We can drink Coca-Cola without becoming Coca-colonized

[Nishank]

"We can drink Coca-Cola without becoming Coca-colonized"

The following is an excerpt from Shashi Tharoor's new book "India: From Midnight to the Millennium." Tharoor, currently the executive assistant to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, is the author of four other books including "The Great Indian Novel."

(1997)

(Source: http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9708/India97/india/perspective/index.html )

"Anyone who wants to understand the modern world," wrote William Rees-Mogg in the London Times on March 11, 1996, 'must make a personal passage to India which has the deepest and most resilient culture of the four likely economic superpowers of the next century, more stable and politically advanced than China, not yet denatured by the modernism of the United States and Europe." Rees-Mogg sees the continuity of India's traditions as its greatest strength while predicting for it the status of an economic superpower in the 21st century.Neither thought would have occurred to most lndians.

Such predictions may be unduly optimistic. Rees-Mogg's calculation was based on the premise of 7 percent growth in India until 2025, against 2.5 percent growth in the 'mature economies,' giving India, the United States, and the European Union the same GDP in thirty years. (China, by the same projection, would be much bigger than any of the three.) But his analysis rested implicitly on the assumption that Indian democracy has 'solved the constitutional problem' and so will be able to manage the inevitable processes of political change and economic growth. I believe that, provided Indians keep the faith, he may well be right.

The choices we make will determine the kind of India the youth of today will inherit in the twenty-first century. John Kenneth Galbraith once spoke of India being in a state of 'suspenseful indecision.' As independent India nears its fiftieth birthday, the time has come to end the suspense and decide.

I believe that, yes, Indians will stand for democracy, openness, tolerance, freedom.

Yes, democracy can be unbearably inefficient but efficiency without democracy can be simply unbearable.

Yes, regionalist decentralization could be dangerous, but devolution of power - accepting that answers to every question in Dharwar (a town in southern India) are not necessarily found in Delhi - can strengthen democracy rather than dilute it. In many ways the (ruling) United Front coalition represents a reaffirmation of the aggregative style of the Indian nationalist movement, which had been denatured by the centralism of (former Prime Minister) Indira Gandhi.

Yes, we are not by nature a secular people -- religion plays too large a part in our daily lives for that -- but Indian secularism should mean letting every religion flourish, rather than privileging one above the rest, while ensuring that the tradition of dharma infuses both public policy and private conduct. After all, there are too many diversities in our land for any one version of reality to be imposed on all of us. Hinduism is a civilization, not a dogma. Worse, the version propagated by the proponents of Hindutva resembles nothing so much as the arguments for the creation of Pakistan, of which Indian nationalism is the living repudiation. Hindu resurgence is the mirror image of the Muslim communalism of 1947; its rhetoric echoes the bigotry that India was constructed to reject. Its triumph would mark the end of lndia, and that, I am convinced, Indians will not let happen.

And finally, yes, we can drink Coca-Cola without becoming Coca-colonized. I do not believe that Indians will become any less Indian if, in (Mahatma) Gandhi's metaphor, we open the doors and windows of our country and let foreign winds blow through our house. Our popular culture has proved resilient enough to compete successfully with MTV and McDonald's; there is probably a greater prospect of our music and movies corrupting foreign youth, especially in other Asian and African countries and among subcontinental expatriate communities in the developed world, than of the reverse. Besides, the strength of "Indianness" has always lain in its ability to absorb foreign influences and to transform them by a peculiarly Indian alchemy into something that belongs naturally on the soil of India. The language in which this book is being published in India is just one example of this.

The independence generation, newly freed of the incubus of colonialism, was deeply mistrustful of the outside world. After all, the British had come to trade, and stayed on to rule: foreign investors were therefore seen as the thin end of a neo-imperialist wedge. The result was stagnation and underemployment, as we turned away investments that would have created jobs and strengthened infrastructure, while we tried to divide an ever-shrinking economic pie. (I have often wondered how much of our political troubles can be laid at the door of our economic choices. Youth and students without economic prospects in a rigidlv controlled economy were ready material for agitations and militant movements: had we opened up the economy earlier, they might have been recruited by MNCs rather than by terrorist gangs.) Today even communist China has learned to transcend history, to put the past in its place and open the doors to the future. India's youth have no colonial hang-ups to hobble them; they can look with confidence, not fear, at what the outside world has to offer them.

I began this book by recalling my own cynicism as an adolescent in the India of 1975. Which way will India's youth turn? In resolving these great debates of our time, their challenge is not only to develop, and take pride in, the "sense of belonging" whose absence I bemoaned as a nineteen-year-old. It is also to sustain an India open to the contention of ideas and interests within it, unafraid of the prowess or the products of the outside world, wedded to the pluralism that is India's greatest strength, and determined to liberate and fulfill the creative energies of its people. Such an India can make the twenty-first century her own. Back in 1975, I ended my article with the words, "Perhaps our citizens of tomorrow will be of a different breed." Perhaps they already are."

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Regards,

Nishank