“The State of the Nation”
Summary
This lecture considers an idea of India that is different from the conventional wisdom that most Indians are fed by the establishment. At a time when India is being lionized as one of the BRIC locomotives of the world economy, we considers how the lack of a clearly articulated civilizational ethic has damaged India and caused many of its citizens to lead unnecessarily stunted lives. Can a strategic intent based on India’s past may enable the nation to thrive in the future?
First, we shall look at the current state of affairs in India from a few angles: why India continues to harbor the largest cohort of impoverished and undernourished in the world; how the endemic scams imply a certain sense of urgency on the part of the ruling classes to rape and pillage as much as possible; and how social mores have undergone a tragic change in the recent past.
Next, we shall attempt to do a root-cause analysis of why this nation, from time immemorial one of the greatest civilizations that the world has ever seen, has deteriorated so badly. Based on this analysis, we shall explore briefly what each of us collectively and individually can do to ameliorate the situation.
What tragedy teaches us: Japan’s reaction to the earthquake and tsunami
Even though I wish to speak about India, let me begin this lecture by speaking about Japan. As we all know, there was an incredible catastrophe in Japan with a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and giant tsunami that hit on March 11th, causing enormous damage and loss of life. Nevertheless, the Japanese people, in the face of perhaps the single greatest disaster that has ever befallen a nation, have shown their mettle: they stood by each other, and helped their compatriots as much as possible.
There have been no riots or violence or looting of shops, as, alas, we saw in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. There have been no instances of breast-beating and emotional appeals on television, as we saw during the Kandahar hijacking. There were, on the contrary, examples of ordinary people acting for the common good – helping those who were homeless or stranded, ensuring that no one hoarded more food or water or fuel than they needed, and so on. Foreigners stranded in Japan were extremely impressed by how well the society functioned, how politely the officials responded.
I have been to Japan many a time, and I have developed a great respect for their civilizational ethos. The thing that strikes me most about the Japanese is their sense of honor. They are an honorable people: and their word is their contract. Their stoicism and valor in times of need makes me believe that the nation shall rise once again from the ashes: just as they did after utter devastation post Hiroshima/Nagasaki.
And the Japanese have been incredibly disciplined. Given the Japanese emphasis on the good of the community, and on each person knowing their roles and responsibilities, the reaction of the public at large was precisely as they had been drilled. There was no running around in a panic – unlike what happened in Mumbai on 11/26 during the Pakistani gunmen’s siege – with nobody in charge, and senior security officers not following the standard operating procedure. The Japanese knew what to do, and they did it.
The spirit of India?
Whenever India has a disaster – and we have plenty of them – nobody knows what to do, and unfortunately everyone simply tries to look out for their own interests, and the government and authorities do not have contingency plans. Furthermore, nobody plans ahead, even when the consequences of not doing so are as plain as day: a tragic example is the recent stampede in Sabarimala: experts have been cautioning for at least a decade that the facilities are inadequate, and suggesting that alternative plans be made for crowd control. But nobody cares, in particular the government does not care.
Among the many acts of heroism and selfless service in Japan one stood out. One of the worst-hit spots is the Fukushima nuclear complex, with at least one reactor in grave danger of melting down. In the face of a nuclear meltdown, and in that case certain death due to radiation or fire, 50 plant operators and engineers volunteered to stay on and attempt to repair the broken cooling system. These Fukushima Fifty, as they are called, show the highest level of courage and honor. And it is not just fifty people, it is a rotating staff of fifty individuals on duty at any one time. Several have been diagnosed with radiation-related illnesses, but they carry on.
That level of civic responsibility – and indeed self-sacrifice – is called “yamatao-damashi” or the spirit of Japan that was displayed by these brave 50 startled me, because I would be hard put to imagine such a thing in India today.
But it was not always so: there are tremendous tales of courage, but nobody knows about them. For instance, there was the Last Stand of C Company, 13th Kumaon Regiment, at Rezang-La, Ladakh, during the India-China war in 1962. Under Major Shaitan Singh (Param Vir Chakra, posthumous) they fought practically to the last man and the last bullet to ensure that the Chinese would not take Leh.
