Philip Collins From: The Times January 05, 2013 12:00AM
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/philipcollins/article3647507.ece
WHILE he was in custody in Ahmednagar Fort in 1944, at the pleasure of the British, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote The Discovery of India, one of the great prison notebooks. Disguised as a history of the nation, it is a manifesto for a modern India.
"It is obvious," says Nehru, that "she (India) has to come out of her shell and take full part in the life and activities of the modern age."
The designation of the nation as female has never been more grimly appropriate in the wake of the funeral of a 23-year-old medical student, now known as "India's Daughter", who was gang-raped on a night bus in Delhi on December 16.
This is a democratic country that, for five years up to last July, had a woman president. It is also a nation in which child marriage, female infanticide, sex trafficking and domestic violence are problems so serious that the only country in South Asia with a worse UN ranking for gender inequality is Afghanistan. It is not without cause that a throng of angry women marched on Wednesday in Delhi to demand changes to the law.
The six men accused of raping India's daughter will be subject to that law, although it is to be hoped that neither summary justice nor the death penalty is meted out to them. But the central point of Nehru's history is that the culture has to adapt, too, and the continued mistreatment of women is just one index among many to show that so much in Nehru's demand for modernisation remains unfulfilled.
No visitor to India, however gilded, ever leaves without an impression of poverty that lingers forever: a withered hand in the window at the traffic lights or a terrible physical deformity displayed on the pavement for the alms of passers-by. According to the UN Development Program, 37 per cent of Indians live below the poverty line. There are more poor people in the eight poorest Indian states than in all of the 26 poorest African countries combined. Incredibly, when its growth rate took off between 1996 and 2011, India was one of only three developed countries in which levels of hunger actually rose.
A UNICEF report last year showed that one in three of all malnourished children in the world is Indian. An extraordinary 58 per cent of children under five show stunted growth because their mothers were underfed during pregnancy.
All across India, failures of public policy hold the country back. Four in 10 adults cannot read, and only one in 10 Indians uses the internet, a lower rate than Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
The conventional explanation for the tolerance of destitution is that Hinduism offers both consolation in another world and a divine alibi for the caste system. The distance between the political class and the electorate, in age, outlook and behaviour, is larger in India than in any democracy.
Corruption is the most serious manifestation of this gap.
For all that, I still blame the English for the slow modernisation of India. Not the usual English villains who went to India, but the ones who stayed at home. The London School of Economics did as much damage to the Indian economy as the sort of hapless regional officials lampooned in George Orwell's first novel, Burmese Days. This is because the main intellectual influence on Nehru, that brilliant and flawed architect of democratic India, was a kind of Fabian socialism left out too long in the sun.
From Harrow, Cambridge and London, Nehru took a belief in a planned economy with him back to India. The economy of the newly independent India after 1947 duly became known as "the licence raj". That was because a licence was needed for the business equivalent of breathing. Foreign trade and investment were discouraged and every transaction subjected to a bewildering variety of pettifogging regulations.
The history of the British Labour Party can be written as a slow lesson that trying to control a complex economy is damaging. Unfortunately, its sister party, Congress in India, took the Fabian theorists at their word.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh repealed some of this when he was finance minister in the early 1990s, but the legacy of planning still distorts the Indian economy. Mumbai, for example, has the potential to be a great world city. Its recent promise has attracted the former farm hands of Maharashtra in their thousands. Unfortunately, they arrive to find feces in open sewers, filthy water, traffic-choked roads and trains bursting to the point of danger.
This all goes back to the fact that, in 1964, Mumbai authorities set strict limits on the height of buildings, citing English urban design. Instead of going up, Mumbai spread out. The result? Space in central Mumbai is more expensive than it is in Singapore. The transport network is crumbling under the weight of commuters travelling from illegal slums on the edge of the city. Across India, 93 million people live in urban slums and buildings under construction or on the pavement.
The world will be safer and better if a democracy such as India is a major player than if global power is left to China or Russia. The film of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children captures the excitement and the fragility of the moment in August 1947 that India gained its freedom. From its birth, India was beset by fears its democracy could not survive, but for 65 years, with a brief hiatus under Indira Gandhi's state of emergency between 1975 and 1977, it has thrived.
India needs to read Nehru's diagnosis again. He asks the right question, just so long as they don't also let him supply the answer.
