Nani Palkhivala’s Vision for India
Nani Palkhivala
on his vision for India.
Those of us who
have lived through the earlier days of free India, when the entire nation as
looking forward with zeal and fervour and with a sense of national pride,
cannot but look upon the present times with deep anguish and distress. I do not
think India in its entire history of 5,000 years has ever reached a lower level
of degradation than it has reached now. The depth of decadence to which we have
sunk was exemplified by the leakage of question papers for the Joint Entrance
Examination 1997 for the first time in the history of the Indian Institute of
Technology.
The only
achievement of Indian democracy has been that it has survived unfractured for
fifty years. Nine hundred fifty million people — more than the combined
population of Africa and South America — live together as one political entity
under conditions of freedom. Never before in history, and nowhere else in the
world today, has one-sixth of the human race existed as a single free nation.
Professor Rostow of Texas University regards the survival of Indian democracy
as the most important phenomenon of the post-war era.
The achievement
is all the more creditable, since no other democracy has had such diversity in
unity, or was such a mosaic of humanity. All the great religions in the world
have flourished in India. We have 15 major languages written in different
alphabets and derived from different roots; and, for good measure, our people —
whom you can never call taciturn — express themselves in 250 dialects.
The English
language, which is not included in the 15 major languages listed in the
Constitution, yet continues to be the only link language for the whole country;
it is the only tongue in which the South is prepared to communicate with the
North.
In 1950, we
started as a Republic with inestimable advantages.
First, we had
5,000 years of civilisation behind us — a civilisation which had reached ‘the
summit of human thought’ in the word of Ralph Waldo Emerson. We inherited great
skills and many-splendoured intelligence, since the genes had evolved over five
luminous millenia. We had a superb entrepreneurial spirit, honed over a century
of obstacles. A few years ago, a World Bank report on India mentioned two very
favourable factors — an unlimited reservoir of skilled labour, and abundance of
capital available for investment in new projects. The trader’s instinct is
innate in Indian genes. An Indian can buy from a Jew and sell to a Scot, and
yet make a profit!
Secondly,
whereas before 1858 India was never a united political entity, in that year the
accident of British rule welded us into one country, one nation; and when
Independence came, we had been in unified nationality for almost a century
under one head of state.
Thirdly, our
founding fathers, after two long years of laborious and painful toil, gave us a
Constitution which a former Chief Justice of India rightly described as
“sublime”.
The substance
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations on
December 10, 1948, is embodied as Fundamental Rights in our Constitution. The
right to equality before the law is guaranteed to citizens and non-citizen
alike. All religions are treated with equal tolerance and equal reverence. The
religion of a citizen is no bar to his holding any office, however exalted, in
politics or the judiciary. In this respect, we are more secular than the United
Kingdom where a Roman Catholic cannot be the monarch or the lord chancellor.
In another
respect, our Constitution may claim to be more progressive than that of the
United States of America. Equality of the sexes is a guaranteed right in India,
whereas the attempt to incorporate a similar right in the United States
Constitution was met with resistance.
We can proudly
say that our Constitution gave us a flying start and equipped us adequately to
meet the challenges of the future. Unfortunately, over the years we dissipated
every advantage we started with, like a compulsive gambler bent upon
squandering an invaluable legacy. I am afraid, India today is only a caricature
of the noble democracy which our forefathers strove to bring to life and
freedom in 1947.
As early as
January 1987, The Economist rightly remarked that socialism as practised in
India has been a fraud. Our brand of socialism did not result in transfer of
wealth from the rich to the poor but only from the honest rich to the dishonest
rich.
We built up
state-owned enterprises called the public sector in India. The sleeping
sickness of socialism is now universally acknowledged, — but not officially in
India. More than 240 public sector enterprises are run by the Union government,
and more than 700 by the state governments. These public sector enterprises are
the black holes, the money guzzlers, and they have been extracting an
exorbitant price for India’s doctrinaire socialism.
There is a
tidal wave of privatisation sweeping across the world from Bangladesh to
Brazil, but it has turned aside in its course and passed India by.
The most
persistent tendency in India has been to have too much government and too
little administration; too many laws and too little justice; too many public
servants and too little public service; too many controls and too little
welfare.
My own thinking is that our greatest initial mistake was to start with adult
franchise. No democracy has ever paid, all things considered, a heavier
price for adult franchise than India. I am not aware of any great democracy
which started as a republic on the basis of adult franchise: all of them
started with a more restricted system and then graduated to adult franchise.
When the Constituent Assembly was in session, two of our greatest statesmen — C
Rajagopalachari and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel — recommended that we should not
start with adult franchise but educate our people first to make them worthy of
discharging their duties as citizens of a great democracy; but they were
out-voted.
The second
fatal mistake was to let the population nearly treble, in the absence of any
sensible or sound family planning measures and policies. Today, the unbridled population
growth, except in the state of Kerala, has been the ruin of this country.
Our third
disastrous mistake was to pay no attention to education. Value-based education has never any
sex appeal in Indian politics. Unlike Lee Kuan Yew who gave education the
priority of priorities in Singapore, our political parties treated literacy as
a matter of no consequence. The result has been that more than half of our
population is literally illiterate. Official statistics give a more comforting
figure; but that is only because any person who can write or sign his name is
considered to be literate according to official statistics.
Professor
Amartya Sen has bluntly said India will be the only country in the world to
enter the 21st century with half her population illiterate, and that successive
state governments have demonstrated “incredible irresponsibility” with regard
to primary education. In total disregard of Article 45 of the Constitution,
state governments have completely ignored their obligation to provide
compulsory primary education.
