On the Branding of Swadeshi

India's economy is in crisis. Inflation has raised its ugly head. Even our huge new middle class is in trouble. The poor may sink completely. Our greatest immediate difficulty is that those most essential of commodities - staple foods and fuel - are seeing the fastest rising rates.

At the same time, complexity takes hold of our economic, political, religious, and cultural fronts. Yet we are being sold a strange brew of oversimplifications. It's the cost of development, they say; or, reform is always painful and so costly to implement...

There is a deliberate bid to reduce the political fallout by confusing the issues. Great and somewhat relentless forces have silently been unleashed in our nation. Though we can see the evil clearly in our neighbors' experiences, we are blinded to our own inability to see ourselves as we really are.

Strategically and with global implications, the restoration of democracy in Pakistan, the sidelining of 'Mushy' Musharraf, and the now more hidden face of the military oligarchy there, coupled with the fallout of the 'war on terror' on Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, has led the US, Britain, and the EU to seek much closer ties with India.

We see the rise of the West in India most clearly in the fields of defense and retail. More subtle signs include the red carpet welcome to Western based MNCs, as well as a deliberate (but silent) turning away from the independence theme of Swadeshi that formed the economic backbone of Mahatma Gandhi's freedom movement.

It is not just one Indian national party that has changed their tune to welcome the latest trend to global capitalistic hegemony. Both our leading political blocks - the Congress led UPA, and the BJP led NDA, are openly shedding nonalignment for Western goodies.

Just a couple of small examples show how far we have come since our 'non-aligned' days of standing tall for freedom. On the one hand our politicians try to convince us that our economic and defense needs dictate our strengthening trade with the West and even with Israel. On the other hand, we are not willing to accept desperately needed gas from Iran. Iran's policy of seeking nuclear self-sufficiency (as we too had done) apparently now offends our Realpolitik and the necessity of pandering to the American foreign policy. We feel safer as American dependents - now how strange is that?.

I think the biggest blind spot that we have is our fear of China. There is no logic to this fear. Any rational analysis would show that closer ties between these two economies promise huge benefits for both sides. It is an economic alliance that the West justly fears. All sorts of pressure has been brought on our politicos to increase the alienation, and our brave leaders have succumbed. There is no logic, but after all an immediate need in the depths of their pockets.

No similar 'pots of gold' await any deal with Iran. While our nation may benefit immensely from the low cost of sorely needed Iranian gas, and we continue to surreptitiously buy Iran's oil, this pales in comparison to the loss of secret revenues from those neoglobalists who want to call the shots for us.

As Mahatma Gandhi knew, when there is no Swadesh there can be no Swaraj. Yet we no longer care for the Mahatma's advice.

Swadeshi is also prominently missing in agriculture. The obvious result is that while the prices of basic foods skyrocket, the traditional farmer gets poorer and poorer. Those that benefit directly, and immensely, are the stockists and 'middle men' - now a misnomer in itself for this niche has been fully occupied by MNC minions. It almost seems as though our political bosses are aching to replace the myriad millions of traditional farmers with mega farms controlled by a few choice corporate houses.

The new breed of MNC linked trading house can stock (it used to be called 'hoard') and therefore exercise empty 'value addition' with impunity. They sell at self-created demand peaks in connivance with a government that will authorize exports of commodities that are in short supply. The obfuscation is most clearly visible when the government blames 'global' factors including that wonderful commodity, crude oil. The recent global spike up in the prices of commodities should actually have absolutely no impact on domestic prices when our own agricultural production is more than self sufficient! The same goes for cooking oil where retail prices at one stage rose by more than 50% over just a six month period!

Meanwhile, the farmers starve, fail to pay their debts, and commit suicide. We face a drought this year with the failure of the SW monsoons. And on the sidelines await the ever-eager property speculators, who are just waiting to pick up excellent farmland at distress sale prices, to hand over to the cash-rich agri-corps, who are also circling hungrily above. Once the carcass has been picked clean, we Indians who earn only a tenth of what the West averages, will yet pay the full 'global' price at par for our own commodities. Paying such a price to our existing farmers seems not to be an option. No, we will wait for the corporates to make the killing!

As Gandhiji remarked so many years ago, "Swadeshi is that spirit in us which requires us to serve our immediate neighbours before others, and to use things produced in our neighbourhood in preference to those more remote. So doing, we serve humanity to the best of our capacity. We cannot serve humanity by neglecting our neighbours"

And further and more pointedly, Swadeshi is "a call to the consumer to be aware of the violence he is causing by supporting those industries that result in poverty, harm to workers and to humans and other creatures"

The  maha atma Gandhiji came, and he did more than his bit to rescue us from our coils of slavery. There is no sense in yearning for him to come again. The only ones who can save us from our (oh so 'Gandhian') politicians, are ourselves. Right now we have only ourselves to blame for not calling our politicians to account. It is high time for our youth to rise and discover the true power of the ballot, voting for persons who are not so bent on first taking care of lining their own pockets. But that is only the beginning.

