Old myths we still live with

Political thinking in India has been dogged by mindsets and myths derived from the founding fathers. Thus, Mohandas Gandhi is the source of the anti-urban bias in politics. The Mahatma's assessment was that "India lives in its villages."

It was an accurate description of the times, the early 20th century. At the dawn of the new millennium, however, rural India is fast becoming transformed and gaining the characteristics of urban areas.

As such, the urban-rural divide that politicians and activists continue to invoke is actually a continuum. Denizens of rural areas now have a plethora of contacts with their urban counterparts through television, cell phones, retail marketing, agribusiness and motorbikes.

However, the Gandhian view persists among the jholawallahs, who believe that an activists' honour code prescribes a life of rural poverty and opposition to economic development.

Like Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru also left us with myths about a planned economy and the public sector straddling its 'commanding heights'.

Ideologically biased towards Soviet Communism, Nehru believed that in a decolonised India, the private sector had only a marginal role to play; the government would lead economic development, combining growth with equity. Though the freedom movement was peaceful, its leaders had bitter experiences; Nehru, for instance, spent a full 19 years in prison. He had no delusions about the Raj.

Yet, his indictment of colonial rule was largely about economics.  He did not, however, take into account the tradition of free trade and private enterprise that preceded and was disrupted by the Raj and its command and control governance.

In rejecting market economics, Nehru turned his back on a glorious tradition and unwittingly continued the exploitative colonial legacy. Four decades of socialism brought India to the brink - in 1991 it warded off bankruptcy by physically pledging gold reserves to the Bank of England.

These two myths have had a pervasive influence on political thought. Rural poverty struck Gandhi when he returned to India from South Africa in 1914. While in England as a law student, he remained at the fringes of society, hobnobbing with vegetarians, theosophists and others -  critics of industrialism.

This early exposure to alternative thought laid the ground for his subsequent diatribe against modernity in Hind Swaraj, written on a steamship to India in 1909.

Gandhi's rejection of modernity finds an echo today among activists who oppose everything: Special Economic Zones, genetically modified crops, India's participation in the World Trade Organisation, patent laws and MNCs, among others. This mindset is a major obstacle to India's transition to a middle class economy.

On the other hand, Nehru's rejection of market economics drew from the salons of Cambridge University  of the early 1900s.

Russia was in the throes of an incipient revolution. The ideas of Karl Marx, only recently dead, were beginning to find wide acceptance in these salons. Influenced by the heady atmosphere at Cambridge, Nehru became an admirer of the Soviet revolution of October 1917.

His adulation of the Soviet Union inspired his advocacy of socialism in free India. His view was that the private sector with its profit motive could not be trusted with national development.

His prescription was a 'mixed economy' dominated by Soviet-style government enterprises. Over the years, Indian socialism morphed into a political and bureaucratic elite that did little for the welfare of the people, a VIP Raj to replace the colonists of yore.

Nevertheless, Gandhi and Nehru were remarkable men, noted for their ability to embrace and lead change. Sadly, their legacy degenerated into an ad nauseam culture of political correctness - no questions asked, no boats rocked.

Consequently, Indian politics remained untouched by the two greatest transformational forces of the 20th century: modernity and capitalism. It has remained feudal and sycophantic, cynical and hypocritical.

Email: rdesai@comma.in