No Aliens Under Our Beds

he demonisation of the West is ubiquitous in the Hindu right-wing as well as the Marxist Left. The Hindu Right chooses to speak principally in cultural terms; it professes to be concerned, above all, with 'the colonisation of the mind'. The Marxist Left couches its arguments in the language of economics: it seeks to protect India and Indians from the exploitative greed of western companies and western governments. But their arguments criss-cross; the Left does sometimes take recourse to cultural arguments, while the Right does not entirely neglect economics. There are statements issued by the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch that could have come straight from the pages of People's Democracy.

At any rate, the thinkers and activists of the Hindu Right and the Communist Left are united in thinking that the bulk of India's problems were created or caused by the West. Their arguments are hypocritical and disingenuous. Historians have authoritatively demonstrated that the organisational models of the RSS lie in European youth organisations that flourished between the two World Wars. And we all know that the Sangh parivar is financially sustained by the fruits of the American economy. As for the Left, their political models too are wholly western—Marx and Engels and Lenin were as European as they come. Besides, their political practice has often been tailored to the needs of foreign (if not necessarily western) powers such the former Soviet Union and the current People's Republic of China.

These arguments are also un-Indian, for the founders of Indian nationalism were open to western influences and ideas. Men such as Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar were internationalists, not xenophobes. Tagore put it best: the idea of India, he once said, was against the separation of this land from any other in the world. (It may be interesting to speculate that it may be because of their own marginal contribution to the Indian national movement that the Hindutvawadis and the Communists are obliged now to speak the language of the hyper-patriot.)

Finally, the arguments are also factually incorrect. Indian culture, whether patrician or plebeian, has not been swamped or extinguished by goods and ideas from the West. Indian classical music is now more popular than it was before liberalisation. The arrival of kfc has been contemporaneous with a rise in demand for tandoori chicken.

At first glance, the economic xenophobes may have a better case. The influence of foreign trade and foreign aid is rising. The Indian people are now more vulnerable to shocks in the world economy. However, the vast bulk of domestic production remains in Indian hands. And we liberalised out of our own accord, so that Indians could take advantage of the wider world (as many Indian companies and individuals have already done). If we want the boom, we must also take the bust.

My own view is that 95 per cent of what is wrong with India is the fault of Indians. India is a free country, and a democracy. We elect our leaders, and they function in office as they, or we, choose. Contrary to what some people think, our ministers do not act at the behest of the United States. To be sure, their actions are sometimes misguided or even mala fide. But they are their own. For instance, we should admit that it is the malfunctioning of public institutions, not the malign influence of the World Bank, that is responsible for the agrarian crisis. Likewise, the faults with our educational system, or the health sector, or the law courts were created principally by Indians. And they will be, or will not be, remedied by Indians.

To look for the foreign hand under every bed is only to escape responsibility for our own actions. I, however, realise that for having written what I have written, I run the risk of being labelled a CIA agent.