Earning our greatness is a work in progress

As the New Year is about to draw in, it is worthwhile to recall that India, which is in the league of countries thirsting to restore their lost greatness, is still a work in progress.

Greatness is the new spirit of the age. In fact, aspiration to greatness is a trait that runs common with almost all great leaders. Somehow, the nationalist phrase coined way back in 1858 by the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke with the motto ‘The Fatherland before everything else’ is staging a comeback.

As the New Year is about to draw in, it is worthwhile to recall that India, which is in the league of countries thirsting to restore their lost greatness, which envisions an ‘Amrit Kaal’ of a prosperous and inclusive India, in which the fruits of development reach all regions and citizens, “especially our youth, women, farmers, OBCs, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes” is still a work in progress.

The recent example of vending ‘greatness’ as a national policy goal came from America. Donald Trump came back with a promise to make America great again. He seemed to have appealed to a majority of the Americans who feel that the game is rigged against them and put the blame on the foreigners, immigrants, and minority groups for the society’s problems. Almost every leader harks back to an imagined notion of greatness and holds perceived enemies as responsible for the downfall of the nation he or she represents.

We had a sample of his recipe for American ‘greatness’ when Trump turned out to be the first major candidate to challenge the post-1945 consensus on the liberal international order. He suggested NATO obsolete and in 2016, defended his assertion that more countries, such as Japan, South Korea or even Saudi Arabia, may need to develop nuclear weapons. Given Trump’s flair for manufacturing, his position also bodes ill for those battling climate change.

If Trump is instrumental to reconfigure America’s role in the world, Putin wants a reinvigorated Russia to become once again the arbiter of Europe’s fate and central to the international scene as during the Cold War era. Xi Jinping seeks to regain China’s pre-eminence in the Asia-Pacific and plan realistically on becoming the dominant power by 2049. Erdogan’s desire is to make Turkey the Islamic pivot in international politics.

The problem begins when the aspiration to restoration of some ‘lost’ greatness becomes a war of attrition. Let’s take the example of China. When Britain declared the First Opium War on China in 1839, it sealed the fate of what had been, for centuries, the wealthiest and most powerful empire in the world and set in motion the fall of the Qing dynasty which, in turn, would lead to the rise of nationalism and communism in the 20th century. Contemporary China claims to be the heir to a 5,000-year-old continuous civilisation.

India is long called a ‘wounded’ civilisation. The Indian defeat at Plassey in 1757 is similar in some respects to the Chinese defeat in the Opium War, in view of that they both were considered ‘low-key’ English victories over ancient and proud civilisations. Yet both set in motion a chain reaction of events that opened the ancient lands to a long period of foreign subjugation and bloody conflict.

Shashi Tharoor in his book Inglorious Empire has to say that the “plunder” of Indian wealth by East India Company officers like Robert Clive set in motion a culture of looting that continued via unequal trade and general extraction in the 19th century, accounting for six-fold decrease of India’s share of the world economy by 1947 which was as large as Europe’s in the 18th century.

Dichotomy of wealth, poverty

At the end of the 16th century, India’s wealth sustained more than a hundred million people during the Mughal Empire. Interestingly, the claim that India was great until British repression made it poor is suspiciously similar to the claim Hindu nationalists make today – that India was great until Islamic repression from roughly the 13th century impoverished it. If the Mughal rule did not solve the riddle why, despite the economy producing a fabulous financial surplus and the country being prosperous, the people were poor, we might ask as well why people are poor even as India is poised to be the third largest global economy by 2030.

If the British laid a country-wide railway network to loot us, our governments have failed to give us a world class public transport system either. India ranks among the rare group of nations where it had an economy growing so fast for so long with such limited results in terms of reducing human deprivations. The general state of public services in India remains absolutely dismal, and the country’s health and education systems, in particular, have remained highly privatised and compartmentalised. Around 53% of all of the salaried workforce does not have any social security benefits in India, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey Annual Report 2021-22.

The world’s most populous country is poised to become the third largest economy by 2028. But the size of our population and a sense of historical greatness alone are insufficient to guarantee us a global power stature in view of the fact that with a higher poverty standard of $6.85 (about Rs 576) per day – the poverty threshold for middle-income countries – more Indians are living below the poverty line in 2024 than in 1990, primarily driven by ‘population growth’. Despite its population, India lags far behind China in its pool of human skills. The question of growing economic inequalities is leading to more justification of corporate capitalism, while the anxiety and anger of a declining economic standard of living are widening into larger pockets of social unrest. Nearly 80% of jobs in India are in the informal sector. The number of unemployed is increasing by a few million every year, and so is inequality.

Our Prime Minister talks of bullet trains and smart cities and claims the scientific knowledge in Vedas as a symbol of the greatness of Hindu civilisation alongside India’s diplomatic and military prowess. However, he is surely aware that many of the fundamentals are still unattended, or poorly redressed. We are not there yet.

(The writer is a Kolkata-based commentator on geopolitics, development, and culture)