We must find ways to hold our politicos to account, to demand that they lead well and honestly, and to demand that they have a vision for humanity, for the India that can be built up by a committed and caring India.

FARMING CONCRETE - India at 50/50

We, the people of India, always seem to be at the crossroads.

For a country that is thought to be developing fast, a lot of the time we are quite uncertain as to our direction, and even more confused about our ultimate destination. Instead we are very busy doing what Yogi Berra once advised : "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."



Everyone seems to silently assume that our goal in 'development' is to become a clone of 'developed' economies as much like the U.S. or Britain, or Japan, and to transform into this heavenly vision just as soon as possible.

Having traditionally been socialist in spirit but officially non-aligned, India has largely come out of 'the socialist trap', and now appears to be leaning towards a capitalist, 'free market' economy, somewhat to the delight of those who like possessing, and using, Capital. Or, so goes the assumption at present, but do we really wish to become 'more developed' in this limited and warped sense?

What are we turning ourselves into? What are we to become? We have indeed emerged, but to what? At present we Indians seems to me to be in the grip of a particularly thick fog. We are incapable of seeing our own noses, let alone tackling any bigger questions. And one of the biggest questions revolves around what we are going to do with agriculture.

Here is today's biggest fork in the Indian Road: 50% (yes, one half) of India's 1.1 billion population is now urban. The growing urbanisation of rural populations is driven by the death of small farming as a viable way to make a living. As making a livelihood out of farming becomes less attractive to families and (by design) much more attractive to corporates, the trend will be that smaller farms will be abandoned to be consolidated by larger, capital rich, corporates who will then complete the mechanisation of agriculture (in the name of efficiency) and try to completely eliminate rural labour.

What are we going to do to employ the up-coming flood of ex-farmers? The number of farmer suicides is growing (though we seem to hardly notice) by leaps and bounds every year. Do we just let them quietly continue to commit suicide? What a convenient solution...

The problem of course, is more general than just agriculture. In a comment on a previous post, Mahil had alluded to the increasing drive for specialisation in our developing world. As the machine, aided by intelligent computerised control, takes over both production and process, where will human-performed jobs come from? From a different angle, another tough question to answer now is : How will our nation's wealth eventually be distributed? Do justice, and fairness, and honesty, and openness have a say in our direction into the future?

Admittedly, our problems in India are not small ones. With a population of well over a billion people, somewhat scarce natural resources, limitations on arable land, and weather that always seems intent on either starving us with drought or starving us with deluges, it's perhaps not surprising that we seem fixated on wondering mostly about the when and the where of the next meal.

The pundits tell us that now, security is the name of the game. Do you own a house? Have you financially planned for your children's educations, and more worryingly, their marriages? have you got a couple of credit cards? Are you keeping up with the Krishnans?

The idea of planning, beyond the matter of the family's survival, is not something that includes our neighbors, our rural cousins and our nation at large.

Being shortsighted produces a situation that is rife for those who do have longer term agendas to quietly set their plans in train. Our politicians seem sometimes to be hand-in-glove and sometimes (rarely) simply dupes. Eventually, when the truth of massive sell offs does emerge, all will perhaps claim to have been too easily fooled! This is not in any sense a 'conspiracy theory'. I refuse to believe that folks that are so good at ingeniously lining their own pockets are as dumb as they wish us to believe on the questions of development and overall direction.

In theory, we have something called a 'planning commission'. The only problem is that this too is a 'socialist' leftover and as such this commission now does little of substance. The current head is someone who explicitly believes in deregulating everything. The resultant "Five Year Plans" have become manifestos of what to dismantle first, and of how fast the markets can be 'liberated'.

Our politicians are just as intent on survival (in the narrowest sense) as anyone else, but they are far-sighted enough to ensure that their monetary genealogies will survive for at least a few generations of their own profligate progenies.

In other words, motive and opportunity are known to be present in all developing economies. These are the ingredients of economic murder. Our economic c(r)ooks are particularly intent on making them coincident TODAY in India.

So, what are we going to do about it? Are we prepared to continue to be myopically concerned with our own little selves? Are you prepared to let your child's nation's future be quietly sold off to the highest
bidder?


Thanks to http://www.jillandjohn.net.nz for the lovely pics from Tibet