New Delhi: The past year 2020, will be remembered in history as the year when the balloon of the spin artistes in the Ministry of Finance [since 2014], was pricked.
All indications are that the third Quarter of 2020-21 [October-December, 2020] will reveal negative trends in most parts of the GDP sectors. As of now, even as officials of NITI Aayog were to sing praises of how the government has turned around the Covid-19 caused decline, the combined index of eight core industries, published by another branch of government, revealed it to be minus 2.6% in November 2020, compared to November 2019, after having briefly recovered in July. Furthermore, during April to November 2020, the index has declined by minus 11.4%.
For MSME we have no data as yet. But no doubt the growth rate in this sector has much more sharply declined. Thus for industrial production as a whole, the annual 2020-21 industrial numbers will be a big minus, and not as predicted be on “green shoots” or a “V shaped curve” trajectory. I do not want to go repeating in these columns the miserable economic performance of the government, not only during the coronavirus pandemic, but since 2015-16.
But fortunately India or Bharat is destined to survive, as it has done so many times in the past. It is better for this author to addresses what we now need to do to prepare for this destiny.
India, that is Bharat, and also known as Hindustan, survived over 900+ years of ravage, waves of brutal foreign aggression and then imperialist brainwashing [remember “White Man’s Burden”?] and loot, as also fought off cruel debilitating intrusive religious conversions since 1192 AD, and finally became victorious in 1947. From 1757 to 1947, the Imperialists had siphoned off $71 trillion [today’s GDP is $2.6 million—see Reset authored by me and published by Rupa], to emerge as a democratic Republic of India in 1950.
Since then India has recovered substantially, has remained democratic, survived five wars, suppressed secessionist attempts, and has now emerged as the third most prosperous country [by GDP size] and second most populous nation in the world.
Today in 2021, India is at a turning point in history—whether or not it can emerge as an innovative global economic and military power, a population with a mental outlook, or alternatively, the mindset, that matches the requirements of this concomitant global role, in short as a Guru for the world as we were before the foreign invasions.
The answer is: India must. That is India’s destiny as seen by our sages such as Sri Aurobindo, Swami Vivekananda for the sake of global survival and stability in this 21st century.
Whether we will rise to this commitment will depend on the appropriate commensurate mindset development of our people. This now is more of a priority for focus, which in my view is within our grasp. This question is about how to structure the mindset development.
In a recent article in the weekly Organiser, the Sarsanghchalak of RSS, Dr Mohan Bhagwat gave us a seminal idea: That Bharat of the future must state the nation’s existential purpose as a nation, and prepare a Vision Document to chart a road map for attaining that purpose.
I agree totally. For too long, in different degrees of intensity, from Nehru to Modi, India was projected as having a single purpose of “vikas” or development. Never in the hoary past did our sages focus on a one dimensional concern with economic development. Of course India was the most developed country for centuries till 1750. What made India to be the accepted guru in many continents, especially Asia is our spiritual teachings. Dr Hu Shih, China’s great philosopher and President of Peking University delivered a speech titled “The Indianisation of China; A Case of Peaceful Borrowing” at Harvard University’s Tri-Centennial Celebration in 1936 [see my recent book: The Himalayan Challenge: India, China and the Quest for Peace; Rupa 2010].
But India is special not because of its past economic development, but for the development of the mind, for peace and tranquility, family, managing stress, multiple intelligence concepts, yoga, meditation, and placing the gyani and tyagi individuals about all others in the social hierarchy, as Lord Krishna tells Arjuna [see Bhagwad Gita]. Varna was based on gunas and not on birth. The Varna system was based on guna classification, but the system has now ossified and become birth based, which it never was. It needs to be discarded completely.
The fact today is that an overwhelming majority of India’s population is the Brihad Hindu community, consisting of Sanatana Dharmis, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs who together represent about 82.5% of the total Indian population.
India’s religious minorities are constituted by Muslims [13%] and Christians [2.5%] and some other small religious groups. Though Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs are also considered minorities, they are really so close to the majority community in culture and indigenous ancestry that they are considered as partners of Hindu society. The Indian Constitution, in Article 25, which covers a fundamental right of freedom of religion, defines Hindus, as inclusive of Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains.
Unlike Islam and Christianity, these other minority religions were born as dissenting theologies of Hinduism. They share the core concepts with Hindus such as re-incarnation, karma, equality of all religions, and ability to meet God in this life.