Then there was the recent anniversary of the martyrdom of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru. They were hanged by the British exactly 80 years ago, on March 23, 1931, for the crime of daring to oppose the colonial yoke. Even though our textbooks do not provide a full picture of the valiant and desperate struggle for independence, from the Rani of Jhansi to Kalapani to the Komagata Maru[1] to the Gadhar Party[2], we can still marvel that there were men and women who disregarded their own self-interest to advance a sacred cause: freedom. I am reminded of Shakespeare in Julius Ceasar:
Cowards die many times before their deaths
The valiant never taste of death but once.
But today, that sort of valor sounds positively quaint. If you open up any Indian newspaper, all you read about are scams of varying kinds wherein the powers-that-be spirit away enormous amounts. That is, if you ever hear about it – for the pliant and colluding media takes pains to ensure that most malfeasance is never reported, but is swept under the carpet.
The scale of the loot is absolutely staggering. A financial watchdog named Global Financial Integrity[3] estimates that $462 billion has been spirited out of India till 2008, and they note the theft had accelerated in recent times. That amount of money is roughly half of India’s GDP, which is about a $1,000 billion. Indeed, some have taken to reporting the latest scams – the 2G Spectrum, the Antrix-Devas Spectrum, etc. – in percentage of GDP, as that makes the most sense.
In fact, one may make a case that the ‘spirit of India’ is in endemic corruption. Moral and material corruption is ubiquitous. For instance, the very people who trot out Gandhi’s ideas once a year on the day of his death would not recognize those same ideas if they were presented to them on a platter. Khadi-wearing has now become a watchword not for sacrifice and humility, but venality.
The media also makes a big after every terrorist attack, about the ‘spirit of Mumbai’ or the ‘spirit of xyz-city’. This is not very meaningful – instead of a positive can-do spirit, the fact that people go back to business as usual the day after the carnage simply means they are resigned and fatalistic – they expect nothing from the government: they know that the government is not going to protect them, and therefore it is the silence of the powerless, not the calm self-confidence of the empowered, as in Japan.
Why are wealthy Japanese so willing to self-sacrifice, as compared to poor Indians? Perhaps the question should be about the middle-classes in both nations, because the poor in India are truly impoverished and hopeless – you would hardly expect them to have ascended Maslov’s hierarchy[4] to get to self-actualization, since they are still worrying about the basic issues of food and shelter. But then the observed fact is that the poor in India are generous: observe how after any accident or catastrophe, those on the ground are full of praise for how much the local people do for them.
So it is the middle class that has been addled in India, becoming cynical, uncaring, too willing to dismiss anything other the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest as naivete. Of course, the middle class in India, as elsewhere, have a disproportionate impact, because they tend to occupy the positions of power and influence in the executive, the judiciary, the legislature, and the media.
I believe this pervasive cynicism among the Indian middle class is the result of their internalizing an idea of India that is so grossly at variance with the facts that it is for all practical purposes a hoax; but a hoax that is so widely believed and propagated as an article of faith that it has become a dogma that none may question.
In fact, I believe this cynicism arises from a ‘manufactured consent’[5], to use a phrase popularized by the leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky, who used it to denote the stranglehold that the military-industrial complex has on US policy and US public perspectives. The idea is simple: keep the people ignorant and in the dark, so that they can be manipulated easily to suit the interests of the ruling class. It usually involves some sort of an ‘opiate of the masses’ which renders the masses mindless.
This mechanism is clearly in wide use in the US. The average citizen is rendered relatively ignorant of the world at large because their education system and the media conspire to make them so. This is important because it enables the elites – the top 5% that constitute the ruling classes there – to make rapid decisions, secure that they can easily persuade ‘public opinion’. One example of this was when the Americans decided to attack Iraq: overnight, they persuaded their public that Saddam Hussein (who had been a friend for years, especially during the Iran-Iraq war) was suddenly the most wicked person ever.
This sort of mass delusion, courtesy of an educational system intended to produce coolies, and a corrupt media that is hand-in-glove wit certain politicians, is rampant in India as well. For instance, the content of the entire education system in India quickly destroys any creativity in a student; furthermore it fills their heads with arrant nonsense about history , ‘soft power’ and geopolitics, and convinces most Indians that they can are not capable of competing on even terms with people of other nations.
The opiate that keeps Americans sated has generally been television; in the case of India it is cricket: which, for all practical purposes, has become the national religion. The obsession with cricket has become a major problem in many ways, and is an example of a syndrome of importing inappropriate and damaging ideas, which then strangle native concepts.
