India celebrated the 70th anniversary of its independence from Britain on the 15th instant. Its independence in 1947 was a remarkable event that reverberated in all of the colonies of the British Empire, including then British Guiana – on which “the sun never sat”. Independence for India confirmed that it was only a matter of “when” for the colonies to also be free.
India has since continued to play a key leadership role for the other colonies. Initially, it attempted to chart a middle path between the two competing ideologies of capitalism and communism – represented respectively by the US and the USSR. In 1955, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru organised an Asian-African conference at Bandung, Indonesia, which brought together more than half of the world’s population to declare their opposition to colonialism and neo-colonialism. Later, with the leaders of Ghana, Egypt, Yugoslavia, and Indonesia, he helped launch the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which unfortunately was seen as taking a side by NOT taking a side.
India attempted to steer a middle course, both politically and economically, by combining elements of the two dominant ideologies, but this did not lead to the levels of development needed to pull it out of the morass one hundred and fifty years of British colonialism had mired it in. India inevitably became an exemplar of the consequences of what was called “underdevelopment” in the seventies. This process can be illustrated by the history of the cotton industry of India.
In 1700, India was supplying up to 90% of the cotton fabrics in world trade. By the end of the 18th century, however, after the conquest of India, most of the manufacturing of the fabric was transferred to England, and, within two decades, Britain became the top exporter and India’s share fell to 20%. The British banned the importation of textile looms and other machinery into India, and the latter was stuck with producing cotton and importing fabrics from England. To rub salt into the wound, the cultivation of cotton was encouraged in the US, which soon surpassed India as the top producer of this crop. Those parts of India where the cotton industry was destroyed — UP and Bihar — today still remain the most poverty-stricken parts of India.
But the underdevelopment of India was replicated in every tropical colony, where the countries were directed to produce raw materials to be manufactured – and most pertinently – “value added” in the colonial metropole. For instance, Guyana still produces cheap raw sugar that has to be exported to England to be refined into expensive white sugar, which is sold to consumers.
But India still remains a model for the former British colonies – and other underdeveloped countries.
Through all its travails, India has remained a democratic country. Today it is the largest in the world, even though may in the “First World” had predicted this was not possible in the face of the magnitude of challenges presented to the leadership. However, India has now become a beacon in another area: not the simplistic promulgation of a “middle path” consisting of a melange of the competing foreign ideologies, as in the sixties, but in starting to forge its own path based on its own ancient traditions – modified, where appropriate, by new proven advances.
This is what has been signalled by India’s new and dynamic Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, and his party, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), which has comprehensively replaced the Congress Party across India. The point the former are making is that with the fall of communism and the present ruptures in capitalism, what is needed is a paradigm of development that takes into cognisance the strengths of each polity and nation. Development cannot ignore the culture of each nation: it must be autochthonous.
This is something that Guyana also needs to do. In the first two decades, it tried socialism. That failed, and in the last two decades it tried neo-liberalism, which also foundered.
