Ashis Nandy on future of India.

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Ashis Nandy on future of India: 'A poor man’s America, with shrinkage of liberties'

http://www.firstpost.com/living/ashis-nandy-on-future-of-india-a-poor-mans-america-with-shrinkage-of-liberties-3088894.html

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Many things have changed drastically in recent years....’ What do these changes presage for India’s future?”

First of all, India no longer has a vision of its own. Its vision is the vision of many developing societies around the world. It is a homogenised, predictable future which has been sold to us as a universal cure for poverty, indignity and backwardness in general. In other words, our own futures have been stolen

Our futures have been stolen because we have forfeited other possibilities of imagining our future. We have embraced what others too have – a universal model of development but for minor tinkering here and there. China may have an efficient work culture than, say, India’s, but the missions of both countries are essentially the same. It is same because their visions are same.

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Our hero is (Singapore’s first prime minister) Lee Kuan Yew. He’s so popular that one is afraid of saying he was one of the last despots, the last votary of “developmental authoritarianism”. Take the East Asian Tigers. I have arg­ued that they were not only tigers but also man-eaters. All of them had despotic regimes. If you want spectacular development, then be prepared for a high degree of authoritarianism.

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Mind you, this (urban-industrial vision) was not the creation of the Bharatiya Janata Party. India had already changed before it came to power?” Perhaps the BJP’s rise is a result of India having changed? He agreed, “That’s right. They can deliver the urban-industrial vision more ruthlessly, or at least seem to do so.

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So true.

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About Savarkar, Nandy said to me, “He did not believe in anything (religious). He refused to give a Hindu funeral to his own wife and said that there was nothing sacred about the cow. He also made fun of (RSS’s second sarsanghchalak) Golwalkar’s fondness for rituals.  Savarkar is the real father of the emerging India. Gandhi (a believer) is now the stepfather.”

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This part is the most brilliant. 

 

With all the destabilising changes occurring in India, what would it be like in 2100? With the certitude of one who had seen and studied India’s past, Nandy, who will turn 80 next year, said, “India will be more like an American slum to the nth degree, a poor man’s America. Even to become that, we will have to pay a price in terms of shrinkage of our liberties.”

In this quest to become a poor man’s America, we could go the whole hog, banishing tribals to reserves, as Americans have indigenous Indians. Nandy thought India will go a step further: “Actually, wherever they are not concentrated in numbers, as in Nagaland and Mizoram, we will just finish them off. One-third of all tribes in India are tribes only by name. They have been dispersed, atomised, and individualised. They have joined the proletariat.”

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Could such an India be happy in 2050? (Happiness is the title of one of Nandy’s essays.) “It will be demanded of them to not be unhappy,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “There will be a public demand to be happy. So if you are unhappy, you become a traitor…or a class enemy, as it happened in the Soviet Union. Unhappy people there were sent to psychiatrists.”

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in short, mob rule.