Building Brand Bharat

SEVENTY EIGHT YEARS AFTER INDIA WON independence, Independence Day remains the most celebrated event across the country. On the 79th Inde­pendence Day, the nation will once again remember the sacrifices made by its leaders for attaining that cherished moment “when we shall redeem our pledge—not wholly or in full mea­sure, but very substantially”, in the words of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will hoist the national flag on the historic Red Fort for the twelfth time and deliver another significant address. Across the country, the Tricolour will proudly flutter. No Indian would like to miss this celebration of nationalism and patriotism.

In the West, such sentiments of nationalism and patriotism have been a subject of debate. Often these political ideas have been vilified for the right or wrong reasons. The debate has led to the creation of three distinct ideological groups—liberals who regard these ideas as anti-global and hence parochial and fascist; conserva­tives who regard them as essential for national cultures to survive and thrive, and hence reject globalism as a fad; and libertarians who reject both globalist and nationalist institutions to govern individu­als and argue that humans need the fullest freedom. In essence, on the crucial question of political identity, the West sees a major conflict between the individual, the nation and the world.

In India, we rejected none. Instead, we achieved a synthesis among the three. In our integral project, we achieved a higher synthesis—the universal or creationist oneness. Stalwarts of India’s independence movement like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Mahatma Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo, Tagore and Savarkar, all spoke of this higher synthesis that India was to achieve through inde­pendence. Most freedom fighters, if not all, got their basic inspi­ration from scholar-saints like Swami Vivekananda. Although Vivekananda never used words like nationalism, his empha­sis on patriotism, linking it to not only the land—“territorial patriotism”—but also the culture, religion and people—“cultural nationalism”—provided the foreground for India’s vision of in­dependence to blossom.

Gandhi wanted independent India to be Ram Rajya. That was “true democracy” for him. Writing in Young India in 1929, he ex­plained: “By Ram Rajya I do not mean Hindu Raj. I mean Ram Raj, the kingdom of God. I acknowledge no other God than the one God of Truth and righteousness. Whether Ram of my imagination ever lived on this earth, the ancient ideal of the Ramayana is undoubt­edly one of true democracy in which the meanest citizen could be sure of swift justice without an elaborate and costly procedure.”

Savarkar argued that nationalism in India was no different from universalism. “After all, there is throughout this world, so far as man is concerned, but a single race—the human race—kept alive by one common blood, the human blood. All other talk is, at best, provisional, makeshift, and only relatively true. Nature is constantly trying to overthrow the artificial barriers you raise between races. To try to prevent the commingling of blood, build on sand. Truly speaking, all that any one of us can claim, all that history entitles one to claim, is that one has the blood of all mankind in one’s veins. The fundamental unity of man from pole to pole is true; all else is only relatively so,” he warned.

Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Where the mind is without fear’ is a well-known poem in which he dreamt of waking up Bharat into “that heaven of freedom” in which the world “has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls” and where “the clear stream of reason has not lost its way”. Sardar Patel ex­horted the same sentiment in his own words, calling upon his countrymen to “take to the path of Dharma—the path of truth and justice. Don’t misuse your valour. Remain united. By com­mon endeavour we can raise the country to new greatness”.

Then came Sri Aurobindo with his own birthday message on August 15, 1947, which coincidence he refused to accept as a “fortu­itous accident” but as the “sanction of the Divine Force”. He insisted that all the world-movements which he hoped to see fulfilled in his lifetime were coming to fruition and “free India may well play a large part and take a leading position” in achieving that.

Many other leaders of the independence movement had their own vision for free India rooted in the vitality of its civilisational and cultural value system. For them, freedom did not end with the end of British slavery. Instead it was the starting point of a nation rising to play a crucial role in shaping the destiny of mankind. Aurobindo called it the “destiny” of our country.

Even Nehru was overwhelmed with emotion on that fate­ful midnight when the nation unshackled itself. In his famous “Tryst with Destiny” address, he asked a very pertinent question: “At the dawn of history, India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and grandeur of her success and failures. Through good and ill fortune alike, she has never lost sight of that quest, forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. We end today a period of misfortunes and India discov­ers herself again. The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity to the greater triumphs and achieve­ments that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future?”

