Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum in their 2011 book ‘That Used to be Us’ described five pillars of prosperity that together made the American economy grow. These five pillars are public education, infrastructure, immigration, government support for basic research, and the implementation of necessary regulation on private economic activity. When we look at this in the Indian context, some interesting facts appear.

Public education in India has been systematically destroyed and handed over to business. There are more coaching centers than schools. When I was in school in the 1960s, my town and all others for that matter, used to have the Government Intermediate College (called GIC), as the best school. Good marks in the Board Exam would get you professional seats. Not anymore. 

Infrastructure is pathetic. Before 2014, getting electricity 24 hours in most places was unimaginable. A lot has happened since then. Roads are coming up faster, but every city gets choked within an hour of rain and flood is a perennial problem in the vast Gangetic plane. Even Kerala in the south is devastated by recurring floods. It takes not months but years for bridges to complete and there are no silos and supply chains to handle agriculture produce. 

We received lakhs of illegal immigrants in Eastern India with full collusion of politicians and local industries. Our best minds migrated to the US after receiving almost free education from the IITs. In the 1970s, something of the order of 80 percent IIT graduates went to America and the vast majority of them became permanent residents and citizens. Another point to ponder about is that if the Indian CEOs of famous American companies had not gone to the US from India, what would they be doing here today? 

The Indian government supported science, by going out of the way but except for progress in Space and Atomic Energy, hardly anything emerged out of the immense investment. There is a disconnect between the government-owned scientific laboratories and the industry they are supposed to serve. Their work not bought and used by industries, the scientists changed their metric of success to the number of research papers to their credit and in attending conferences and seminars. 

Private sector after 1991, feasted over the Indian economy. We have this double tragedy of an inefficient public sector and an extractive private sector whose aim is to make profits. The Indian pharmaceutical industry is critically depending on China for basic materials and God forbid, if China stops supplying intermediate molecules, India will have serious scarcity of life-saving drugs.

So why the surprise when in 2019, India has 106 billionaires which puts the country fourth in the world, after the United States, China and Germany? In GDP terms, India is a $3 trillion economy compared to the $21 trillion US economy and $14 trillion Chinese economy. Much smaller nations like Germany and Japan make more than us and France and UK, almost the same as us. It is obvious that a few people own much of India’s wealth.

The condition of Indian farmers is curiously pathetic. From seeds to fair price for their produce, they are systematically shortchanged. English writer Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) famously said, “Agriculture not only gives riches to a nation, but the only riches she can call her own.” The riches of India were earlier held by kings, then looted by the British and now are appropriated by the owners of the private industry.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi set up an audacious target of making India a $5 trillion economy by 2024. Going by his track record, I have no doubt that it will happen. The point is who would own this – another 100 billionaires added in the list or an efficient public sector and the people emerging out of poverty into the middle class?

India is at a historic turning point. One track goes to the revival of public owned enterprise – roads, railways, factories, power, telecom, seeds, fertilizers, and petroleum; the other goes to their natural death and the private sector taking over the economy of more than 1 billion customers. No middle path is going to take us to $5 trillion. Moreover, there will be no return from any of the two courses taken. 

William Shakespeare wrote, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” Our leaders elected by a massive mandate in 2019 have great responsibilities to take country on the right track. In Kath Upanishad, there are two most important words in the verse 1.2.2 – Shreyas and Preyas – the preferable and the pleasurable approach for man. The intelligent man selects the electable in preference to the delectable

On the surface, V.S. Naipaul’s book India: A Wounded Civilization, seems negative. But when I read it again, in the course of my writing India 3.0, I realized the depth of Naipaul’s writing. “Being an ancient civilization, India should have advanced quickly. But instead, it becomes more and more archaic. The reason lies in the subtle effects of constant invasions for the past thousand years.” Naipaul visited India during the Emergency and wrote, “… in its periods of apparent revival, India hadn’t only been making itself archaic again, intellectually smaller, always vulnerable.” 

