Getting ready for a global role
India has never been a threat to any nation. At the same time,
it cannot be threatened by any nation.
By Atal Bihari Vajpayee

For a nation as ancient as India, where change never took place without yielding to continuity, how can one capture its change in any time segment without committing the error of inexactitude?

One hesitates to use the phrase "India's transformation" with any temporal point of reference. For a nation as ancient as India, where change never took place without yielding to continuity, how can one capture its change in any time segment without committing the error of inexactitude? At any point of beginning, so many older developments are still in forward flow. Similarly, at any chosen terminal point, several newborn currents are still in formative shape. The flow of a nation's life cannot be dammed by erecting artificial walls in time, except to understand the meaning and main lessons of the changes in a given period.

The nearly six decades of India's Independence can be divided in two parts, with the interregnum of 1975-77 as a point of separation. 1947 was an epochal turning point in our nation's history because it marked India's passage from colonial rule to freedom and redefined India's geopolitical identity. It taught us, as a nation, the lesson of valuing our freedom and safeguarding it at all costs. It made us aware of the challenges to our unity and integrity. And it placed on us the responsibility of shaping India's development in the modern world on the basis of self-reliance and guided by India's own civilisational genius. Looking back at the first 30 years after Independence, on balance, one can be satisfied by India's achievements. The Constitution we adopted then has stood the test of time. And the gleeful prediction by some among our former colonial masters that an India of such immense and apparently conflicting diversities would fall apart soon after the disappearance of the glue provided by foreign rule has now become a forgotten footnote in history.

Planned and state-directed economic development is the one area where, in hindsight, India's performance in the first 30 years looks less than satisfactory. In my view, the policy of mixed economy for the newly freed nation was sound. Had our then rulers maintained the right balance between the public and private sectors, and steadily enlarged the latter's scope of activities, India's growth would have been faster and more broad-based. Sadly, the balance was disturbed under the externally borrowed politico-ideological influence of communism. After the mid-1960s, policy distortions became more pronounced since they were now guided by the internal power struggle in the ruling Congress party, culminating in the imposition of the Emergency in 1975.

Understanding this background is essential for a proper appreciation of India's transformation in the subsequent 30 years. By far the biggest lesson of these three decades was learnt pretty early in the form of the struggle against the Emergency. The fact that the campaign against the Emergency was largely peaceful and that even this infringement of democracy could be corrected through democratic means in the general elections in 1977 was a decisive victory for the system of governance we chose in 1950. In spite of the failure of the Janata Party experiment, 1977 made the common Indian aware of the power of the ballot. On the other hand, it made political leaders with despotic tendencies aware of the limits of their power. It also augmented India's stature in the international community enormously. Without sounding immodest and without exaggerating the point, I would say that the peaceful triumph of democracy in India had its own quiet influence a decade later on the successful march of democracy in the erstwhile Soviet Union and eastern Europe.

In order to realise the superiority of the democratic path, all one needs to do is survey the turmoil and tribulations in several nations around the world, including in our own neighbourhood, where change was sought through violent capture of power. In recent years, the activities of Naxalite and other extremist forces sound a warning bell for India's future. These forces, which have no faith in the power of the ballot, not only endanger India's democracy, harm India's socio-economic growth, condemning the poor and backward areas in which they mainly operate to continued poverty, and imperil India's unity and integrity, but also their ideologies and actions pose a threat to everything we value in India's cultural and spiritual heritage. Political parties and governments must sink their differences in evolving a united and comprehensive strategy to neutralise this peril.

If 1977 applied the democratic corrective to authoritarianism, the reforms initiated in the early '90s applied the policy corrective to the growth-hindering licence-permit-quota raj of the previous decades. The broad consensus on the reforms agenda, which has now been forged among all major political parties in India, augurs well for India's future. Its fruits can be seen in several economic indicators. On an average, the GDP rate has more than doubled during the past decade. Infrastructural bottlenecks that obstructed growth in the previous years are being removed. Several sectors of the Indian economy, such as it, telecom, pharmaceuticals and automobiles, have become world class. Recent years have seen a surge in India's entrepreneurial energy.

Yet, though our growth rate has gone up, it has not reduced social and regional imbalances in development adequately. It has not yet provided to crores of our SC, ST and OBC brethren their rightful share in the nation's development. It has not sufficiently addressed the problems and needs of agriculture and small-scale industries. It has not yet provided gainful employment to millions of Indians. Our villagers need better roads, accessible and affordable healthcare and better educational opportunities for their children. If this need for development is not quenched soon, it could create problems for our democracy and governance.

The days of one-party rule have long been over, and there is little possibility of their return in the near future. Coalitions are the order of the day. When we were in power at the Centre, we proved that coalition governance can be both stable and result-oriented. I believe too much is made of the secularism-communalism divide. It is coming in the way of development of our democracy. India is a multi-faith nation, where freedom of faith is safeguarded by our age-old secular traditions. Our diversities are a source of strength, not weakness, for national unity. The more we develop the culture of taking every section of society on the path of cooperative development, greater will be our internal strength and international stature. India has never been and will never be a threat to any nation. At the same time, India cannot be threatened by any nation.

Now that independent India has completed two eras of nearly 30 years each, the stage is set for a future journey of fresh possibilities. We must keep in mind that the world around us too has changed in a big way. The end of the Cold War has been a major external transformation in the past 30 years. The shape of the new world order is not yet sharply visible. But few can deny that India is going to be a major- and benign-player in the coming decades. Perhaps for the first time after over a millennium, India will have an opportunity to contribute significantly to global developments in the service of peace, democracy, global brotherhood and mankind's integral development. We must get ready to play this global role by effectively dealing with all the challenges at home through peaceful and democratic means.

(The writer is a former Prime Minister of India.)