From swadeshi and nationalism to swadeshi and nationalism

  Even five years back, the idea of swadeshi was an out dated thought. To the economists, it was anti-economics; to the intellectuals, it was anti-modern; to the industrialists it was anti-technology; to the media, it was amusement; to the policymaker, it was socialism in disguise; and to the politician, it was an embarrassment. The combined calumny of all these powerful groups created deep prejudice against the idea of swadeshi in India and outside. This went on for five to six years.

  But now, the swadeshi view has overcome all unfair attempts to label it as irrelevant, and even harmful to India. Today even some such intellectuals agree that swadeshi is not such an inelegant idea after all; many define swadeshi as "India- first" approach; like the "America- first" approach in USA, for they need a foreign lead to define swadeshi. Many industrialists agree on swadeshi as the idea of strengthening Indian industry and creating Indian multinationals. Even the media and commentators are not as hostile to the idea of swadeshi as they were and have begun to view it more seriously; many political parties and leaders are openly supporting the swadeshi viewpoint. Now even the media talks of swadeshi shares as distinct from MNC shares in the stock market. The take-over of various corporates by MNCs is not just regarded as anti-swadeshi, but also against national interests. So the idea of swadeshi, interpreted by everyone in his own light, is now very much in the Indian mind. What is it that turned the Indian mind towards swadeshi, when, just five years ago, it was virtually consigned to the dustbin of history. Before tracing how the Swadeshi began to reassert in India, it is necessary to recapitulate how Socialism forced its way into the Indian polity, and what Socialism meant as a contrast to the present day market capitalism.

  When at the beginning of this decade the German wall collapsed and the Soviet Union disintegrated, virtually the entire World defected from Socialism to Capitalism. This was on the faith that, if Socialism failed, Capitalism must succeed. During the cold war, the operating principle was that Capitalism and Socialism were competing ideologies. In truth they were two sides of the same coin. Both view human beings as purely economic creatures and are based on the Abrahamic world view that the world is secular and materialist and there is nothing sacred about anything; both agree that men and women pursue in the main, economic prosperity and nothing else; both rule out the existence of God except as the personal view of the believer. Both regard human beings as essentially atomised individuals and do not recognise any natural, cultural and social human collectivities having common faiths, ideals, goals, and way of life. Capitalism believes in sharing the burden of the state with the market, and trusts the market more than it believes in the state as the delivery mechanism. But communism does not believe in the market and believes only in the state. This is the sole difference. Thus capitalism and communism are the same content in two different containers. And yet the world kept believing for almost the whole of the 20^th century that both were conflicting ideologies.

  That was why Mahatma Gandhi told Pandit Nehru that although the latter believed that capitalist system was the cause for the ills of industrialisation, the truth was that the fault was in industrialism and no amount of socialisation would cure its ills. The dialogue between Gandhi and Nehru on industrialism, socialism and capitalism dates back to 1928. Pandit Nehru first wrote an angry letter to the Mahatma accusing him of exaggerating the faults of western industrial civilisation, and belittling its achievements. Nehru also told the Mahatma that the idea of Ramrajya was no good in the past, nor would he want it back. He was blunt that whether one liked it or not the western civilisation would gradually over take India. The Mahatma stunned by Nehru's angry outburst, wanted to make public the differences between the two saying that he never imagined that the differences between him and Nehru were so unbridgeable. He also advised Nehru to carry on an open warfare with the Mahatma, as, if the latter was wrong, he was causing irreparable harm to national interest. But, Pandit Nehru successfully avoided the debate. Again after 17 years, in the year 1945, Nehru ridiculed the Mahatma for his ideas on gramswaraj and swadeshi. Here too Gandhi suggested an open debate, but Nehru again avoided the debate saying that the elected representatives of independent India would discuss and decide in which direction the country should move. So the all-important debate between the mentor Gandhi and the disciple Nehru never took place.

  Neither did the dialogue, which Pandit Nehru had promised to the Mahatma that the elected representatives of independent India would carry on took place. There was no debate at the national level about whether the ideas of swadeshi, swavalamban, gramswaraj articulated by the Mahatma were out of date and irrelevant. There was no debate on whether India should pursue the free market motto, if it discarded the swadeshi view or the socialist model; and whether the socialist philosophy would suit the Indian psyche. The leadership adopted socialism without debate, without understanding what demands it would make and what changes and adjustments it would impose on our society, polity, ethos and religion.

