Nor would the day be all that different for the celebrants. For them, it would be memorable only for waking up with the most horrendous-ever collective hangover of mankind, with the fetid aftertaste of champagne - or arrack or hooch or whatever - in their mouths, and a faint regret in their minds for having made such awful fools of themselves the previous night. It is unlikely that the dawn of the new millennium would mark the beginning of anything particularly consequential. The millennium morning would be momentous only notionally, as a paper event.
In contrast, the turn of the first millennium in India was the end of one phase of our history and the beginning of another. For, in the very first year of the 11th century began the Turkish invasion, which eventually led to the six century-long dominance of India by Turko-Afghan and Mughal rulers, during which the very face of India changed.
The Turkish invaders found India in a sorry state. For about a thousand years, roughly between 600 BC and AD 500, India was a dynamic, progressive and prosperous nation but had long since slid eyeless into the Dark Ages. The state of Indian culture at the end of the first millennium was dismal. "The so-called scientific theorems of... [Indians] are in utter confusion, devoid of any logical order, and in the last instance always mixed up with the silly notions of the crowd... a mixture of... pearls and dung," writes Al-Beruni, the distinguished 11th century Arab scholar-scientist.
India was not alone in this predicament. It was the Dark Ages in Europe too at this time. However, Europe eventually pulled out of the Dark Ages. India did not. In many ways, India today is where it was a thousand years ago. Its institutions have changed and so has its economic and technological environment, but its socio-cultural ethos remains shockingly medieval. It also remains a wretchedly poor and backward country, having over 270 million adult illiterates (about half the total illiterates of the world) and some 350 million people living in absolute poverty. No nuclear test, no military victory, can erase this most awful reality.
How did we get to this state? Our general tendency is to blame it on foreign invasions. This is convenient, for it absolves us of the responsibility for our predicament. But it won't do. Only the weak blame others; the strong blame themselves. Besides, the blight in India had set in many centuries before the British or even the Turkish conquest of India. The true explanation for our plight, therefore, has to be sought in our own institutions and values, by comparing the dynamic phase of our civilisation at the beginning of the first millennium with its inertial phase at its close.
The significant factor here seems to be that during virtually the entire dynamic phase of our civilisation, the religion of the dominant classes in India was Buddhism, not Hinduism. The two religions, though offshoots of the Vedic religion, were entirely unlike each other. Buddhism was a demanding religion, which imposed absolute dharmic imperatives on human conduct and insisted that man should strive to transcend his environment and his own innate nature.In contrast, Hinduism was an undemanding, I'm-OK-you're-OK religion, which accepted ethical pluralism, assigned to each caste its own dharma and advised man to be contented with his lot, however despicable his lot might be. Buddhism inculcated discipline and endeavour, Hinduism inculcated passivity and fatalism. The emphasis of Buddhism was on conduct, that of Hinduism on faith.
There were no gods in Buddhism to turn to for forgiveness or redemption. So also in Jainism. Even Upanishadic Hinduism rejected the concept of god as a creator-ruler and reduced divinity to a pure abstraction, the all-pervasive underlying principle of the cosmic order. India, which is today a land of flamboyant religiosity, was for many centuries dominated by rationalist, godless religions, incredible though it might seem.
But the scene changed in the second half of the first millennium AD, when rustic Hinduism, with its simplistic faith in gods and rituals, became the religion of India, displacing not only Buddhism but even Hinduism's own higher (Vedantic) tradition. By the end of the millennium, Buddhism was in full retreat.
Thus, Indian society at the end of the first millennium was radically different from what it was at its beginning. The most pernicious aspect of the new dispensation was the full-blown caste system. Under this, as Manu had decreed, a man of low birth could never become high by high associations, though a man of high birth could become low by low associations. One could move down, but never up. The caste system didn't envisage any possibility of progress, either for society or for the individual.
In such an environment, enterprise was useless, individualism inconceivable. Doing one's own duty without looking for reward, as the Gita enjoined, in practice meant doing one's duty passively, without pride or pleasure in one's work.
So it was that the chalta hai syndrome became our national malady, characterised by a dismal work ethic, corruption, hypocrisy, servility (towards superiors) and tyranny (towards inferiors). These attitudes have implicit socio-religious sanction in India. Is it any wonder that corruption is pervasive and brazen in today's India, and no one feels the slightest guilt about it, since we believe that any wrong or sin, however vile, can be made right by performing suitable rituals?
We delude ourselves in imagining that our national salvation lies in reviving the values of classical Hinduism but the truth is that those values, and the social system that went with them, are precisely what still keep us mired in the Dark Ages. They are not the best of Indian culture, or even the best of Hinduism.
In many respects, the past we imagine never even existed. Take, for instance, the notion that ancient Indians were a particularly spiritual people. As Swami Vivekananda put it: "It is not that we did not know how to invent machinery, but our forefathers knew that if we set our hearts after such things, we would become slaves and lose our soul, our moral fibre." These are inspiring words. But hardly factual. The fact is that ancient Indians were no more spiritual than any other ancient people, as even a cursory study of the Vedas would show.
We cannot in any case revert to our ancient lifestyle - many of those practices (animal sacrifice, sati, child marriage, untouchability) are crimes today, and some others (beef-eating, for instance) are deadly sins.
Besides, there is no road back to the past, except in our fancies. However glorious our heritage, we cannot live on it today.
We have to move on. It is science and technology that would save us, not any gods, whether Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim or Christian. Even Vivekananda, for all his advocacy of spiritualism, recognised the value of materialism. "We talk foolishly against material civilisation," he said. "I do not believe in a god who cannot give me bread here giving me eternal bliss in heaven! India is to be raised, the poor are to be fed, education has to spread, the evil of priest-craft has to be removed. " Or, as Nehru said: "We've had enough of Rama and Krishna. Not that I do not admire these great figures of our tradition, but there's work to be done."
A true patriot today is the man who hates India in its present plight and does something about it and not the man who proclaims that India is the greatest nation and does nothing to relieve its misery. To claim, as our netas do, that we are today a great nation is sheer folly, for the pretence of being great obviates the need to strive for greatness. But then, as Al-Beruni said about Indians in the 11th century AD: "Folly is an illness for which there is no medicine."