When I was in
the United States, I was often asked one question — How does India, with its
great human potential and natural resources, manage to remain poor? The correct
answer is very unflattering and hardly the type of answer which an ambassador
of any country may be expected to give: We are not poor by nature but poor
by policy. You would not be far wrong if you called India the world’s
leading expert in the art of perpetuating poverty.
Yes, the
potential of India is so great! Sir William Ryrie, the executive vice
-president of the International Finance Corporation, expressed the view that
India has some of “the most creative entrepreneurs . . . The most dynamic
business leaders, and the sharpest financial brains in the world.” These words
give you an idea of the magnitude of the effort needed to keep India
impoverished.
Most of our
politicians and bureaucrats, untainted by knowledge of development in the
outside world, have no desire to search for genes of ideas which deserve to be
called “a high-yielding variety of economics”. We are smugly reconciled to low
yield from high ideals.
India is
rattling — and rattling violently with spare human capacity. More than thirty
million are registered on our 891 employment exchanges. According to objective
estimates, there must be at least thirty million more who are unemployed, but
who are not registered.
As the
chancellor of the exchequer pointed out in the House of Commons some time ago,
the population of Hong Kong is less than one per cent of India’s (0.7 per cent
to be precise) and its land area is 0.03 per cent of India’s and yet it has
twice the trade of India.
The picture
that emerges is that of a great nation in a state of moral decay, of which
corruption and indiscipline are two of the several facets. In the land of
Mahatma Gandhi, violence is on the throne today. Mobocracy has too often
displaced democracy. The contribution of modern India to sociology has been a
Bandh — the closure of an entire city by militant rowdies.
One may apply
to India the words used by the late Benigno Aquino about the Philippines —
“Here is a land in which a few are spectacularly rich while the masses remain
abjectly poor, where freedom and its blessings are a reality for a minority and
an illusion for the many, a land consecrated to democracy but is a land of
privilege and rank, a republic educated to equality but mired in an archaic
system of caste.”
The greatest
problem of India is that its finest men — men of calibre and vision, knowledge
and character — are not in politics and stand little chance of getting elected,
having regard to the murky atmosphere of our political life. I was one of the foolish people who
told Hari Nanda to stand for Parliament. He stood for Parliament from the seat
which was supposed to be the safest for him — Faridabad. He was not only
defeated, but he forfeited his deposit!
If I am asked
to name one curse which deserves to be regarded as the greatest curse of India,
I would say it is casteism.
Unfortunately,
divisiveness has become the Indian disease. Truly, divisiveness is the AIDS of
India — a disease which is spreading fast and wide, preys on the public mind
and is without a cure in sight. Communal hatred, linguistic fanaticism,
regional fealty, and caste loyalty are gnawing at the vitals of the unity and
integrity of the country. To the growing army of terrorists and professional
hooligans, caste or clan, creed or tongue, is a sufficient ground to kill their
fellow citizens.
National
integration is born in the hearts of the citizens. When it dies there, no army,
no government can save it. Inter-faith harmony and consciousness of the
essential unity of all religions is the very heart of our national integration.
The soul of
India aspires to integration and assimilation. Down the ages, Indian culture —
a tremendous force of power and beauty — has been made richer and deeper as a
result of absorbing what is best in outside influences and integrating those
various influences to grace and enrich its own identity.
Yet, an
objective overview would justify confidence in the long-term future of the
country. A nation’s worth is not measured by its gross national product any
more than an individual’s worth is measured by his bank account. Ambassador
John Kenneth Galbraith remarked that while he had seen poverty in many
countries of the world, he found one unusual attribute among the poor of India
— “There is richness is their poverty.”
Hundreds of
millions, who have no standard of living, still have a standard of life. The
ancient civilisation has survived and will survive when the raucous and
fractious voices of today are lost in the silence of the centuries.
Nature has been
kind to India in one respect. It has endowed the country with the gift of
producing great leaders in the darkest hour — leaders with the gift of grace
who can arouse the trusting millions to lofty heights.
I believe the
solution for India is not to be found in adult franchise. There is a basic
lesson of Indian history. Our people have always taken their moral standards
from their rulers; the people have risen to great heights when they have basked
in the glow of noble kings or leaders. The present generation is waiting for a
leader who will make it relearn the moral values, and who will inculcate in the
people as Gandhiji did, a sense of the responsibilities which fall on every
citizen of a free society.
It is true that
eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. But it is true, in even a deeper
sense, that eternal responsibility is also part of the price of liberty.
Excessive authority, without liberty, is intolerable; but excessive liberty,
without authority and without responsibility, soon becomes equally intolerable.
De Tocqueville
made the profound observation that liberty cannot stand alone but must be
paired with a companion virtue: liberty and morality; liberty and law; liberty
and justice; liberty and the common good; liberty and civic responsibility.
One last
thought, and I shall have done. Today, the unity and integrity of India seems
to be at stake. But “even this shall pass away”. Indian society will, in course
of time, acquire the requisite political culture — the attitudes and habits of
tolerance, mutual respect and goodwill, which alone can make democracy
workable.
The day will
come when the 26 states of India will realise that in a profound sense they are
culturally akin, ethnically identical, linguistically knit and historically
related.
The major task
before India today is to acquire a keener sense of national identity, to gain
the wisdom to cherish its priceless heritage, and to create a cohesive society
with the cement of Indian culture. We shall then celebrate our Republic as the
dependence of the states upon one another, the dependence of our numerous
communities upon one another, the dependence of the many castes and clans upon
one another — in the sure knowledge that we are one nation.
