New India taking shape
There’s something fresh in the air in India these days. There’s a spring in the step of most Indians. There is renewed hope for the future. The celebration seems to have just begun…
Anyone observing the social, political and economic life closely in India will see one thing emerging…there’s a new India developing, very much different from its previous hesitant, stuttering and apologetic existence.
The new India started emerging more confidently when the political dispensation in India changed recently. The floodgates opened and the water started gushing out determined to chart its own course different from the long standing period it was kept in check by the dam of callous and uncaring previous political dispensations. The new-born child that India was after its political independence from the British after 1947 never came into its own and was stunted in its growth and aspirations. It was constantly reminded that it deserved what it got, it should not ask for more than what a pauper is worth, it was constantly spat at, considered a blot on the face of the earth and treated as a sham among the world nations. India was like the poor orphan, Oliver Twist, in Charles’ Dickens novel— kept getting a whack on its knuckles when it asked for more!
In its long existence as one of the oldest civilizations on the face of the earth, the last thousand years of its existence have been the most challenging. Due to external and internal factors, India was mauled wretchedly first by the marauding Muslim invaders and later by the British traders-turned-barbaric conquerors. The Muslim invaders tried imposing Islam on its subjects and in the process destroyed numerous cultural motifs of India. Under the British, India became the supplier of raw material to the British empire and powered the Industrial Revolution in Britain and its emergence as a world power. Transfer of technology, skills and culture took place covertly and openly from India to Britain. What was once the richest country in the world by GDP till 1600s became among the poorest nations by the 1900s. Britain became Great Britain by theft. No wonder Great Britain proclaimed the ‘sun will never set’ on its ‘crown jewel’, India.
Few centuries of stupor ensued after the British started ruling India. Indians were brainwashed to believe their culture, ethnicity, people, history and very existence was inferior, and Western civilization was their redeemer. Many Indians picked up English language and habits at the cost of native ones further contributing to the decay in the nation. The cultural genocide was well thought out and clinically executed to perfection. Once the mind was conquered, ruling Indians became easy for the British. A sweet master and slave relationship was secure in its place.
While there were several attempts in isolated pockets in India to secure their freedom from the British rulers, it took a moral giant like Mahatma Gandhi to unify and channel the nation’s efforts towards independence while complementing other forms of resistance to the British. Finally, in 1947, India got its independence from the British and thought it could breathe free.
Unfortunately, the political dispensation that ruled India from 1947 was a mirror image of their previous foreign political masters. A bigoted mindset still smitten by Britain ruled India for a long time treating Indian citizens as second rate citizens of their own country. While democracy was adopted as a form of governance, socialism was also injected out of fear of the Western model of capitalism that had subdued the country for long.
Even while leaving the country in 1947, India was divided into two parts by the British to try to weaken it permanently. Pakistan was carved out of India as an Islamic state on the basis of religion to cater to the whims of a political leader representing a section of the Muslim population. As a result of the partition of India and the resulting tensions where many Muslims from India crossed the border to migrate to Pakistan and likewise many Hindus and Muslims to India, India suffered a major genocide, which is unfortunately unspoken of in the annals of world history. Till this day, Pakistan tries to unnecessarily interfere in the internal affairs of India through help of few zealous Middle East Islamic nations in the form of terrorism across whole of India, and in particular, in the state of Jammu and Kashmir.
Since, India had adopted socialism after 1947, there was considerable Russian interference for few decades in the internal affairs of the country as well, and India adopted many schemes from the Russians to run the country and govern its people, which did not really help the country’s development potential.
Once the United States emerged as a superpower after the second World War, its Christian missionaries in India through the sponsorship of the United States Government gradually started covert operations of trying to convert Indians to Christianity through the garb of helping the poor with material help. What the British Government had left doing when they exited India, the US Government had picked up without shame to forward its interests of keeping India weak. This was not helping strengthen the social fabric of India as well.
Towards the last quarter of the twentieth century, China started spreading its Communist tentacles in India to create anarchy and Communism got christened as Naxalism in India. The philosophy of Naxalism was the same: the State oppresses the people and people need to take up arms to fight the government. This interference from China did not strengthen India as well.
In this backdrop of the above-mentioned three India-breaking forces (Arab/Pakistan religious fundamentalism, US Government-sponsored Christian missionaries’ religious conversion agenda and China Maoism influence) being poisonously active and the corrupt Indian political class fooling gullible Indian citizens, a new political dispensation has been ushered in by majority of the population to bring a whiff of fresh air as a last hope for the country and themselves.
The new political dispensation has captured the imagination of the patriotic Indian by bringing in a corrupt-free model of governance at the Central level and placing more emphasis on providing essential services to the common man, which was unimaginable for the average Indian citizen. Also, curiously, there is gradual hope that finally things will turn around in the country for the better and there is now a reason to live a life of dignity in India.
This is the new India I talked of in the beginning. It is like a child suddenly being allowed to play in the garden after being not allowed to play for many days. It is the start of new possibilities, it is the start of puberty for a young nation…finally the coming of age of a New India. Fundamental and economic foundations are being redrawn to take the nation to the next orbit of growth and prosperity, and eventually make India a developed economy while not compromising on ethics.
India growing up means benefit for the world at large. Mind you, this is just the beginning of New India! More to come…keep coming back to this space.
(The views presented in above write-up are purely the personal perspective of the author).
References:
1)’Breaking India’ book by Dr. Rajiv Malhotra
2)’The Battle for Sanskrit’ book by Dr. Rajiv Malhotra
3)’The Worldly Philosophers’ book by Robert L. Heilbroner
4)’My Experiments with Truth’ book by M.K Gandhi
