Thanks to vigorous ‘globalization’ (or perhaps re-globalization) and massive global innovations in communications, digitization and multimedia technology as well as country’s vastness of both population and geographical area, India as a sovereign nation appears outwardly to be managing well to have carved out its distinct niche in the current international stage. Although not included as yet in the United Nations Security Council or OECD group, India is being constantly cajoled—in the spheres of international politics, international business and trade and also in the most influential section of the international media—by the richest Western countries, particularly since the early 1990s when the country finally plunged itself into so-called neo-liberal waves unleashed across the world by the capitalist bloc in the wake of the Cold War. Going by a section of global (and domestic) media portrayals of India, the country now seems, with its present military and technological expenditures and capabilities, as if it is in the cusp of a dramatic rise to become a global economic giant and superpower, thanks to its ongoing reforms on World Bank-IMF lines. Yet at the same time, India is a land where gigantic material deprivations and inequality, blatant irrationalities and immaturities in day-to-day functioning, governance and administration, naked dances of raw emotions and unalloyed sentiments, reign of religious faith, dysfunctional and outmoded institutions, violations of rule/law and corruptions galore at a pervasive scale (see, e.g., Luce 2011; Anderson 2015 for some relevant illustrations and statistics). The latter at a very immediate general level are abundantly testified by national headlines as well as variety of regional news reported in Indian major dailies and numerous news channels on television (at least) insofar as ideology, perceptions, outlook, conduct, maturity and functioning of major political parties, related institutions and respective political leaders are concerned.1
For example, a large chunk of political activity and energy in India is consumed by sheer mud-slinging, war-of-words, leg-pulling and efforts at finding scandals (often at a very personal level) among political leaders of rival parties—virtually all with a view to garnering voters in one’s own fold during elections. There is a distinct common tendency among major political parties (both ruling and those in opposition) to play predominantly with the mass of ordinary citizen’s abundant store of unreasoned emotions, sentiments and long-nursed sociocultural irrationalities and immaturities—all generally in a sacred guise of working for India’s traditions and its illustrious culture. For example, a sizeable share of public resources is spent on just installing enormous awe-inspiring statues of past and present national leaders or heroes,2 while millions of children suffer undernutrition, skip schools to work for a bare minimum subsistence or die prematurely because of acute inadequacy of health care facilities. Lakhs of female lives are (implicitly) sacrificed every year both before and after birth by their own parents through familial neglect, discrimination or sex-selective abortions in large tracts of starkly male-dominated culture and society.
While Indian scientists have achieved commendable heights in spheres of medicine, space and nuclear research, the majority of them do not seem free yet of traditionally held religious faith-based notion that all this ‘man-made’ scientific progress is ultimately attributable to God’s blessings and wishes, which are, in turn, believed to be favourable—mythically—only if regular prayers and rituals meant to keep God satisfied are performed. As this deep-rooted religiosity goes, God ultimately reigns over us, our survival and worldly activities; therefore, we should pay our due prayer and subservience to God in various forms and rituals. Nearly all households, offices, banks, hospitals and other public spaces are decorated by portraits of deities of various genres/sects and textures such as printed photographs or metal-made idols placed either in some overhead corner or prominently displayed in foyer or on a wall. Telangana Chief Minister, who has been a key leader of a sustained mass political movement for the creation of Telangana as a separate state (carved out of the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh) has recently offered gold ornaments—worth of Rs. 5.6 crores—ostensibly out of public exchequer at the Lord Venkateshwara Temple in Tirupati presumably to keep his spiritual ‘vow’ to God if a separate state of Telangana comes true (The Indian Express, 22 February 2017). Apart from other things, this action evokes an obvious dilemma as to whether this ‘success’ [in obtaining separate state of Telangana] was due to an effective people’s movement steered by a clear-headed committed leadership or due to favourable blessings of the God with whom the leader presumably made a ‘deal’ at a spiritual plane. If one enquires about the rationale of such practices of even chief state executives of a secular democratic country and also about the publicly displayed dependence on religious faiths, an otherwise intelligent and articulate Indian with enough educational certificates/degrees would answer in a typically evasive way and say that ‘it is more of our deep-seated culture than of a religion as such’.3
All this can well be seen as reflections of an undiminished and unquestioned sway of people’s abundant store of pre-modern (traditional) partisan/irrational sentiments, emotions and blind religious faiths vis-a-vis a weak hold of reason, scientific outlook, objective rationality and universal humanism. This ideational state of the nation—as we shall show later in this book—has been consistent with and has perhaps been reinforced by a muddled content of school education designed to teach science and mathematics just as some discrete skills with their little underpinnings and inspirations in shaping and enabling young minds to question and examine critically glaring irrationalities (and unreasonableness) of traditional societal practices, age-old unquestioned rituals or indeed whatever goes under a catch-all or evasively capacious term, ‘our culture’. In consequence, a globally time-tested route to getting rid of myriad socio-religious aberrations and distortions through, inter alias, Enlightenment of citizens’ minds and thinking with appropriately designed educational content/message has remained chronically outside the dominant imaginations, visions and perceptions of the most influential elites and politicians of the post-Independence India.
