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.
