50th
Anniversary of India's Independence
on August 14th--a Balance Sheet
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON-- By what yardstick does India wish to be measured
as it celebrates this week (along with Pakistan) the 50th
anniversary of independence as a sovereign country?
As the world's largest functioning democracy it has
clearly achieved renown and every day by example it lays low
the lie that China is too big to be ruled any other way than
by dictatorship. As a military power it has an unshakable
superiority over all its neighbors, save China. And if
India's rulers remain wise, as they have been since prime
minister Jawaharlal Nehru's tragic mistake, not long after
independence, to go to war with China over an unimportant
peace of Himalayan real estate, that power equation need
never again be put to the test. Moreover, with Pakistan, its
estranged twin, at long last under civilian rule that is
both democratic and sensible, now is the time to solve the
Kashmir dispute and to forge a peace agreement that will
commit both sides to rapid nuclear disarmament.
But the most important day-to-day yardstick of
achievement is economic. Is India capable of becoming an
economic superpower of the twenty-first century?
Like China it has all the potential, perhaps even a surer
one because its legal and civic institutions are far better
formed. The record of its first 50 years is impressive, yet
at the same time flawed in one crucial aspect--its failure
to lift its poor majority far enough off the floor so that
they have hope of a decent future.
Nehru described India under British rule as "a servile
state with its splendid strength caged up, hardly daring to
breathe freely, governed by strangers from afar, her people
poor beyond compare, short lived and incapable of resisting
disease and epidemic." Sworn in as India's first prime
minister in August, 1947, he called for "the ending of
poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of
opportunity." The man who won independence for India and
Pakistan with his non-violent campaigns of passive
resistance, Mohandas Gandhi, said then that India would
"only truly become independent when its poorest were free of
human suffering and poverty."
E.M. Forster, the celebrated author of the great colonial
novel, "Passage to India," described the country as
"swelling here, shrinking there, like some low, but
indestructible form of life." But a look at recently
published facts and figures in the United Nations Human
Development Report suggests that, despite the magnitude of
today's problems, the late Mr. Forster wouldn't recognize
the India of today:
* Food and Nutrition: Between 1951 and 1995 food grain
production increased four fold and famines, once a recurrent
plague of Biblical proportions, have been virtually
eliminated.
* Education: Between 1961 and 1991 literacy more than
doubled.
* Health: Between 1961 and 1992 life expectancy doubled
to 61 years and infant mortality was more than halved.
* Safe water: More than 90% of the population now have
access to safe drinking water.
* Income poverty: Rural poverty has declined from 51% of
the population in 1977 to 39% in 1993 and urban poverty from
40% to 30%.
For a continent getting round for a billion people such
progress ends up affecting a big slice of humanity. Still,
the poverty remains deep, the early vision unrealized and
the future uncertain. 53% of children under the age of
four--60 million of them--are undernourished. 61% of females
over the age of seven are illiterate. Each year there are
over 2 million infant deaths, most of them avoidable.
India's future hangs partly on its economics and partly
on its politics. While no one believes that India will
return to the dark, Fabian days of its "Hindu growth rate,"
a mere 1.2% annual growth, that marked its first three
decades of independence, the question now is can it
liberalize further so that it can up its present 6% or 7% to
8% or 9% a year? Even now India is one of the top three
countries of the world, only beaten by China and the U.S.,
in a new index, devised by the World Economic Forum, that
combines growth prospects with economic size. The game for
the next twenty-five years is to seize China's second
place.
The politics, however, will determine whether the poor
will share in this golden future. Part of India has already
shown what can be done. Four states, Andhra Pradesh,
Maryana, Kerala and Punjab in recent years have reduced
their income poverty by an astonishing 50%. If all of India
had Kerala's birth and child death rates there would be 1.5
million fewer infant deaths each year and a quite dramatic
reduction in population growth.
India, tomorrow's could-be giant, has to decide its
future. Wise decisions could insure a stunning success that
would leave China envious and America open-mouthed. But a
lack of confidence in the political arena, leading to
botched economic and social decisions and to increased
tension, war, with Pakistan, would throw this promise to the
wind.
August 13, 1997,
LONDON
Copyright © 1997 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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