Neither does Rahul Gandhi have any ideas of his own on how to lead India into the future nor does he have any understanding of the country's glorious past. His speech at the CII was proof enough
Can a leader, suffering from an embarrassing disconnect with the country’s glorious past, lead it to realise its full potentialIJ Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi’s speech at a recent Confederation of Indian Industry meet only confirmed what most Indians always suspected: That the Gandhi scion’s understanding of India is shallow and his opinions are based on borrowed ideas. Even the Congress was embarrassed by Mr Gandhi’s failures and mistakes at the CII meet. Nothing else explains why it edited out several portions of his speech in the version that was posted online.
For example, Mr Gandhi said: “They used to look at India and say, boss, the Hindu rate of growth! They have been saying this for 3,000 years. Now the Hindu rate of growth has become the European rate of growth.” The Congress vice president had borrowed the pejorative phrase ‘Hindu rate of growth’ from Raj Krishna, who first used it to describe India’s dismal 2.5 to 3.5 per cent growth rate in the decades after independence, thanks to the country’s centralised socialist economic model. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the socialist model lost its legitimacy. Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao junked the Nehruvian mindset and with that ended the ‘Hindu rate of growth’. The rest, as they say, is history.
Ideally, Mr Gandhi should have compared India’s dismal economic performance in recent years with the country’s pre-colonial past when it was a global leader. After all, there was a time when scholars and travellers from around the globe came to India to learn and admire its wealth and richness. The world has already acknowledged the contribution of Hindu India to fields as diverse as mathematics, science, astronomy and botany.
Similarly, the concept of ‘zero’ and the decimal system introduced by Aryabhatta and the pioneering contribution of others like Varahamihira solved key mathematical problems. As one can see from the Roman numerals, it was a cumbersome line-up of numbers till the Indian system came into vogue. The Arab traders learnt the Hindu system and modified it. The Europeans learned it from the Arabs through their trade relations and then called it the Arabic numerals. The system was in place far before that, as can be seen from the numerals used in hundreds of ancient Hindu texts.
The picture of India as a semi-barbaric nation where babies were thrown into the river as sacrifice, was created by European colonisers and missionaries to justify their occupation of the Eastern countries through subterfuge. And then they bled India white through administrative and economic measures that destroyed local industry at a time when the economy worked through village-based self-sufficient institutions.
Volumes have been written by various foreign historians about the prosperity and abundance of ancient India right up to the middle of the 18th century. Paul Bairoch, a Belgian economist, in his well acknowledged study proved that in 1750 India’s share of world GDP was 24.5 per cent, China’s 33 per cent and the combined share of Britain and the US just two per cent. Angus Maddisson, a great economic historian, later confirmed Bairoch’s study. He further said that India was a leading economic power till 1700. India had 32 per cent share of world’s GDP in the first 1,000 years and 28 per cent in the second millennium till 1700.
It’s a settled fact that poverty came to India because of colonial rule. Systematic destruction of the Indian economy was resorted to, so that wealth could be transferred from India to the West. Before colonial rule came, there was centuries of looting by Islamic invaders. But even though they took back to Central Asia and Persia much wealth from India and even destroyed institutions of great learning like Nalanda, they could not suffocate the Hindu economy.
Against this background, it is regrettable that someone who is projected by the Congress as the crown prince of the party, should be so ignorant as to speak of a “Hindu rate of growth for 3,000 years”. Moreover, the prince also seemed to have ignored the fact that his use of that phrase was tantamount to condemning his own party’s socialist legacy between 1947 and 1977, and then between 1980 and 1989, when Soviet-style socialism governed Congress- thinking, and the country suffered the same type of scarcities as people did in the erstwhile Soviet Union.
That crass ignorance was also evident when he referred to the Rani of Jhansi while recalling his visit to Jhansi. He sought to play down the heroic role that she played in what was the first organised attack on British imperialism. The Congress was so embarrassed by this gaffe that it removed this part of the speech from the video it posed online.
Congressmen may claim that each of these mistakes was a mere instance of a slip of the tongue. But how could they hide the naivete of their leader which the latter laid bare, when he pleaded for a change in the system from the Pradhan Mantri to the village pradhanIJ Essentially, Mr Gandhi was promoting the decentralised system of governance that prevailed in India before colonial rule destroyed it. However, instead of referring to Mahatma Gandhi for empowering local Governments, he made much of the Constitutional Amendment that his father Rajiv Gandhi had brought about to confer power on panchayat heads.
The simplistic rhetoric that Mr Gandhi spouted about taking the people’s voice to the Centre of power was really a condemnation of his own party’s policies. He should ask himself how and when the Congress changed from being a vigorous mass movement under Mahatma Gandhi to the family heirloom that it is today. Also, if Mr Gandhi is talking about decentralisation when he himself derives legitimacy from dynastic heritage (or “political DNA”, as he mentioned), then it poses the question whether he was condemning his own heritage or merely playing to a gallery consisting of a new generation of young people, that now dominates the electorate.
And that is not all. The Congress scion also wants exponential growth, not the incremental growth that India has registered so far. But surely he is aware that in the last nine years that his party has been in power, India’s national growth rate has dropped from nine per cent to five per cent. In this context, his praise for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, under whose leadership growth came down from ‘incremental’ to in effect ‘negative’ (when 10 per cent inflation is taken into account), is just absurd.
Ultimately, Mr Gandhi’s much hyped speech proved to be just another well-rehearsed show, liberally laced with borrowed sound expressions. Also, he pointed to Mr Sam Pitroda several times, revealing the man who is quite possibly responsible for all the fancy phrases he used like “exponential growth”, “Pradhan’s voice” and “out-of-the-box thinking”. A leadership that is divorced from the past and merely mouths borrowed phrases, holds little hope for the country.