NEW YORK - India, born fifty years ago this week, would uplift its impoverished people, vowed its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, set a world standard for morality, and restore the greatness of ancient Hindu civilization.
To the world, Nehru's colleague, Mohandas Gandhi - the "Mahatma," one of the century's noblest figures, incarnated India. Gandhi led India to independence from Britain, preaching austerity, self-reliance, religious tolerance and an end to the pernicious caste system that combined medieval serfdom and racial apartheid.
Sadly, half a century later, independent India, the world's second most populous nation, seems better personified by Nehru's late daughter, Indira Gandhi, who, before her assassination, steered India towards authoritarianism, communal violence, and a corrupt pseudo-democracy run by venal political hacks and goondas (gangsters).
Today, India, with 934 million people, has an economy the size of tiny Holland's. Recent liberalization and opening of India's long-protected domestic markets has ignited the lust of western corporations. Business publications call India "Asia's newest tiger." Indeed, an urban middle class - 30-40 million people - is thriving. India has become the world's largest producer of computer software.
But behind the glitter and ostentatious consumption of the Bombay, Delhi and Bangalore urban elite, lies another India. Forty percent of its people live in dire, African-style poverty. Per capita annual income is US $340. Only 15% of Indians have indoor plumbing. Over 60% of Indian children are malnourished. Disease, filth and terrifying squalor are omnipresent.
India has managed to end the cycle of famines that used to kill millions, but the price of the agricultural "Green Revolution" has been devastation of two-third's of the nation's forests, currently disappearing at 2.5 million acres annually, and massive pollution of air, water and soil.
India's Hindu culture, which teaches resignation and perpetuates the caste system, is often blamed for economic and social backwardness. But British rule left an equally disastrous legacy: India's founders were schooled in British Fabian socialism. Since 1947, India has been run by a deeply corrupt bureaucracy that feeds off state-run industries, anti-business regulations, protectionism, and graft.
In 1955, war-ravaged South Korea was poorer than India. Today, under a free-market system, South Korea's people have a per capita income over US $10,000, almost 30 times that of Indians. Socialism and corruption have bled the native talent and industry of India's people.
It's a miracle India has held together at all. A dizzying collection of disparate peoples speaking over 300 languages and major dialects, India was cobbled together by British imperialism. A north Indian Brahmin is as dissimilar from a dark-skinned Dravidian from Tamil Nadu as a German from an Ethiopian. India is the world's second Islamic nation, with 120 million Muslims. Sikhs are India's most productive farmers, though only 2.5% of the population.
This vast potpourri of nations is like a separate planet, self-contained and utterly self-absorbed. The rest of the world could disappear and most Indians wouldn't even notice. India moves to its own ancient rhythm, and seems utterly unchangeable.
Yet India also seethes with unrest. In Kashmir, Delhi wages a ferocious war that has killed 50,000, marked by massive human rights violations and torture, against the independence-seeking Muslim majority. In Punjab, Delhi used equally murderous methods to crush the Sikh independence movement. Human rights are everywhere violated across India by brutal police, and gangs of goondas employed by rapacious landlords.
While India wallows in poverty, it maintains armed forces of 1.4 million, the world's third largest, and operates a huge, covert nuclear weapons and missile program. India currently has 12-15 operational nuclear weapons. Delhi sees itself as successor to the old British Raj - master of the entire Indian subcontinent and the Indian Ocean from Australia to Africa.
India's nervous neighbors - Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Burma, and Sri Lanka, accused India of imperial bullying. Pakistan and India have fought three wars and remain at scimitar's drawn. Alarmingly, India's opposition Hindu chauvinist-fascist party, the increasingly powerful BJP, calls for the suppression of the nation's Muslims and Sikhs, and for a final "crushing" and re-absorption of Pakistan into "Great India."
Despite chronic poverty, miserable governments and toxic corruption, there is hope for India - provided it remains intact and does not splinter like the Soviet Union. A new generation of young Indians has abandoned socialist ideology for making money. Glimmers of social consciousness are seen where none before existed. The beneficial influence of the outside world is invigorating India. India exports industrious, educated people around the world who thrive as model citizens once freed of their native land's corruption and torpid Hindu socialism.
Even so, India still does not command respect it so desires from the world. Indians are unfortunately seen by many as arrogant, preachy, or inept. As the Trinidad-Indian writer V.S. Naipaul observed, the spectacle of India demanding to be treated as a great power while most of its people still defecate in the street is tragic and grotesque.
India's greatness remains in the distant past - and future. India will eventually become a major economic and geopolitical power next century. To get there, however, it will need decent government and a social revolution. Nehru's promises have yet to be kept.
Copyright E. Margolis, August 1997
Reprinted with Permission
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Inside Track On World News
International Syndicated Columnist & Broadcaster
The Toronto Sun