It took several decades for Indians to come out of this stereotype of a nation of migrants as imagined by Raghupati Sahay ‘Firaq Gorakhpuri’ (1896–1982). The fantasy of the Aryan invasion created by the Germans to cover up their own barbarian nakedness against the Romans and endorsed by our own Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) in his book Discovery of India took the civilizational glory out of our schoolbooks. 

It is pathetic to see that the ideas Indians have of the achievements of their civilization are essentially the ideas given to them by European scholars in the nineteenth century. But not anymore! Three existentially important issues – cultural identity, national security and the economy – are now addressed without any -ism other than nationalism. 

The hoopla created around the National Population Register and the continuation of arrangements like Article 370 could not have been possible in any other country of the world. Even Unique Identity – Aadhaar to all the residents of India was fought tooth and nail at every possible forum. But by the 2019 elections, India shrugged off its self-doubts and through the election mandate, exorcized the ghosts that were haunting the Indian nation, paraphrasing Naipaul’s words, “the complex instinctive life of its people that muffles response and buries even the idea of inquiry.” The political parties who degraded themselves in family enterprises based on obsolete ideologies and bogus sociological identities were defeated in a resounding manner.   

The term New India gained traction. But what is new in this; ask naysayers? Let me articulate three features of new India, namely: (1) a billion-strong young, aspirational middle class, (2) a clear right-of-centre political position on the three core issues of national identity, national security and a liberal market economy, (3) a backlash against the forces that kept India enslaved for a thousand years not by valour but with cunning and deceit, not sparing those who still live captivated by the phantoms of the past. 

No one is now blind to the botched up independence of India and the horrendous human tragedy of the partition that came with it. Democracy is a system of the rule by the majority. You can’t lose an election and keep confronting the elected government at every step. Indians now seek historical dignity, economic security, and national pride. Give it or get lost. 

Our neighbouring country will reach its own fate. It still has a last-minute chance to liberate itself from the terrorists who have taken its people hostage. India, as a neighbour, will be affected whatever way things turn out there. New India’s tryst with destiny depends on how deftly it handles the warring United States, Iran and China and keeps Soviet Russia in the equation. 

New India, from the position of one amongst the three largest global economies must play its role in the reordering of the global order. A little mistake and history will not forgive people occupying its high offices. The Indian civilization has had enough of its wounds. We talk a lot and that is our problem. No one fears an argumentative nation. We don’t need more nobility; we need more reality.

Everybody is crying out about an impending slowdown. Headlines like those of the GDP growth plummeting, the stock market nose-diving, nobody buying cars any more, and so many thousands losing their jobs, are appearing everywhere. When an economy registers negative GDP growth for two or more consecutive quarters, it could be termed as a recession. The three sectors crying out the loudest – finance, real estate and automobile – their growth can’t continue forever. The sky can’t be clear all 365 days! 

Whose growth does the GDP indicate? If it is only certain sectors of the economy, crying wolf is no good. The wolf has already been here. It was silently feasting upon smallholder farmers and daily wage earners, when people were buying high-rise flats and cars, using EMIs. The loan default at Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Limited (IL&FS) last year was the trailer of the liquidity crunch film that is now hitting screens. 

Most of the GDP rise has come from consumer goods. Consumption growth has been aided and abetted by the rise in personal lending. How much you earn is no more the question people ask. How much you spend is what they are interested in. Money has lost much of its meaning as a means to buy services and products with credit flowing in the veins of the economy. Money itself has become a commodity in the era of financialism. 

Unlike in capitalism where money is used as capital to produce goods and services; in financialism, money is used to grow more money. Credit has penetrated every aspect of human life – from childbirth, schooling, and housing to holidaying, wining-dinning, and getting beauty treatments using credit cards. Living beyond one’s means has become the culture. So what happens when your salary that pays for the EMIs and credit card dues gets hit, or is lost altogether? Reality bites, it is biting now.  

Young people mistakenly thought that their higher pay packages, coming out of a larger GDP and the rising Sensex, were correlated with a higher quality of life and more happiness. High packages brought with them their own lifestyle trappings. A large number of the young people are now finding that this was true only up to a certain income level, after that the large income is indeed a trap of lifetime slavery to the creditors. Beyond a certain income level, additional increases in income do not bring higher quality of life.

