Mahatma Gandhi was a great believer in the power of the people. The strength of Indian society for Gandhi was found in its most humble members. His utopian vision of India was of a nation of self-sufficient villages of equitable citizens governed by India's native political body, the village Panchayat. Surprisingly, as India rushes to embrace a consumer culture, Gandhi's notions of a politics of inclusion and of deepening democracy to include the full participation of the poor is gaining rather than losing currency. "What you are seeing now in India is a new sensitivity to spread the wealth," T. C. Ramadorai told me, "not just in the über class but in the middle class that is expanding into rural areas."
Gandhi believed that the logic of technology advanced for its own sake led inevitably to destruction. He shared this view with German philosopher Martin Heidegger and American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the inventor of the atomic bomb. As Oppenheimer learned, too late, once the genie is out of the bottle, there is no putting it back. Once a technology has been invented, chances are it will be used. Gandhi's spinning wheel remains in the center of the Indian flag. Indians continue to embrace it as a symbol of their country's struggle for independence. Most soundly reject, however, its message about technology. Technology, Gandhi warned, tends to create desires that
satisfy its own dictates rather than human needs. Gandhi's response this was literally to strip himself and his life of everything that was not the product of the most basic technology possible.
My Indian grandfather was a strict Gandhian, having been caught up in the swadeshi movement for India's independence in his youth. We all called him Bapuji, the same affectionate yet respectful name used by Gandhi's close followers for the Mahatma. It means something like "respected papa." No matter how much money he made or his children made, my Bapuji, like Gandhi, always wore khadi dhoti, a drape of hand-loom cotton cloth Indian men wear to create a form of loose trousers. I loved to sit in his bedroom in the flat in Juhu on the old iron bedstead, the Voice of America or the BBC on the radio in the background, and listen to my grandfather's words of wisdom. So many times Bapuji told me, his American granddaughter, "You must rule technology. Don't let technology rule you. You should never use any machine you cannot take apart and put back together yourself."
Given the evident impracticality of renouncing the use of almost every kind of machinery if this principle were truly applied, Gandhi's views on technology have been trivialized. In fact, they are profound and live on in the concept of appropriate technology.
"People tend to fetishize technology," Reuben Abraham told me. "They fail to recognize that technology is a means to an end and not the end itself. Electricity by itself does nothing. It's what you do with the electricity that matters." Reuben is setting up a joint initiative for sustainable development between Cornell University and the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. He asked me, "How do you have this kind of growth without destroying the environment? If India and China develop like the United States has, we're all in trouble. Sustainability has to be embedded in business processes. You can't do business first, over here, and then think about sustainability, over there.
That's not going to cut it."
Visionary Indian business leaders, as we have seen, are forging a new model of inclusive, sustainable capitalism that is perhaps our best hope for a future menaced by global warming and stark inequalities. Their efforts are rooted in the hard realities of India today. "Why will India leap forward?" Dr. Shetty asked me. "I'll tell you. We are good at creating institutions. Money alone won't do anything. This is the right moment for India."
As Rohini Nilekani, Nandan Nilekani's wife, a woman strongly committed to social change and saving India's environment, told me, "Many of us try to dissect this animal called poverty. It has many avatars. In India, three hundred million people are living with less than they need to eat. Anything can happen," she warned, "so, we have to ask ourselves, 'How are we to manage decision-making in this country?' We are working in the trenches to deepen democracy."
These efforts are also inspired by a cultural renaissance that is searching to redefine what it means to be Indian in the twenty-first century. "The aspirational urge is enormous, the desire to find a place in the sun, but we need a notion of self-respect that is not derived only from rising economic clout," Pavan Varma, the author of Being Indian and the head of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, told me. "Our culture was not created yesterday. We have to dip into our culture, and take it to a global level." The green architect Karan Grover put it this way, "Ultimately, what I want to say is that we have
the resources, we have the stories, to take us to another place."
India is a complicated, fractious, often cacophonous democracy where viewpoints and visions clash and compete. Yet, I have found an astounding consensus around the notions of inclusion and sustainability, grounded in India's unique cultural heritage.
But there is another India: The India that embraced the explosion of a nuclear device as a triumph of achievement and a good nose-thumbing at those who would exclude this great nation from the club of nuclear powers; the India that outspends every other developing
country on military procurements while hundreds of millions of its people go hungry. India's missiles are named after conquerors such as the Prithvi, after the twelfth-century ruler Prithvi Raj Chauhan. India's missiles are also named after the elements: Agni, meaning fire, and Akash, meaning sky. Agni is also the name of the Hindu god of fire. The Trishul missile is named after the weapon wielded by the god Siva. This is the India of the lines quoted by Robert Oppenheimer from the Bhagavad Gita at the terrible realization of what had been unleashed by the bomb: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." India has vowed that its military program, including nuclear weapons, is for defensive purposes only, but there is no doubt that an arms race is on
in South Asia and that the region is one of the world's most perilous.
