I am happy to be invited by the editor of Organiser to return to writing a column for Organiser. In 1970s I had written with " missionary" zeal in these columns about the Swadeshi Plan which was about self-reliance and not taking foreign aid, about achieving a 10 percent growth rate in the economy by giving up socialism, and the feasibility of acquiring nuclear weapons. These were radical ideas in those days that angered Mrs. Indira Gandhi and her KGB benefactors. She denounced me on the floor of Parliament and her Minister of Education ensured that not only I but my wife were both sacked from our professorships at the IIT, Delhi. Today, those radical ideas of the 1970s have become mainstream and I stand vindicated.
But the mission is incomplete, because India becoming a global economic power is not enough. To count internationally and get her due place in the world order, India must become thoroughly united with a virile mindset without self-doubt, and undergo a renaissance to cleanse the dirt and unwanted baggage acquired over the past thousand years. Otherwise foreign forces already alerted by India's recent economic successes and it's implications will leverage our internal weaknesses and self-doubt to derail the country. Look at the fate of Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Brazil, the shining hope of the 1960s. They are in one crisis after another today and in shambles. And East Asia, the much publicized "Tigers", had a blowout in 1997, and still to recover. Soviet Union is in 16 separate pieces, a happy development but a warning nonetheless. What happened to Yugoslavia ? It is in four warring pieces. It had happened to us earlier in the eighteeth and nineteenth centuries when we were balkanised. It can therefore happen again. Hence we need a new agenda for change to weld the Indian into one corporate mind and entity. This I shall expound in these columns.
Our nation is, in fact, at a cross roads of history today. To find our destiny and direction all Hindustanis with a patriotic mindset have to come together to combat a common unseen but alien enemy, and not to traverse again the unfortunate and tragic chapter of our past history when we helped the foreigner to get a grip on the nation in order to settle our own petty squabbles.
The last time we set aside our political and personal differences and came together was to fight the Emergency during 1975-77. Had we not done that, in particular Jayaprakash Narayan and Morarji Desai had not teamed up with the RSS, despite all their past differences, dictatorship would have prevailed and been legitimized through the ballot box in 1977. We came together and triumphed, and restored democracy. Even if that unity did not last long, the main task of restoring democracy was achieved and the nation saved.
Today, the challenge is much more formidable than it was ever in our history. More important the threat to our national integrity embedded in this challenge is not obvious or crude as was when Mohammed Ghori attacked or Robert Clive plundered the nation. These earlier challenges were single dimensionalat the physical conquest level. Today the challenge is highly sophisticated, multi-dimensional and deceptive.
What is happening today is a very subtle fragmentation of our national consciousness and an induced acquiesance in our outlook to condone or be impervious to whatever wrong is going on. There is, for example, no national will to enforce accountability on the leaders who make patently wrong decisions, which harm the nation. Or bring to book their lifestyle that is inconsistent with the national spiritual ethos.
This state of affairs has come about steadily through one wrong decision after another over the years and a weak mindset of the intelligentsia to tolerate it or explain it away. The first of such decisions with disastrous long term consequences was in 1947, when Nehru decided to go to the UN Security Council on Kashmir which had become by then a part of India in legally iron clad way. The Instrument of Accession had been signed by the Maharaja acceding Kashmir to India. He was legally empowered to do so by the Indian Independence Act passed in June 1947 by the British Parliament, which Act carved out a new nation of Pakistan out of undivided India. That Act also empowered the Princely States to accede to India or Pakistan without requiring to ascertain the wishes of the people. There is no dispute about the legality of the Instrument of Accession, and yet Nehru without obtaining his Cabinet's consent declared that the wishes of the Kashmiri people would be ascertained. By going to the UN, Nehru made Pakistan a party when it could never be legally so. Ironically, if Pakistan questions the validity of the Instrument of Accession then it questions it's own legal existence since both draw their legitimacy from the same legislationthe Indian Independence Act of 1947. If Kashmir is of disputed status then so will be Pakistan itself. Either both or neither ! What Nehru did, for his personal image in the West, or perhaps to please Edwina Moutbatten, was to weaken the national resolve to cherish the hoary concept of Bharatvarsh, the geographical integrity of Hindustan from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. Since then it has been easy to rationalize writing off bits of India, continuously to amputate Mother India, from Aksai Chin, to Northeast to even returning reclaimed Indian territory such as in Hajipir(1965) and Chicken Neck(1972) and now, as Prof. Nalapat writes, soon in Siachen and Sir Creek. Yet Nehru has not been held accountable by succeeding generations. Some even take pride in being known as Nehruvian even today, when he should be despised much as Neville Chamberlain is in Britain.
Then the nation was railroaded into adopting the Soviet economic model on the ground that, as Communists and their fellow travelers in India propagated, there was no inflation, no poverty, and no unemployment in the Soviet Union. The reality today is that there no Soviet Union ! The Soviet model weakened the Indian economy, set us back, and introduced corruption in India as a way of life. This has made us vulnerable again to the foreigner. How that happened I shall deal with in my next column.
(Dr. SUbramanian Swamy)
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Source: Janataparty