Young French President Nicolas Sarkozy (b. 1955) in 2009 commissioned a panel led by Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz (b. 1943) to examine the issue of recession as he found “a dangerous gulf of incomprehension between experts sure of their knowledge and citizens whose experience of life is completely out of sync with the story told by the data.” India is very different. Our leaders are know-all types and our experts can derive multiple conclusions on the same set of data. 

The inventor of GDP, Nobel laureate economist Simon Kuznets (1901-1985) was uneasy about a measure that treated all production equally. He wanted to subtract, rather than add, things he considered detrimental to human well-being, such as arms, financial speculation and advertising. But GDP as it is now calculated makes no distinction between the tariff of a hotel room or a hospital bed, the price of a bottle of whiskey or milk, and charity or gambling. The more the business, of whatever type, is seen as good.   

Robert Kennedy (1925–1968) famously took pity on GDP politics, saying, “It counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.”

The New India should not get trapped in the GDP game played by a few for the benefit of a few. For long, tax payers’ money was used to create wealth for a few – let some of them be sobered down. Many people abandoned their small towns and parents there to metro cities and opted for unsustainable lifestyles – let those be moderated. If the stock market falls, the nation will not fall with it. Three-fourth of the Indian people are living at a level from where only rise is possible. The crash of some peaks, and the bursting of some bubbles, as GDP declines will not cause an earthquake.

If this world is a machine, then who is the ghost in the machine? Who runs this world is an old question with answers that keep changing with time. Human beings used to be hunter gatherers in the early ages. Some of these people shifted to rearing animals rather than killing and eating them. A mix of these wandering people, upon settling into territories over time started calling themselves as nations, some strong and others weak. Wars were the next natural development. The principal cause of war, which was greed, was camouflaged by religion, ideology and imaginary conflicts. To stop some of this chaos, great empires were born – the Roman Empire, the Prussian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and many others. 

The First World War, which started as a war to end all wars, led to the demise of empires and the creation of Soviet Russia. The hurt pride of the Germans led to the Second World War and the end of the European era. A bipolar world dominated by the Americans and the Russians emerged. In 1990, with the implosion of Soviet Russia, America unleashed globalization to bring almost the entire planet into its control. This turned China into a global factory, and India into an intellectual slave provider, to achieve profit for the US corporations. It badly backfired and today, President Trump is trying in vain to reverse globalization. 

So, who runs the world now? Global corporations? Military power? It was believed that control over resources creates a symbiotic relation and balance that runs the world. But the newly brewed trade war between China and the United States; the exit of Britain from the European Union; the American Military Power shining in its impotency to establish rule over Afghanistan and Iraq, occupied decades back; and Iran, Turkey and Hungary staring back in defiance at their erstwhile mentoring nations, have all thrown up new doubts. Every time victory over terrorism is declared, bombs blasts at the most unexpected locations rattle this illusion. There is unease and uncertainty in the air.  So now, who is controlling the modern world?

Let us go to Neti Neti, ‘not this, not this’, line of thought of ancient Indian thinkers. Money does not control the world. All major international currencies are tied up in a tangle and no one is really leading. All ideologies and isms, are dead and in a great paradox, Communist China is today’s most capitalist country and the United States is promoting most vigorously, the rights of its workers and the interests of its locals over that of its immigrants. Religion is dead as a force, not only politically, but also in its role as a moral and social reformer. British journalist Catherine Nixey, working for The Times, in her book In The Darkening Age, narrates how nations following the Christian religion, despite preaching peace, had been violent, ruthless and intolerant. Lack of human development is glaring in most of the orthodox Muslim nations. 

It is important to look at the Vedic concept of Kali Yuga – the Age of the Dark for two reasons. One, it explains to a large extent the increased entropy, disorder and uncertainty of the contemporary world. Internet-driven electronic mass and social media have established a kingdom of lies and deceit over the human mind and an explosion of a mindless, unfocused generation growing up in every country of the world is imminent, in varying intensity and time lag. There was a Hollywood movie ‘World War Z’, sometime back, wherein zombies created by a biological infection almost took over the world but for the heroics of the protagonist. In real life, however, there is no protagonist and the end would unfortunately be different from the one shown in the movie.  

