Poverty Is The Enemy No.1

Poverty Is The Enemy No.1

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow-  from Revolution No.1, (Lennon/McCartney), The Beatles, (1968)

1968, when the Beatles released their exasperated, rocking, mocking, song, Revolution No.1, was a really big year for student protests.

The Beatles were at the height of their popularity then, and so could afford to say “you can count me out”, flying in the face of the mood of the times, right there in the lyrics of the song.

Young people were in a ferment all over Europe and America. This part of the world did not really figure in the global narrative except for independence era stalwarts like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the non-violence movement.

But for young people, the underground papers and songs featured the VW bus driven overland hippie trail from Istanbul, and the promise of sun, sea, mountain and marijuana. 

There was the celebrated visit of Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg, and travel-writer Paul Theroux describing his train journeys on the sub-continent too.

However, India did not properly feature in the society columns of Tatler and the long-form essays in The New Yorker till the self-same Beatles visited Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Ashram in Rishikesh, in 1969.  

But in Paris meanwhile, they drank cheap wine, sang the Marseillaise, and ate baguettes on the police barricades. Revolution as free-love-in, as it were.

The protestors were joyously against, almost everything: the authorities, their military machines, their governments.

It was against militarism, particularly the American war in Vietnam. Authoritarianism in general. Capitalism, its adherents sneered at as “piggies” in yet another Beatles song from the White Album (1969). Racism- in the post Martin Luther King/JFK era, was approached with the aggression of the Black Panthers. Sexism - now that the birth control pill was here, and so on.  

While most of the protest narrative then survives intact even today with minor updating, one thing that has taken a real-life beating is the anti-capitalism.

You might not know this sitting here in India, with the cacophony, mayhem and murder produced by the frustrated libleft, the radical Maoist, and main-stream socialism that animates most political discourse clashing with the saffron forces; but the rest of the world has indeed moved on.

The USSR is gone. Some of its erstwhile constituents are “making nice” in the EU. Russia is a land of billionaire oligarchs and vodka swilling masses. The  Soviet Central Asian states are now following their mineral and oil rich destinies. China is working to take over the world. North Korea is more of a menacing dictatorship than anything remotely Communist.

The Arab pretenders to paternal, benevolent dictatorship, in republican, islamised socialist garb- Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, have been induced to bite the dust.

Not sure what Iran is politically, but it looks most like an Islamic, Shia, theocratic state.

Capitalism, Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark-like individualism, may have had its ups and downs, but Communism undiluted, as in Engels, Marx, Mao, Stalin etc. has completely lost the plot in the nearly 50 year interim.

This even in the world’s backward nations, some tucked away in Africa with their currency reduced to less value than the paper it is printed on, Myanmar-run to a standstill, and new found democracy, by a set of army uniformed generals, and the like.

Some are indeed fierce, with a blood-soaked radical Islam for example, but that is quite another matter.

These places pay absolutely no mind to economics and its theories just as long as the money for its depredations is wrested from somewhere. They may be doomed in the long run, but intend to do as much as possible to make their presence felt in the meantime. They think, no believe, that they can kill their enemies first.

Amongst much change, China is the prime example of a throw over transformation. After the destroyed lives and paroxysm of the Cultural Revolution under Mao, it brought back Deng Xiaoping from obscurity, and unleashed a capitalist juggernaut that has taken it to a $14 trillion plus economy today.

It did this, from a cold start, from an economy in a few million, just like India’s was, at the dawn of the eighties. It took just 30 odd years.

China is now the second biggest in the world in absolute terms, not the new-fangled purchase-power-parity (PPP).

But, it is still single party-ruled, with ostensibly, some form of opaque, internal election system.

There is still no “will of the people” universal franchise, and next to no political freedom.

Not a thing has changed since the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 and perhaps it never will, now that the state has infinitely more military power to suppress than it did in 1980.

Militarily, China is now getting to the point where it is itching to challenge the might of America. This, of course, playing to the middle kingdom’s innate and natural arrogance, could unravel the whole ball of twine.

Socialist, Secular, Republican India, a thriving democracy, is counted in the top ten too, but only as the fastest growing one in percentage terms. But this is predicated on a still modest $3 trillion in GDP.

And it remains snail-paced slow, an effect of its tumultuous democratic processes and the hung over Socialist ambivalence about its future path. But, at least it does have a mixed economy and fair to goodness institutions.

Others like recently oil-rich Venezuela, that embraced an antique, Cuban-style “Castro socialism” are, in effect, quite ruined. It took hardly a decade to bankrupt itself.

India has itself realised whatever prosperity it now has, only since the reforms of 1991, when the orthodoxies of the Licence Permit Raj were dismantled.

Before that, GDP growth never exceeded 3%, and the GDP itself was a paltry $250 million, or less.

It is just as well we moved up, because even though we have over 200 million Indians below the poverty line today, the population has more than trebled since independence at 1.2 billion or so.

If we didn’t produce surplus food today, and if the growth rate was not between 7-8% per annum, we would be in dire straits.

So while a casual observer might deduce that this country is in chaos, the truth is that we are an evolving democracy with every chance of doubling our GDP every four or five years for decades to come.

The growth rate will be maintained at near double digits because of the enormous domestic demand pent up for the decades of socialist want and shortage.

This economic growth, and only this, will calm the very many injuries and divides amongst the Indian population that we seem to be constantly fighting over.

So secure do we seem to be in our multi-faceted petulance, that we do not hesitate to compromise on national security by openly aiding and abetting our enemies in Pakistan and China!

So if there is something worth protesting today in 2017- it is this: why are we still poor after seven decades? Why are so many people denied the basic necessities, let alone the better things of life?

If this is the basis of our struggles, and we translate the urge into productive policies inspired by the capitalistic aspiration towards growth, we will certainly prosper. We have a foundation already. We can build quite fast upon it if we pull together.

For too long, inequalities have persuaded our political masters to attempt to redistribute poverty by taxing and bringing down the pitifully few rich.

In the last 25 odd years, from the mid-1980s onwards, we have adopted a new tack, and this has created thousands of millionaires and hundreds of billionaires amongst Indians. The middle class today is the size of the entire population in 1947.

We have gone abroad and excelled in various fields such as IT. We have purchased iconic companies across the globe, and proved that we can manage them better than their previous owners.

The need therefore is for much more of this. We must dump socialism for its low yield and flawed understanding.

In its place, we must unleash the potential of this country to become, given its intelligent people and abundant natural resources, a developed country to reckon with.

Let us not waste our protests by reducing them to petty bickering. We have to eject poverty. It is our enemy No.1.

In the process, many of us will grow rich, and have the wherewithal to pursue our passions. What can be the quarrel with that?

 (1,413 words)

March 1^st, 2017

Gautam Mukherjee

(Gautam Mukherjee is a columnist and commentator from the right-of-centre)