  We assumed that purely by political process, that too by a democratic polity, we could turn the society to abandon its age-old traditions, beliefs and lifestyle and switch over to socialism. The result was a dual life- a formal modern life as the veneer and the age-old beliefs as the core. The traditional views and life style went underground illegitimatised at the political, economic and modern social intercourse. And along with it absconded religion except to the extent the system allowed the minority religion and culture to defy the new notion of secularism. This also led to a further duality- lip service to socialism for votes, and institutionalisation of permit quota, licence raj in the name of mixed economy. This promoted corruption and black money and caused serious erosion in national character. Yes, the society remained where it always was and refused to change, but the polity put on a show of socialism. The pace of deterioration reached its peak when Indira Gandhi virtually turned theatrical on socialism. She even labelled those who opposed the dishonesty that went on in the name of socialism, as anti-poor, pro-rich, and even as American and CIA agents. She grafted the slogan of socialism in the Constitution of India, pressured the Supreme Court into accepting socialism as a constitutional creed to which the rest of the Constitution was subordinate. Thus phoney socialism became legitimate politics.

  While the Socialist reign was a general disaster to India, in specific terms, it damaged the economic potentiality of India. The Indian enterprise and entrepreunership dominated the world trade before the British advent; it dominated the trade in East Asia and Africa even after the British left India. Before the British established its rule, that was in 1830, India's share of the world's production was 19%, that of Britain 9% and of USA 2%; its share in the world trade was 18%, that of Britain 8%, and of USA 1%. India had greater literacy than Europe. It is colonial rule that eroded the Indian economic base. When the British left, our share of the world's production and trade were less than 1%. Thus the British demolished the business competence, initiative and self-confidence of Indians; the demolition work was continued more efficiently under the Socialist regime in India. The Indian trading communities turned into clerks and skilled self-employed became unskilled employees, or turned unskilled and unemployed. A country, which worshipped money as god, was persuaded to treat moneymakers as untouchables. A nation which had tradition of treating work as worship and which actually worshipped the tools of trade was organised and trained to destroy all work ethic. Public sector was indiscriminately encouraged with the result inefficiency was concealed in ideological exposition. The installation of the Socialist regime was collaterally assisted by the godless idea of secularism. Socialism and secularism alienated the Indian State from the Indian beliefs, tradition and values. The Indian state abhorred talented traders as blood sucking middlemen, acute financiers and bankers as exploiters and accumulators of wealth and power and astute industrialists as monopolists and profiteers. In fact the Indian businessmen were treated as undesirables, even as untouchables. The socialist regime perpetuated a mindset in which the best minds of India found it advantageous to seek employment rather than turn employers to provide employment. Some of the best minds in the country in the first two decades after freedom entered Government service instead of setting up business or profession that would have created wealth and employment; and some of them made business out of the government. That is not all. Socialism turned the public life government-centric and politics-oriented. This disproportionate role for state and politics, without any norms to evolve and recognise quality and merit, generated a massification of entry into politics for recognition and power. This gradually turned, as the society weakened against politics and money, politics into a profitable industry.

  The ordinary people as well as the informed ones whether in towns or in villages, were made to believe that it is the state, not the society or community, which will deliver. The result was the disuse of all traditional delivery mechanisms like the village communities, social and religious institutions. The public discourse also changed to move the people away from God, and even from the very idea of nationalism. The result was an India, which was the anti-climax of all that the movement for freedom of India had envisioned. If the freedom movement was inspired by the idea of spiritual nationalism as expounded by Swami Vivekananda, motivated by Sanatana dharma, held out by Aurobindo as our nationalism, fertilised by the enchanting Vande Mataram of Bunchim Chandra, and defined by the ideal of Ram Rajya set by Mahatma Gandhi, free India's secular and socialist mix declared every one of these noble and sustaining ideas as irrelevant, unsecular and communal.

  It was then that two path breaking developments took place in the trans 1980-90. The Ayodhya movement called the bluff of pseudo-secularism and the collapse of the communist states exposed the socialist theatre in India, which was nothing more than the shadow of Soviet brand of Socialism. This resulted in a massive process of national self assertion. The Ayodhya movement restored the pre-independence values eclipsed by the secular socialist regime, and illegitimised the pseudo secular ideas and practices. With its collapse in Berlin and Moscow, socialism became a dead letter in Indian polity, notwithstanding the false undertakings being given by all political parties to the Election Commission professing socialism. The entire intellectual establishment of India, including bureaucrats and columnists overnight defected to market capitalism. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh dismantled the entire socialist edifice in pin-drop silence. There was not a word of protest - in the Congress or in the CPM or CPI or the Revolutionary Socialists or the Samajwadi parties. The whole nation witnessed and even rejoiced the way socialism ceased to figure in the resolutions of political parties and in platform speeches.