The world, the way it is or is going to be, will eventually end but humanity will survive; good human beings will remain alive. Therefore, the point is not to brood over what is wrong with the world, and to face the reality that there is hardly anything right with the world. The point is not to be passive and see the decay and degeneration of human values, but to connect with the Infinite of which this earth is a minute part and the human part, further a small part of the planet itself.  The Indian mind has always seen the Earth as Mother, humanity as one, and the world as a family – Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam. 

A Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. Let us take that first step by connecting to the Infinite Intelligence centre inside our own body – our soul, or with whatever other word we may like to call it. A multi-layered system governs everything, whether it is our life inside, our life around and the world at large. The first step to know who runs the world is to know who runs you!

I have fond memories of celebrating Independence Day in school. We would apply white polish on our canvas shoes in preparation and rehearse with gusto, the chorus of patriotic songs. I have heard in rapt attention, many Prime Ministers’ addresses to the nation – Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), Lal Bahadur Shastri (1904-1966), Smt. Indira Gandhi (1917-1984) on radio and watched them every year after TV arrived in the late 1960s. Without any ideological prism, I enjoyed every Independence Day and heard the Prime Minister of the day speaking from the rampart of the iconic Red Fort, including the solo ones of Prime Minister Charan Singh (1902-1987), Vishwanath Pratap Singh (1931 -2008), H. D. Deve Gowda (b. 1933) and Inder Kumar Gujral (1919-2012).

The Nation is above political parties and leaders, whom I understand as products of their times and not as producers of their times. I saw Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri when he came to Meerut to unveil the statue of Gandhiji at Town Hall in 1964, from a distance. Through my association with Dr APJ Abdul Kalam (1931-2015), I could see from close quarters, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi (1944-1991), Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (b. 1932) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi (b. 1950). I was awed every time in the presence of the respective Prime Ministers of India. 

The nation-building of India is still a work in progress even 72 years after its independence. We are still talking about homes with toilets, electricity, cooking gas and safe drinking water supply for every family. Of course, growth has taken place – the economy has grown, development indices like infant mortality, maternal mortality, and longevity are better than ever, but there is also decay – crimes and corruption are unabated, socio-economic inequality is dividing people, farmers are distressed and big businesses are eating away small enterprises like pythons in full collusion with the state. Our state-owned banks, postal services, government-run schools and hospitals are in their last existential phase.

What kind of a nation is India going to become? I wrote a book, India 3.0: The Rise of a Billion People, which was published earlier this year. Although it did not become a bestseller like any other good book, it was read by thoughtful people and was well appreciated. The job of a writer is to read the signs of time and share them with others through his work. The five books that I co-authored with Dr APJ Abdul Kalam spanning 1999 to 2015 did precisely that. We took the pulse of the people and recorded it for posterity. I wrote a 600-page tome on Dr Kalam to preserve his work after he departed and dared to write India 3.0 solo, just to preserve his dream of India for the future generations. 

Today, I want to transcend what Dr Kalam saw India become as a nation and try to see what it is actually becoming right in front of my eyes, to share the signs of my times with younger people. India is coming out of its self-imposed isolation and joining the global political order aligning with regional forces, namely China, Russia, Iran and Turkey. Whatever this development results into will be important for India. India is accepting the globalized economic order; our economy will work in the ecosystem created by Microsoft, Google, Facebook and their like. Our leaders will take their notes and brief from the Artificial Intelligence (AI) deduced trade strategies and war games articulated by global corporations. 

People who are educated, healthy and open-minded will flourish, whereas people who are blindfolded to whichever ideology they chose to be blinded with, will perish. India’s destiny is to be a market of more than a billion people and a provider of intelligent, skilled and hardworking people to the global economy. Globalization of the Indian economy took place in the last twenty years, is happening now, and will only happen in the next twenty years with greater speed, depth and breath. Steve Jobs (1955-2011) famously said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” Each one of us has to lead our lives, our families and our communities by making our best efforts, and India will become a better country, let there be no doubt about it.