The state of the Indian union!

There is relative calm in the country, the political process was successfully completed early this year and the Indian economy is certainly turning around. The state of the ‘Indian Union’ is good. Not too many countries in the world can say that with enough confidence. Notwithstanding the cancer next door, India has managed to stay focused on issues that matter to the people of this country. This week’s passage of the ‘Right to Education’ bill in both houses of parliament is a case in point. The muscular and open debate in the Lok Sabha and a live coverage of the proceedings by the electronic media is a sign of a developing democracy. Can you imagine a similar process in a country like China? How else do you develop the civic institutions of democracy?

China might be ahead of India in terms of primary education but their education system does not inform the students. The whole society in China is indoctrinated by the ruling ideology and the children get a twisted view of the world at large. This is dangerous for any society in the long term. Indian education system is hardly a model system but would evolve over a period of time. Now that we have Kapil Sibal as our Minister of Human Resource Development, instead of the dead-beat Arjun Singh, we should see dramatic reforms in our entire educational system. Sibal has already indicated his intentions of liberalizing the higher education system in India. Standardization of primary and secondary education across India is even more important. A uniform education system is key to national integration!

INDIA’S EDUCATION AGENDA – Kapil Sibal

Kapil Sibal could harvest the demographic dividend

Twenty years back when we left India, Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi used to consider India’s exploding population as a major national liability. Their successors, P V Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Dr Manmohan Singh converted this liability into a global human capital. How could this happen and that too virtually overnight? The reason was simple, the Gandhi’s were modestly educated, unlike the three scholars who followed them as Prime Ministers of India. Gandhi’s of India, excluding Mahatma Gandhi, were political animals with a short-sighted vision of India. It was Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao who completely changed the destiny of India. Even today the sycophants of Nehru-Gandhi cabal would hate to admit the fact, but then who cares? The fact of the matter is that Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi got a unique mandate in 1985 but squandered it on petty politics. India is lucky to have a window of relief from this political dynasty and grow to its full God given potential.

Kapil Sibal, a Master’s of Law from Harvard Law School, has been appointed the Minister for Human Resource Development by Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, replacing a dogmatic and infirmed, Arjun Singh. Sibal has already indicated his willingness to open India’s educational sector to foreign universities and thereby provide vastly expanded higher-education opportunities to millions of Indians. This has the potential to further enhance India’s growing human capital. India is on its way to become the world’s largest English-speaking liberal democracy. Currently, 30 million Indians are fluent in English language and 60 million more are somewhat functional in an English speaking environment. There seems to be a unanimous opinion around the world that India would have 300 million English-proficient workers by 2020. Besides being fluent in English, these Indian workers are likely to be better educated and trained compared to their Western counterparts and would cost only half to one third of their competition. Just THINK about its global impact!

The best part of India’s story is its demographics. India has the youngest population in the world, unlike China or the ‘Western World’. According to Vijay Srinivasan, “Nearly 31% of the Indian population is less than 14 years old, and approximately 58% of the population is less than 25 year old, which translates to over 600 Million young people. As the Western nations age and even China ageing fast due to its “one-child policy”, the future workers of the world would be coming from India, it seems. The GDP growth of India itself would absorb most of these young workers, if only India manages between 8 and 10% growth annually for the next 25 years. This is entirely possible, and India could well become the only country in the next few years to reach a double-digit economic growth rate. China would experience an inevitable slow down, possibly dropping down to no more than 5 to 6% growth rate.” India is likely to provide low-cost legal and health-care services to the world for decades to come. Indian design and culture has the depth and breadth to fire the imagination of the world. Young people around the world are likely to follow India in this century!

The evolution of India’s foreign policy – Part VIII

Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao and his administration had a profound impact on India’s image around the world. He was himself a consummate diplomat. Rao understood the importance of nation’s foreign policy and its impact on the domestic growth. He implemented his life-long agenda of unshackling the Indian economy. He was the first non Nehru-Gandhi Prime Minister to have completed a full five year term. Naturally his impact on India was very significant and long lasting. Narasimha Rao’s world view was significantly different from the Gandhi family. India is believed to have covert relations with the state of Israel since 1969 but it was Rao administration that established full diplomatic ties between the two countries on January 29, 1992. Madhavsinh Solanki was the Foreign Minister of India at that time. Israel has become a strong ally of India since then. Prime Minister Rao was intellectually persuaded to declare India a full and open ‘Nuclear Power’ but Americans leaned on him heavily to give up the idea. According to Vajpayee when he became the PM in 1996 Rao handed him a piece of paper which simply stated ‘Bomb is ready. You can go ahead.’ (referring to a nuclear device) and asked that it should not be made public. Vajpayee revealed this only after Rao’s death. Rao also launched the Look East foreign policy.

While Narasimha Rao succeeded in transforming the Indian Economy and Foreign Affairs, his administration was very week domestically. Kashmir insurgency that was brewing since 1989, flared up during the 5 year term of Prime Minister Rao. He was successful in curtailing the Punjab militancy but failed to stop the demolition of Babri Masjid by the goons of VHP (Vishva Hindu Parishad) on December 6, 1992. This destruction of the disputed structure, which was widely reported in the international media, unleashed large scale communal violence, the most extensive since the Partition of India. It is widely believed that the 1993 Mumbai Bombings, which claimed hundreds of innocent lives and left thousands injured was the Muslim underworld’s retaliation for the demolition of the Babri Mosque. This proved to be the single most damaging incident in India’s domestic policy. As I have written earlier, it was a phony excuse for Muslim extremists who were waiting for any such opportunity to create sectarian unrest; it was an idiotic lapse of judgment as far as Ministry of Home Affairs was concerned. This unnecessary violence gave India a very bad name in the international media and damaged the country’s reputation. But for his failed domestic policy P V Narasimha Rao would have been acclaimed as one of the most successful PMs of India! Despite his failures, Rao would remain the father of Modern India.

General elections were held in India in 1996 to elect the members of the 11th Lok Sabha. The result of the election was a hung parliament, which would see three Prime Ministers in two years and force the country back to the polls in 1998. The May 1995 defection of high profile Congress Party leaders like Arjun Singh and Narayan Dutt Tiwari divided the party into smaller factions. Bharatiya Janata Party emerged as the single largest party with only 161 seats in the parliament followed by Indian National Congress with 14o seats. The then President of India, Shankar Dayal Sharma, invited the leader of the largest party in parliament, Bharatiya Janata Party to form the government. Atal Bihari Vajpayee was sworn in as the new Prime Minister on May 15, 1996. He was required to prove a majority in the parliament by May 31, 1996. Vajpayee tried to build a coalition but failed to convince the moderate parties to support the BJP’s agenda. Instead of facing a loosing ‘confidence vote’ on May 31, he decided to resign as Prime Minister in just 13 days. Congress Party then declined to attempt a majority as the second largest party. Instead they agreed to support H D Deve Gowda, Chief Minister of Karnataka, as the next Prime Minister of India. He took office on June 1, 1996. Meanwhile the country drifted and India’s foreign policy was non-existent. Deve Gowda couldn’t last even a year and resigned on April 21, 1997.