing on them. Inevitably, their gaze is turned outward – towards material goods, social status and power. So if the Gandhian message is to be meaningful, it has to be reinterpreted.
Food shortage was one of the first problems the government of independent India had to tackle in 1947. It had to decide whether to introduce rationing in order to mitigate hardship, especially for the weaker sections of society in urban areas. Gandhiji was opposed to the move, favoured among others by Jawaharlal Nehru.
In his usual laconic way, he summed up his case in one sentence. Desk bherishta ho jaega, desk barbad ho jaega (the country will be corrupted, the country will be destroyed). Clearly the first part of the warning has turned out to be right. The licence-permit raj has spawned a regime of corruption from the highest to the lowest echelons. While it will be an exaggeration to suggest that the second part of the warning too is threatening to materialise, there can be little doubt that the political system is in peril partly on account of widespread corruption.
I recall the Mahatma’s perspicacity on the issue of controls on the occasion of his birth anniversary to underline a point which is generally missed in most writings on him. Gandhiji was, of course, nothing if not deeply moral in both his personal life and approach to problems. But, it will be seen that his was not, as in this case, an abstract and sui generis morality. His assessment was rooted in concrete reality.
I am persuaded that if he had lived, he would have vigorously opposed the byzantine system of regulations and controls Nehru introduced as part of his programme to promote development and social justice (some form of egalitarianism). I am equally convinced that if he was alive today, he would have been in the forefront of a struggle for the dismantling of the controls that threaten virtually to strangulate the democratic system.
Not many Indians are likely to think in these terms if they think seriously of the Mahatma at all on this day. They are more likely to be content with ritualistic homage to the great man. As such, especially those in opposition to the Congress government are also likely to call for a return to the Gandhian values of simplicity and austerity which they regard as essential prerequisites for the restoration of certain minimum standards of public morality. Again, they will be wrong. Values do not grow in a social vacuum.
As a rule, individuals and societies turn their gaze inward when they feel threatened in physical or moral terms, or both. In British India, a lot of Indians felt so threatened. They felt that the very foundations of their culture were being undermined. Surprising though it may appear, this was even truer of a vast majority of Western-educated Indians than of ordinary Indians who were better rooted and therefore felt more secure. That was one main reason why they accepted Gandhiji’s leadership, though their vision of free India was quite different from his.
The citizens of independent India do not feel so threatened. They have found a way of reconciling their traditions with the changes which the West-induced modernisation is forcing on them. Inevitably, their gaze is turned outward – towards material goods, social status and power. So if the Gandhian message is to be meaningful, it has to be reinterpreted. Morality has to be rooted in socio-economic reality.
I shall not pretend that Gandhiji would have definitely done so if he was still with us. I just do not know. I shall also not pretend that it is easy to persuade those in office and those who influence public (read intelligentsia) opinion from outside that it has become urgent to dismantle controls. The battle will be long and arduous.
Above all, I shall not claim that the removal of controls will bring forth the rule of righteousness (the Ramrajya Gandhiji spoke about). Indeed, I anticipate that if given a free rein, a lot of Indian businessmen will literally run amok and unleash something close to moral anarchy. This could, in all probability would, provoke such a strong reaction among the middle class intelligentsia that the government (of whatever hue) would feel obliged to return to controls. It would, therefore, be desirable to proceed cautiously and gradually.
That apart, however, another point is worthy of attention. A self-correcting mechanism is built into the marketplace. This mechanism is slow to work. It is by no means perfect. In fact, dishonest practices can be witnessed in the most mature capitalist countries but finally it works. That is the experience of successful market economies. There is no such self-correcting mechanism in the bureaucratic world, especially if the political masters also fall into the trap of corruption, which, incidentally, is unavoidable. And malpractices in the business world do not undermine the state as corruption among the political-bureaucratic elite does. The choice should thus be obvious.
In this regard Rajiv Gandhi is closer to the Mahatma than to his grandfather and even his mother who, it deserves to be recalled, had taken steps in 1980-84 to liberalise controls on the economy. As it happens, Chinese and Soviet leaders have been at pains to broadcast the grave weaknesses of their planned economies. In plain terms, the regime of controls has lost legitimacy all over the world. But systems survive long after they have lost acceptability among the people. Power holders manage to hold on tenaciously.
In India’s case, the bureaucratic elite is no less tenacious than its Soviet or Chinese counterpart and can be depended upon to erect barriers in the path of reformers wanting to do away with controls. There also exists an alliance of convenience between the bureaucrats and the politicians in office who need access to enormous amounts of money to keep themselves and their parties going.
It will be idle, indeed dishonest, to pretend that we can begin to move towards an order which can be called Gandhian, however much we may stretch our definition, even if Rajiv Gandhi is able to perform the miracle of substantially reducing the scope and rigour of controls over the economy. The movement in the direction of industrialisation is irreversible. Indeed, so is the drift towards modernisation of agriculture.
Involving as it does the introduction of high-cost inputs such as chemical fertilisers, pesticides, hybrid varieties of seeds which require much larger and far more regular supply of water, tractors and threshers, and an increasing emphasis on cash crops at the cost of coarse cereals such as jowar and bajra which served as the staple diet of the poor in much of rural India, and the sharpening of income disparities, modernisation of agriculture would have pained Gandhiji even more than large-scale industrialisation. But that too cannot be reversed. In the economic field, the movement is farther and farther away from the Gandhian model. The newly aroused concern about the growing ecological imbalance cannot cover up this reality.
This brings me to one of the Mahatma’s central concerns which was second only to his passion for the country’s freedom and communal harmony – his concern for the well-being of the millions (over 100 million today) whom he called harijans. Their economic status in village India has, if anything, deteriorated in relative terms, that is in relation to landowners, as a result of the disruption of the old system and the continuing lack in urban India of “clean” jobs for them.
On the face of it, much has happened to mitigate the evil of untouchability since the twenties when Gandhiji took up the fight against it, more especially in the last 40 years since Independence. A new elite has arisen among the harijans as a result of reservations for them in the legislatures under the Constitution, schools and colleges and government jobs. In the nature of things, this elite cannot be subject to the kind of discrimination that other harijans face, particularly in villages where untouchability continues to be practised even if without the old rigour. The ballot box has been a major factor in this change because it has given the harijans a political clout that they have never possessed. By and large the harijans have favoured the Congress. Indeed, without their support it just could not have stayed in power all these decades.
But an honest recognition of the reality should dissuade us from indulging in rhetoric. If Gandhiji initiated a social revolution and if Jawaharlal Nehru took it a stage further, the revolution cannot be said to have fructified. This is not surprising.
Though we may not like to admit it, the theory of pollution and therefore of segregation is built into Hinduism. If there are the pure (brahmins) at the top, there have to be the impure (the untouchables) at the bottom of the scale. There is just no escape from it. Untouchability is not a blight on the face of Hinduism as the Mahatma described it. It is an integral part of Hinduism. Hinduism provides for mitigation of the discrimination through jajmani system and by and large segregation is not enforced with cruelty. But the fact of it cannot be denied.
The concept of purity is longer enforced according to old tenets. A large number of educated brahmins and businessmen have, for example, begun to eat meat and engage in practices which were regarded as unclean; delivery of children by doctors belonging to these communities, for instance. But these are changes the caste system has been able to accommodate. The ideology has weakened but the structure remains in place. I, for one, cannot see a way out in Gandhian or other terms.
Sunday Review, The Times of India, 2 October 1988