The present chapter sketches an informed comprehensive exposition of deeply crippling contradictions, dilemmas and puzzles that afflict contemporary India in three major spheres—economic, political and sociocultural—and demonstrates how they are all assimilated into a gigantic chaotic formation, of which intrinsic essence is best captured by the term, ‘metamorphosis’, in a sense not very different from what Franz Kafka conveyed through his absorbing portrayal of a metaphorical metamorphosis and its attendant predicaments experienced by Gregor Samsa in his earth-shaking novelette.4 In the immediate post-Independence decades of the newly founded Republic of India, the term ‘crisis’ was in vogue in many authors’ characterization of the multitude of challenges of growth and development (e.g. acute shortages both of food in relation to high growth rate of population and of foreign exchange in relation to imperative needs for growing imports to fuel the import-substitution strategy for rapid domestic industrialization, exacerbated, of course, by at least two wars with two neighbouring nations by the end of 1960s and by a few major droughts).5 But over the preceding seven decades—and especially since the early 1990s—the country has experienced fairly rapid growth at an aggregate level: per capita real income has increased many fold; overall food shortages have been converted into food ‘self-sufficiency’; there have been substantial expansions of manufacturing and tertiary sectors; literacy rate and elementary education have increased several times the levels prevailing at the time of country’s Independence; and urbanization and technological progress, specialized research has proceeded apace as well.
However, the country in course of its aggregate growth and development has simultaneously been entangled, as we shall elaborate below, by some significant economic imbalances, structural distortions and social aberrations, thereby inviting—almost inevitably by the logic of its own muddled/misguided line of thinking, elitist ideology and foggy vision in the formative years after Independence—a gigantic political, social and ideational metamorphosis and its associated quandaries. As will be argued in course of this chapter, India ideationally looks like a perpetual metamorphose: it has neither been transformed into what it was desired or imagined of becoming, nor has it remained exactly at its earlier form at the beginning of its process of metamorphosis. Also, we shall stretch the story further to posit (in following two chapters) that the genesis of India’s protracted ideational metamorphosis is traceable largely to what one might metaphorically call an ‘original sin’, namely a conscious evasion from core Western Enlightenment ideas and values and hence from its concomitant rise of socio-political-ideational modernity, secularity and maturity. The latter, as our argument goes, could not materialize in the absence of post-colonial India’s concerted and decisive efforts at a mass-scale ideational infusion—into the minds of common people, elites and political classes alike—of the supremacy of reason, rationality, scientific and secular outlook, humanistic and universalistic worldview.
India’s Economic Growth and Development—‘A Picnic Atop a Volcanic Mountain’?6
A distinct culture of reckoning chiefly—if not solely—with the rate of growth of GDP as the key indicator of a country’s economic performance is germane within mainstream economics globally for a pretty long time. Although some later attempts at evolving more nuanced measures of development such as Human Development Index from the standpoint of actual human well-being have been in vogue in evaluating and ranking of countries, the supremacy of growth rate of GDP as an indicator of economic performance still reigns across the world. India is currently being rated as a high-performing country almost exclusively on account of its high rates of growth of GDP prevailing since the introduction of liberalization programmes in the early 1990s. But going by its basic economic structure and also by major human development indicators (nutrition, life expectancy, infant child mortality, literacy and education, and other primary civic amenities), India’s standing has been improving far more slowly than even its poorer South Asian neighbours (Drèze and Sen 2013).
As is well-known by now, India, under Jawaharlal Nehru’s stewardship, embarked on building a rather vaguely conceived ‘socialistic pattern of society’ with a disproportionately large emphasis on expansion of public sector, combined with comprehensive state regulations and licensing regime that contributed greatly to a stifling of spontaneous (and competitive) growth of private entrepreneurship in the country. Within a few decades after Independence, India landed up becoming an economy marked typically by sluggish GDP and industrial growth rates, along with huge surplus rural labour, massive poverty and large-scale illiteracy. In this period of overwhelming dominance of the National Congress Party under Nehru’s leadership, relatively little effort was put to meet even the modest requirements of social equality and justice. In stern words from a narrative powerfully presented by Perry Anderson :
The record of Nehru’s regime , whose priorities were industrial development and military spending, was barren to any such impulse [of bringing social equality or social justice]. No land reform worthy of mention was attempted. No income tax was introduced till 1961. Primary education was grossly neglected. As a party, Congress was controlled by a coalition of rich farmers, traders and urban professionals, in which the weight of agrarian bosses was greatest. (Anderson 2015: 110)
Meanwhile, India witnessed a lot of political turmoil (including the Emergency of 1976–1977) under the authoritarian leadership of Indira Gandhi with considerable backwash effects under the reins of her son, Rajiv Gandhi . All this has had, on the whole, adverse implications for India’s industrialization and economic growth. It was only in 1991 that a new regime of so-called liberalization was formally launched with a view to rectifying some earlier counterproductive restrictions, ‘license Raj’ , related policy biases, social injustices unleashed, as it were, in the name of a ‘socialistic pattern of society’. But the obsession with rate of growth of GDP as the prime marker of economic achievements did not die down. For example, India’s growth rate of GDP —either achieved over a preceding year or predicted for a following year—routinely finds place in the headlines of mainstream press, ...