That presently these minorities feel somewhat alienated from core Hindu society nowadays is the consequence of India’s current identity crisis. It is this area that today we need to give more intellectual attention.
The purpose of India that is Bharat or Hindustan, needs an acceptable ideology that embodies the ethos of the Constitution, and seeks to end this ongoing current identity crisis and bring about a renaissance. The purpose of India is that a land of superficial diversity and basic unity is a nation of unity in diversity. Brihad Hinduism [including Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains] has that purpose and is unique to it. All other religions in theology believe in: “My way or the highway”.
The vision of this purpose lies in achieving a national renaissance in Indian mindset [which has been sullied and ossified by a 900-year foreign invasion and subversion trauma], in the articulation and propagation in an intellectually challenging way, focusing on achieving national unity, harmonizing diversity.
The vision has the following markers:
- THE CORRECT IDENTITY OF AN INDIAN: Indians, according to modern genetic research on DNA reveals that their ancestors are the same, thereby destructing the racial dividing Aryan Dravidian Theory or the race based Varna system. Indians are more than 99% genetically one family.
India’s Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras, Scheduled Castes and Tribals, all show a common genetic ancestry. The age of this yet-to-be-determined common parentage goes back, in India itself, to at least 9,000 years and possibly even earlier than 20,000 years ago, leaving no scientific genetic support for recent British Imperialist sponsored migration theories, including the concocted Aryan-Dravidian theory. Even the DNA of an occasional foreign parent over the centuries has been swamped by the subsequent generation by the dominant DNA of the native. Hence, the Indian in the present day and age has the same DNA irrespective of varna, region, religion, and language.
- INTEGRAL HUMANISM, THE THEORY OF HARMONISATION OF ECONOMIC ASPIRATION AND SPIRITUAL NEEDS: This economic ideology requires shifting our focus from purely materialistic theory of capitalism, socialism and communism to an integral view of material progress harmonized with spiritual values. Modern economic growth also is powered overwhelmingly (over 65% of GDP) by new innovation and techniques (e.g., internet). Capital and labour contribute less than 35% of growth in GDP.
This means we require a disciplined intellectual focus of the younger generation. Universities are greenhouses for our youth to find their roots and develop and flower their intelligence for pursuit of their chosen careers after graduation and to live a good family life in a vibrant democracy.
Unfortunately, the educational system we have today is the same as designed by Macaulay in 1835, with intention to produce civil servants and clerks for the British to rule over the Indian masses.
- SANSKRIT AS THE NATIONAL LINK LANGUAGE: In the centuries to come, it is Sanskrit that will be the most sensible link language for us Indians. There are two reasons for it. The first is that all Indian languages have a high proportion of words taken from Sanskrit. In the case of Bengali and Malayalam it may be 85 per cent, while in the case of Tamil it is at least 35 per cent (even in the DMK version of “pure” Tamil). Bengali is proudly referred to as the “daughter” of Sanskrit, but Tamil, which has a proud history of its own, thanks to the long unbroken reign of the Chola and Pandyan kingdoms, is thought of as the “sister” of Sanskrit since Tamil is almost as old as Sanskrit. For this reason, Sanskritized Hindi is easier to understand for the Southerners because of the substantial common vocabulary. Hence Sanskrit is ultimately the best national language for India.
Further, international research in today’s most advanced area of computers, namely, Artificial Intelligence, which is to revolutionize the knowledge systems of the 21st century, is now increasingly coming to the conclusion that Sanskrit is the best language to store knowledge in a computer. Dr Rick Briggs of the US National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), in an article in Journal of Artificial Intelligence (1968), titled “Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence” has held that: “In the past twenty years, much time, effort, money has been expended on designing an unambiguous representation of natural languages to make them accessible to computer processing…There is at least one language, Sanskrit…(in which) can be reckoned a method…that is identical not only in essence but in form with current work in Artificial Intelligence.”
A constructive ideology for India’s purpose is thus based on: (a) India’s Constitutional Framework (b) Modern imperatives & (c) re-interpreted and de-falsified Ancient Values Principles.
India, that is Bharat, is the name of the Indian Republic as per the Preamble in the Constitution. The term Indian, that is Bharatiya, thus signifies a citizen of the Republic of India, which as per Part II of the Constitution, in Articles 5 to11, defines the scope of Indian citizenship.