THE TIMES
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/indias-woes-over-lack-of-womens-rights-began-in-britain/story-fnb64oi6-1226547820737
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/philipcollins/article3647507.ece
WHILE he was in custody in Ahmednagar Fort in 1944, at the pleasure of the British, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote The Discovery of India, one of the great prison notebooks. Disguised as a history of the nation, it is a manifesto for a modern India.
"It is obvious," says Nehru, that "she (India) has to come out of her shell and take full part in the life and activities of the modern age."
The designation of the nation as female has never been more grimly appropriate in the wake of the funeral of a 23-year-old medical student, now known as "India's Daughter", who was gang-raped on a night bus in Delhi on December 16.
This is a democratic country that, for five years up to last July, had a woman president. It is also a nation in which child marriage, female infanticide, sex trafficking and domestic violence are problems so serious that the only country in South Asia with a worse UN ranking for gender inequality is Afghanistan. It is not without cause that a throng of angry women marched on Wednesday in Delhi to demand changes to the law.
The six men accused of raping India's daughter will be subject to that law, although it is to be hoped that neither summary justice nor the death penalty is meted out to them. But the central point of Nehru's history is that the culture has to adapt, too, and the continued mistreatment of women is just one index among many to show that so much in Nehru's demand for modernisation remains unfulfilled.
No visitor to India, however gilded, ever leaves without an impression of poverty that lingers forever: a withered hand in the window at the traffic lights or a terrible physical deformity displayed on the pavement for the alms of passers-by. According to the UN Development Program, 37 per cent of Indians live below the poverty line. There are more poor people in the eight poorest Indian states than in all of the 26 poorest African countries combined. Incredibly, when its growth rate took off between 1996 and 2011, India was one of only three developed countries in which levels of hunger actually rose.
A UNICEF report last year showed that one in three of all malnourished children in the world is Indian. An extraordinary 58 per cent of children under five show stunted growth because their mothers were underfed during pregnancy.
All across India, failures of public policy hold the country back. Four in 10 adults cannot read, and only one in 10 Indians uses the internet, a lower rate than Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
The conventional explanation for the tolerance of destitution is that Hinduism offers both consolation in another world and a divine alibi for the caste system. The distance between the political class and the electorate, in age, outlook and behaviour, is larger in India than in any democracy.
Corruption is the most serious manifestation of this gap.
For all that, I still blame the English for the slow modernisation of India. Not the usual English villains who went to India, but the ones who stayed at home. The London School of Economics did as much damage to the Indian economy as the sort of hapless regional officials lampooned in George Orwell's first novel, Burmese Days. This is because the main intellectual influence on Nehru, that brilliant and flawed architect of democratic India, was a kind of Fabian socialism left out too long in the sun.
From Harrow, Cambridge and London, Nehru took a belief in a planned economy with him back to India. The economy of the newly independent India after 1947 duly became known as "the licence raj". That was because a licence was needed for the business equivalent of breathing. Foreign trade and investment were discouraged and every transaction subjected to a bewildering variety of pettifogging regulations.
The history of the British Labour Party can be written as a slow lesson that trying to control a complex economy is damaging. Unfortunately, its sister party, Congress in India, took the Fabian theorists at their word.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh repealed some of this when he was finance minister in the early 1990s, but the legacy of planning still distorts the Indian economy. Mumbai, for example, has the potential to be a great world city. Its recent promise has attracted the former farm hands of Maharashtra in their thousands. Unfortunately, they arrive to find feces in open sewers, filthy water, traffic-choked roads and trains bursting to the point of danger.
This all goes back to the fact that, in 1964, Mumbai authorities set strict limits on the height of buildings, citing English urban design. Instead of going up, Mumbai spread out. The result? Space in central Mumbai is more expensive than it is in Singapore. The transport network is crumbling under the weight of commuters travelling from illegal slums on the edge of the city. Across India, 93 million people live in urban slums and buildings under construction or on the pavement.
The world will be safer and better if a democracy such as India is a major player than if global power is left to China or Russia. The film of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children captures the excitement and the fragility of the moment in August 1947 that India gained its freedom. From its birth, India was beset by fears its democracy could not survive, but for 65 years, with a brief hiatus under Indira Gandhi's state of emergency between 1975 and 1977, it has thrived.
India needs to read Nehru's diagnosis again. He asks the right question, just so long as they don't also let him supply the answer.
THE TIMES
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/indias-woes-over-lack-of-womens-rights-began-in-britain/story-fnb64oi6-1226547820737