In India, the media has become essentially the handmaiden certain political vested interests. So much so that we really have a media-politician-bureaucrat-industrialist nexus in place: more widespread and with more of its fingers in every pie than the military-industrial complex has ever dreamt of in the US.
Hunger in India: colonialism by other means
But what might motivate the elites to keep the masses in this state of intellectual slavery or quasi-colonization? First, I was once startled to hear a first-hand account by someone I trust about a conversation they had with a senior Communist leader in Kerala about prohibition, some decades ago. At the time, there was a movement for prohibition, considering that many men were wasting their earnings on drink, and anyway, it was considered a social evil.
The Communists were resisting the imposition of prohibition. When this person asked the leader why they opposed prohibition, the answer was: “If there is no prohibition, there will be no poverty. If there is no poverty, who will need us?”. That was an absolutely candid, if cynical statement by the politician. This is precisely what has led to the perpetuation of poverty in India: it is job security for the politician.
And it is not fair to just tar the Communists with that brush. Most political parties in India are left-leaning, and in particular the Congress has a raft of high-sounding schemes, all of which are supposed to emancipate the down-trodden in society, of which India has a lot. India is home to the majority of the desperately poor in the world, whereas other nations have managed to lift their underclasses out of penury and into the middle classes. Notably, China: whatever their crimes, it appears that the Communists there have reduced poverty quite substantially.
A particularly illuminating comparison is with South Korea. In the 1950’s, the two countries had roughly the same GDP per capita. And experts comparing the two expected India to do much better than South Korea which had been ravaged by two wars: World War II and the Korean War. Whereas India, large, not having faced the devastation of war – the skirmishes with Pakistan did not affect India’s industrial heartland – looked much more likely to succeed. But what has happened in reality? South Koreans now have a per capita GDP that is twenty times greater[6] than India’s!
Therefore, several hundred million people, who could have been rescued from poverty, continue to remain in dire poverty. There is a famous statistic that 78% of working Indians live on less than Rs. 20 a day[7]; while the percentage has been disputed – another committee put it at a much lower 25.7% of the population – there is no question that large numbers of people are subsisting on practically nothing. At the lower end of the scale, that would still be 300 million people – the largest collection of the poor in the world.
Alarmingly, things are not getting any better for them. Study after study reveals damning numbers about nutrition and food security[8]. And surely that is the most obvious thing about a population under stress – that they are not eating enough, simply because they cannot afford to. The UNICEF says[9] that 46 per cent of all children in India below the age of three are too small for their age; 47 per cent are malnourished, and 16 per cent are wasted, ie they have little hope of a normal life. “Malnutrition is more common in India than in sub-Saharan Africa. One in three malnourished children in the world lives in India”.
A recent Harvard University study [10] concluded that “Growth in India’s economy since the early 90s has not ended under-nutrition among children in that country…”
The Wall Street Journal[11] referred to the Global Hunger Index, which shows that India is one of the nations most critically affected. It is in the same category of ‘alarming’, along with Haiti, Bangladesh, Sudan, Cambodia and Nepal. Even North Korea is better off! The only nation in a worse category is the Democratic Republic of Congo (‘extremely alarming’). And China, the benchmark for India, is much better off at ‘low’ level of hunger of 6.0 as compared to India’s shameful 24.1 (lower than only war-torn Congo’s 41.2, desperately poor Haiti’s 28.0, and Bangladesh’s 24.2, and it looks like even war-ravaged Afghanistan and Iran are better off).
An even more damning statistic was published recently in the British medical journal Lancet and reprinted in the Economist. It talks about obesity[12] around the world. Although it is a little hard to read, here is a screenshot:
What this chart says is truly astonishing: there are only three countries in the world (in blue) where people have grown thinner in the recent past (1980-2008): and these countries are Congo, Afghanistan, and India!
This should make Indians, and the Indian government, hang its heads in shame: Congo and Afghanistan are ravaged countries where there are major wars or civil wars going on. (And Iraq, which also had a war, did better). That India is in the same category leads us to an inescapable conclusion: the Indian government is at war with its people. And what is the proposed solution? A laughable ‘Right to Food’ bill, while agriculture has been ignored and downgraded for the past sixty years.