Mira Kamdar: Time to Bring Mahatma Gandhi Back
[Mira Kamdar is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and a fellow at the Asia Society. She is the author of “Planet India: The Turbulent Rise of the Largest Democracy and the Future of Our World."]
The Congress Party’s unexpected landslide in India’s general election was greeted with euphoria. Many believe that Congress - with its commitment to secular values, economic growth, and helping the poor - now has a mandate to transform India into a great power. Business and financial interests, in particular, are delighted with the outcome, crowing about the bonanza about to be unleashed as Congress liberalises India’s economy further.
The Americans are happy that India’s pesky left, reduced to a paltry 24 seats, has been all but eliminated from national government. India’s communists had tried to topple the Congress-led government last year in an attempt to scuttle the nuclear deal brokered by the United States, and had vowed to upend it.
As for the threat from the right, anyone hoping for peace in the region and reduced tensions within India between religious communities is relieved by the defeat of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP’s strategy of painting the Congress as soft on terror and demonising Muslims as an existential threat to India badly misfired.
Unfortunately, however, the economic trajectory that Congress is plotting, though it may well boost growth in the short term, is ultimately on a collision course with both equity and sustainability. Despite rhetoric about “inclusive growth,” India’s wealth gap has widened during the years of exceptionally rapid economic expansion.
The majority of the world’s malnourished children live in India. While private wealth management is a growth industry among India’s 200,000 or so nouveaux riches, 800 million Indians live on less than $2 per day. India’s water supply is stretched to the limit, even as global warming is fast melting the Himalayan glaciers on which millions depend for water. Moreover, climate change threatens to reduce agricultural output by up to 40 per cent by 2080, when India will have another 450 million people.
At that point, the consultancy McKinsey & Company projects India’s middle-class consumer market will have hit 600 million people, twice the size of the current US population. That’s exciting news to retailers looking for new markets. But what about India’s other billion people? And where will the resources come from to manufacture all the stuff these new consumers will buy?
The dye was cast for India’s development path on July 22, 1947, when India’s Constituent Assembly resolved to replace Mahatma Gandhi’s spinning wheel, or charka, with the emperor Ashoka’s wheel of dharma on the Indian national flag. The move symbolically rejected what the incoming government abandoned upon assuming office: Gandhi’s vision of an equitable and sustainable agrarian society based on self-sufficient, pared-down consumption.
For Gandhi, the spinning wheel symbolised the need to assume personal responsibility for consumption as a first step toward achieving justice and freedom for all. But Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, believed in industrialisation and urbanisation, famously calling the new mega-dam projects his government underwrote the “temples of modern India”.
In his famous speech on India’s “tryst with destiny”, Nehru promised Indians that his government would seek to “bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; … to ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman.”
For 63 years, the vast majority of India’s people have waited for this promise to be fulfilled...
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The Congress Party’s unexpected landslide in India’s general election was greeted with euphoria. Many believe that Congress - with its commitment to secular values, economic growth, and helping the poor - now has a mandate to transform India into a great power. Business and financial interests, in particular, are delighted with the outcome, crowing about the bonanza about to be unleashed as Congress liberalises India’s economy further.
The Americans are happy that India’s pesky left, reduced to a paltry 24 seats, has been all but eliminated from national government. India’s communists had tried to topple the Congress-led government last year in an attempt to scuttle the nuclear deal brokered by the United States, and had vowed to upend it.
As for the threat from the right, anyone hoping for peace in the region and reduced tensions within India between religious communities is relieved by the defeat of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP’s strategy of painting the Congress as soft on terror and demonising Muslims as an existential threat to India badly misfired.
Unfortunately, however, the economic trajectory that Congress is plotting, though it may well boost growth in the short term, is ultimately on a collision course with both equity and sustainability. Despite rhetoric about “inclusive growth,” India’s wealth gap has widened during the years of exceptionally rapid economic expansion.
The majority of the world’s malnourished children live in India. While private wealth management is a growth industry among India’s 200,000 or so nouveaux riches, 800 million Indians live on less than $2 per day. India’s water supply is stretched to the limit, even as global warming is fast melting the Himalayan glaciers on which millions depend for water. Moreover, climate change threatens to reduce agricultural output by up to 40 per cent by 2080, when India will have another 450 million people.
At that point, the consultancy McKinsey & Company projects India’s middle-class consumer market will have hit 600 million people, twice the size of the current US population. That’s exciting news to retailers looking for new markets. But what about India’s other billion people? And where will the resources come from to manufacture all the stuff these new consumers will buy?
The dye was cast for India’s development path on July 22, 1947, when India’s Constituent Assembly resolved to replace Mahatma Gandhi’s spinning wheel, or charka, with the emperor Ashoka’s wheel of dharma on the Indian national flag. The move symbolically rejected what the incoming government abandoned upon assuming office: Gandhi’s vision of an equitable and sustainable agrarian society based on self-sufficient, pared-down consumption.
For Gandhi, the spinning wheel symbolised the need to assume personal responsibility for consumption as a first step toward achieving justice and freedom for all. But Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, believed in industrialisation and urbanisation, famously calling the new mega-dam projects his government underwrote the “temples of modern India”.
In his famous speech on India’s “tryst with destiny”, Nehru promised Indians that his government would seek to “bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; … to ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman.”
For 63 years, the vast majority of India’s people have waited for this promise to be fulfilled...