On the eve of the Indian independence,
many doomsayers foretold that the entity called India would not survive too
long. They believed that owing to its religious, ethnic and linguistic
diversities, it would fragment into many mini-nations. Contrary to their
predictions, India not only survived but also emerged as an economic power to
reckon with. But the big question is whether India has been able to achieve
what the founding fathers of the nation had envisaged for it in 1947. If you
throw this question to different set of Indians, the answers would be
dissimilar. Some people will tell you about a shining India vis-a-vis its
impressive growth rate while others would draw your attention towards a dark
underbelly of underdevelopment and deprivation. 'India Since 1947: looking Back
at a Modern Nation' tries to find answers to such questions and explores how
'the Idea of India' has fared during the last 66 years.
Edited
by Atul Kumar Thakur, this anthology has many renowned writers, economists,
environmentalists, bureaucrats, politicians and journalists chiming in with
their own unique perspectives on India.
Ram Chandra
Guha, the eminent historian, opens the book with a highly readable essay on
bilingual intellectuals; writers and thinkers who were/are equally at home with
English as well as at least one of the Indian languages. The best examples are
Mahatma Gandhi who wrote in Hindi, Gujarati and English with equal ease and
Rabindranath Tagore whose translations of his own work 'Gitanjali' fetched him
a Nobel Prize. While listing the causes of the decline in the numbers of
'linguidextrous' intellectuals, he writes, ''The decline of the bilingual
intellectual in contemporary India is thus a product of a combination of many
factors: public policy - which emphasised the mother tongue alone; elite
preference- which denied or diminished the mother tongue altogether; social
change- as in new patterns of marriage; and economic change- as in the material
gains to be had from a command of English.'
In his essay
'India: Where Democracy has Gone Wrong', Prem Shanker Jha ponders over the
issue of genesis of corruption in India. 'The origins of corruption', he says,
'can be traced in two deep flaws in the constitution India adopted in 1950. The
first is the omission of a system for meeting the cost of running a democracy
i.e. the entire process of selecting and then electing the people
representatives. The second is the failure to enact provisions that would
convert a bureaucracy that had been schooled over a century into believing that
their function was to rule the people into its servants.' This reviewer can't
agree more. Undoubtedly, the political sleaze and the bureaucratic arrogance
have been the biggest hurdles in the progress of India.
Politicians
(with the exception of the leftists), businessmen and the purveyors of crony
capitalism have always praised the 'meteoric rise' of Indian economy after the
liberalisation policies of 1990s. Growth rate and direct foreign investments
have now become the only criteria to measure development. The worsening
conditions of the poorest segments of Indian society are not part of any
discussion about India's growth story. If you utter even a single word about
the inclusive growth, you are either branded anti-development or are bracketed
with the Ultra-Maoists. This inequitable economic growth, however, bothers
Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze. In their essay 'Putting Growth in its Place', they
strongly advocate for a development model where each and every Indian partakes
of the fruit of the progress. Right now, 'An exaggerated concentration on the
lives of the minority of the better-off, fed strongly by media interest, gives
an unreal picture of rosiness of what is happening to Indians in general, and
stifles public dialogue of other issues. Imaginative democratic practice, we
have argued, is essential for broadening and enhancing India's development
achievements.'
The rise of Naxalism or Maoism is a side
effect of such sloppy development models which widen the gap between the
'haves' and the 'have-nots'. In 'India: Underlined in Red' Atul Kumar Thakur
delineates the factors that breed extreme ideologies like Naxalism in India.
Though, he is unequivocal in denouncing violence to achieve a political end, he
accepts that in some clusters the Naxalite movement has altered the social and
political power structures and has empowered the oppressed classes. An incisive
and perfectly balanced essay, it is written surprisingly by a 29-year old.
Beyond the politics and the economy, there is a delightful article by India's
best cultural historian Pran Nevile about K L Saigal and his legacy. It is a
well-known fact that India's three greatest singers of the post-independence
era, Rafi, Mukesh and Kishore had started their musical careers by imitating
the great Saigal. But the reviewer wishes that the editor had included more on
the contemporary music scene in India since Saigal sahib was a pre 1947
phenomenon. South Indian singing legends like Yesu Das or Ghantasala come to
mind.
There are four articles out of a total of thirty that disappoint us, because
they are either hurriedly written pieces or rely more on polemics than in-depth
analysis of serious issues.
Ultimately, this is a great collection of essays about post-Independence India,
outlining policies or ideas that worked in India as well as what went wrong
during the last six and half decades of its post-colonial existence. It is not
only useful for Indian policy makers but can also be helpful to leaders of
other South Asian countries that share a history with India.
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