  When the exponents of socialism abandoned their pet ideology, they swung to the other extreme - they became as ardent and faithful exponents of liberalisation and globalisation as they were about socialism. They began to support every move that dismantled the socialist establishment, even though many of those moves began dismantling the Indian state itself. The Indian business men, the Indian middle class and the Indian intelligentia turned so hostile to the socialist idea of the past, they began to view with suspicion any voice of moderation against the thoughtless way in which the entire national course was being reversed; they began to see in any sane voice which advocated gradualism in opening up the Indian economy to global competition, conspiracy to retain the Socialist establishment. With the result just as Socialism had become a fad, globalisation too became an ideological fad. Socialism of the past legitimised globalisation for future - without any thought as to the demands of globalisation, and the capacity of the nation to meet them. Anyone who differed from the pace or reach of globalisation was branded as anti-modern and even anti-growth. There was no debate as to how, in what stages, in what areas and with what safeguards the change over from the socialist regime to the free market economy must take place. Just as our establishment adopted socialism instantly, without debate - and suffered for 40 years, it adopted equally instantly, market economy again without debate. But what it could not realise is that like 40 years of socialism could not penetrate the Indian psyche defended by its age old tradition values and life-style, the free market prescription also cannot accomplish what socialism did not. But like a modern doctor, who prescribes anti-biotic as instant cure for illness, instead of building resistance for long term cure, the Indian establishment has prescribed free market globalisation as the instant cure for the ills of socialism.

  So free market globalisation which appears to be the cure today, will eventually prove to be an instant dose of anti-biotic - a transitional treatment rather than a durable cure. This is what emerges from the experience of India - and even of the world in the 1990s. If Swadeshi, which was eclipsed by socialism for four decades, and rediculed by the globalisers brigade as India discarded socialism, is back - although with different meaning and implications for different sections - it means that the Indian establishment took less time to realise the mismatch between globalisation and India than it devoted to understand the unsuitability of the socialist ideas for India. The present trend to view the swadeshi thought as not so horrible as it was made out when Indian socialism was given instant funeral is indicative of the fact that the present day India is in transition and the idea of economic globalisation is a transitional flirtation, not a destination.

  Why is globalisation a transitional flirtation? Not because the intellectuals and elites in India inspired by Anglo-Saxon world view, who direct the Indian mind in politics and economics, have the vision of a large theoritical formulation in which they see it as a transit point. It is because the Indian society's core values, which are not amenable to the Anglo-Saxon traditions will not internalise the idea of globalisation. For, the civilisational, cultural and traditional ideas and forces have a resistance which the state- directed ideologies cannot overcome. Imagine that despite the unmitigated monstrosity of the communist regime in China, which organised cultural revolutions to banish Confucian traditions, what emerged unscathed from the blackest period of Chinese history was the very Confucian tradition. Akio Morita, a doyen of Japanese business told the Group 7 leaders when they met in Tokyo in 1992 that whatever the great political leaders might do to install a global regime, national, traditional and civilisational factors will thwart the so-called global system of trade. The Anglo-Saxon world view recognised as survival-fit no value other than its own. So the basic justification behind the present effort at globalisation is that the west has finally won against the Rest and that the world is getting restructured on the basis of the western civilisational values. Globalisation assumes a World civilisation modelled after the western.

  This is how the West first perceived the post-cold war World. Francis Fukuyama declared in his work 'The End of History and the Last Man' that the collapse of communism meant that the Western civilisation has finally won and world peace was guaranteed on that basis. But this view did not hold the field for more than two years. Samuel Huntington, a US strategic analyst came out with his famous theory of 'clash of civilisations'. He forecast not the final victory of the West over the Rest, but a West-versus-the Rest scenario. He visualised the post-cold war world driven by civilisational factors inspired by religion, not by economics or trade. He saw civilisational blocks evolving as trade and political blocs. He advised the west to come to terms with a world of different civilisations which have to live with one another, and cannot hope for a world civilisation based on the western, to emerge. Allwyn Toffler agreed that there would be civilisational clashes, but not between civilisations defined by religion, but among civilisations demarcated by economic criteria. He envisioned a civilisationally trisected world - pre modern, modern, and post modern - clashing with one another, in which he perceived the emergence of city states and the collapse of all nation states. Yet another view, expounded by Lester Thurow, perceived the collapse of family, community, morals and traditions, leading to the stagnation and decay of capitalism. Thus the theoritical framework needed for a global regime in trade and politics do not seem to exist. Unless there is a broad theoretical framework in which a World regime can be accommodated, a functional world trade regime cannot be internalised. Therefore the idea of globalisation quickly fabricated by the West after the cold war seems to suffer from a myopic vision - and ignores the large gaps among nations, not amenable to a World regime.