The waters and forests of ancient India were alive with apsaras, water and wood nymphs, whose dances and songs enchanted with their loveliness. The apsaras' sinuous forms adorn the columns of temples all over India. Twining their smooth limbs toward the heavens, they represent the sap of life itself. In India's Hindu cosmogony, rivers are goddesses: the Ganga, the Sabarmati, the Narmada, the Saraswati now flowing underground. Women in India have led the most strident efforts to save the country's environment from the wanton destruction of unchecked exploitation. The women in the Chipko movement wrapped themselves around trees in a loving embrace in order to save them from the timber man's saw. India's celebrity environmental activists are all women: Medha Patkar, who fought the damming of the Narmada; Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and the Environment, who won the 2005 Stockholm Water Prize; Arundhati Roy, who has ceaselessly written and spoken out for a number of causes; Vandana Shiva, who describes herself as an ecofeminist and who fights for sustainable agriculture.
From the World Bank to UN agencies to leading NGOs there is agreement on one thing: essential to ending poverty, ignorance, environmental destruction, and disease in India, including stemming the country's galloping HIV/AIDS epidemic, is the empowerment of
women. This is easily said, less easily done, and rarely thought through in all its implications.
A little over a year ago, I gave a talk in New Delhi to a group of senior Indian policy and military analysts on India's soft-power advantage. There were many retired generals in the room. Aside from a research assistant, I was the only woman present. One gentleman
wanted a clarification: "Soft power, then, does not mean soft country." No, I replied, it does not. Imperialism has always been about emasculation. Though it was Gandhi's radical nonviolence that showed the impotence of brute force and brought an end to imperial rule, India in the decades that followed has fought to assert its potency as a hard power, culminating with its possession of nuclear weapons.
India has within its grasp all the elements it needs to imagine a different trajectory. Because it is still a developing country, it can choose to develop differently. India does not have to blindly follow the American agribusiness model and become another fast-food nation. It does not have to allow a military-industrial complex to dictate national priorities. It can - it must - forge its own path, lest a world hell-bent on consumption for its own sake and the dangerous vanities of military one-upmanship lead us all into oblivion.
The United States must also do its share, if not for India then for ourselves, because our survival depends on India's success. In the interconnected world in which we live, we are all ultimately vulnerable to pandemic disease, to global warming, to the collapse of the old world order and the uncertainties of what will replace it. Americans can start by forcing our government to join the rest of the world in facing squarely the urgent problem of global warming and by admitting our own disproportionate contribution to a situation with potentially devastating consequences for mankind. Indian environmental
writer Ramachandra Guha asks the question in the title of his new book "How Much Should a Person Consume?" It is a timely and profoundly moral question to ask.
Americans can also begin to question the bloated mess that our military-industrial complex - as President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned nearly half a century ago - has become, dictating policy priorities that have cost us dearly in blood and in silver. If we are concerned about China brokering a nuclear deal with Pakistan, we have only ourselves to blame for opening that door and no moral high ground to claim.
Last year, U.S. contractors, already the world's leaders in arms sales, doubled sales of weapons to foreign governments, from $10.6 billion to $21 billion. A significant portion of the increase came from arms sales to Pakistan, including a $5 billion order for F-16 fighter jets. With approval of the India-U.S. nuclear deal, India has become one of the most lucrative potential markets for U.S. weapons contractors, who are burning jet fuel trekking to the subcontinent to show off their products.(l) With the United States and China racing to cement deals and sell arms and nuclear technology to both India and Pakistan, South Asia is on its way to holding on to the championship title for decades to come as one of the most dangerous places on Earth.
I believe that the United States cannot beat China in the long term on sheer economic or military might: a race to do so will destroy our environment and our society. We can beat China - or rather woo it if we reorder our priorities and return to our roots as a government of, by, and for the people, able to assert moral authority in the arena
of world affairs with a clear conscience...
(1) Leslie Wayne, "Foreign Sales by U.S. Arms Makers Doubled in a Year," New York
Times, November 11, 2006.
I would also like to thank my longtime colleague at the World Policy Institute, Bill Hartung, quoted in this article, for his insights on U.S. weapons sales.
Rights: Copyright © 2007 by Mira Kander
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