  If theory refuses to internalise a global regime, the functioning of the current global regime also exposes its dis-functionality. The European monetary crises, the Mexican crises and now the East Asian crisis have questioned the basic assumptions of the global regime under installation. The greatest danger to the world trade regime will come from within the regime - even if the people of the world forget their religious, cultural national and civilisational identities and resolve not to clash in the interest of money and trade. Maynard Keynes said 'money is essentially a destabiliser, and has to be reigned in for economic stability.' This is precisely what the present world regime cannot do. In fact the IMF -,World Bank - GATT formulation was based on this very idea that money being a destabiliser has to be checked; this applied with greater force to transnational money which worked on the basis of exchange rates between currencies. So the IMF was created with the fundamental idea of ensuring stable exchange rates. The World currencies remained firmly linked to the US Dollar and the US Dollar was linked to gold at a firm rate of 35 USD per ounce of gold. This system worked till 1971 when because of the run on US gold reserves on the world losing confidence in US Dollar pressurised by the Vietnam war, the US cut the Gold-Dollar convertibility. The Dollar then depreciated from 35 to over 400 per ounce of gold. More importantly the world slipped into the present era of floating currency values determined by market forces of demand and supply of currencies against one another. It was precisely to avoid this that the IMF was conceived. The only protection that weak currencies of the world had against strong currencies was eroded. And now we have a world currency market in which speculative trade in derivatives exceeds 1.2 Trillion Dollars a day against the annual World trade in goods and services of 4.5 trillion Dollars. So speculative currency market has emerged as the chief arbiter of transnational and even intra-national economics.

  Akio Morita's letter to the G-7 leaders pointedly invited their attention to this point. Morita asked them to answer a vital question - If Japan by efficiency and cost-reduction increases its production physically by 10%, but if the Yen value goes down by 12%, has Japan grown by 10% or fallen by 2%? He asked them another question - has anyone control over the forces that determine the currency values? He pointed out that the derivative trading income of the Citi Bank exceeded (in 1992) 150 million Dollars a day! Knowing that the great leaders have no answer for any of the issues, Akio Morita told them that a world trade regime requires a common world currency. It follows that if a world currency cannot be produced , there cannot be world trade. World trade cannot operate with the currency for the world trade in the hands of one monopoly nation or on the hands of an oligarchy. The entire EC formulation is to produce a currency to match the dollar. But that would create a competitor for the dollar, but, not answer the question which Akio Morita has raised. So the present world trade regime is unstable first for economic reasons.

  Any long term view of the present day world trade regime would point not to its durability and stability, but its instability and transitional nature. So globalisation and global trade regimes are unstable in their very conception and structure. The issue is whether a nation should restructure itself to suit the unstable global structure and ever-changing global institutions? That is, should a nation be largely directed by global view and global institutions, or should it be largely guided by factors inherent to itself? In other words, should an ever changing global agenda lead a nation, marginalising its national ideas, beliefs and institutions, or should it be directed by its own national agenda based on its own ideas, in which the global situation plays a marginal role. The short question is: should a nation be led by its own agenda in the main, with marginal role for global forces? If the answer is yes - then it is return to swadeshi. It is this awareness at the national level, and at the global level, which is gradually persuading the Indian establishment not to treat the idea of Swadeshi with the contempt with which it treated this concept, which welded the movement for the freedom of India.

  Thus it is now a slow, and painfully slow return to swadeshi and nationalism. That is where the civilisational assertions of India commenced in the pre-independence days. Swadeshi and nationalism were the foundations of the Indian freedom movement. They should have become the foundations of the free India too. But the Anglo-Saxon domination of the Indian polity and establishment virtually defeated the very objective of the Indian struggle for freedom. The result was the serious attempt to westernise India on the socialist model. When socialism could not scratch the skin of the Indian psyche and was waiting to collapse and collapsed with global communism, the swing to another Anglo-Saxon view, westernisation through globalisation, has also become a transition, rather than the destination. We started the 20^th century with swadeshi and nationalism; and we are nearing the end of the century again back to the very concepts - swadeshi and nationalism, in the changed situation. The long interlude with socialism and the current interlude with globalisation are mere flirtations of the easy-minded elite Indian establishment lacking in self-confidence. Ultimately the Indian society's unwillingness to disown its age old values and traditions is manifesting in the realisation that globalisation cannot be the core thought of India; it is India which will be the core of India, with the world as a marginal influence on India. So it is back to swadeshi and nationalism, after flirtations with socialism and globalisation.