But then, something else happened. We as a nation decided not to bother much about those visions of our masters. Almost all those great leaders disappeared from the national scene soon after Independence. Voices from the next rung, who remained active in public life, were too feeble to be noticed by the new leadership which opted instead for an easy path of imitating the already ac­complished nations in the West and importing European ideals and institutions. Instead of Gandhi’s and Aurobindo’s “resurgent nation”, we got Nehru’s new “nation in the making”.

It’s not that we have not done well. The model we created after Independence did serve the country well in the last seven decades. But in the end it remained the prover­bial “square peg in a round hole”.

It can be understood more vividly by surveying the journey of some Asian contemporaries. Four nations in Asia began their new journeys around the time that the Western powers were starting to give shape to the liberal international order after World War II. All four nations had one thing in common—they were all products of conflicts and wars of the early decades of the 20th century. On the western periphery of Asia, along the Mediterra­nean coast, out of a massive conflict be­tween Jews and Palestinians and Arabs, a conflict that refuses to die even today, the new nation of Israel was born in May 1948. Surrounded by enemies five times bigger in number, Israel’s surviv­al remained doubtful right from its in­ception. It faced perpetual conflict and terror and occasional wars that kept its eight million Jews on tenterhooks.

At the other end of Asia, on the coast of the Western Pacific, the Japanese began to rebuild their nation in 1945 after the final phase of World War II saw unforeseen destruction in their country when the US used the first and only nuclear bombs against the Japa­nese industrial cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The country was devastated, humiliated and crippled by sanctions for its role in the War.

In the Asian hinterland, revolutions, one peaceful and the other bloody, brought freedom to two ancient civilisational na­tions—India and China—subjugated by colonial oppression for centuries. India secured its independence in August 1947 through a peaceful revolution called Satyagraha—truthful re­sistance—led by Gandhi, a maverick politician. In its northern neighbourhood, China too experienced a revolution, but by no means peaceful and leading to the creation of a communist state in 1949. Mao Zedong, another maverick politician, led the Long March to establish Red Army rule over the country.

The stories of these four countries are fascinating. The Japa­nese leadership adopted a pragmatic path. Early on, it surren­dered its economic and security interests to the very nation that had nuked it, the US. Through two treaties in 1951—the Security Treaty and the Treaty of San Francisco—the two countries be­came formal partners. But Japan kept its national and cultural identity intact. Famously called the Yoshida Doctrine, named after the first post-war Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, instead of hating the US, Japan prioritised economic growth and opted for a security umbrella. Israel decided to proclaim itself as an un­apologetic Jewish state. Zionism was explicitly enshrined as the national identity and foundation of the newly born Jewish state. David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister, declared Zionism as a movement for “building a state”. Within the first three decades, both Israel and Japan witnessed a phoenix-like rise and emerged as strong economic and technological powers and joined the club of developed nations by the 1980s.

On the other hand, in China, Mao’s disastrous economic and political programmes in the initial decades of the 1950s and 1960s like the Great Leap Forward (1958-62) and the Cultural Revolu­tion (1966-76), a product of his romantic notions of Marxism, led to famines and persecution, causing the deaths of millions of citi­zens and resulting in stagnation and starvation. But luckily for China, within a couple of years of Mao’s death in 1976, a reformist leader, Deng Xiaoping, took control of the affairs of the country and led it on a reformist path for the next two decades. Deng de­cided that imported ideology—Marxism and Maoism in this case—should be de-prioritised for his country to achieve progress. Chinese nationalism and economic liberalism, euphemistically called “Communism with Chinese characteristics”, became the new mantra of revival through the 1980s and 1990s. Those two decades witnessed the phenomenal rise of a new Asian giant.

By the time the 21st century dawned, the three Asian na­tions—Japan, Israel and China—which began their independent journey around the same time as India, had grown into influen­tial nations. Unfortunately, India took much longer. Not because it lacked the ability. In fact, it had all the qualifications to become a developed nation. But its people and leadership remained roman­tic and lethargic. It is true that the British had destroyed the Indian economy, industry and civic life. So much was written about that loot in the last century, starting with Dadabhai Naoroji’s 1901 book Poverty and un-British Rule in India and Kanhaiyalal Munshi’s 1946 book The Ruin that Britain Wrought. In their account of India’s economic decline, Roots of Underdevelopment, published in 1987, Gandhian authors Kusumlata Kedia and Arunima Sinha blame the British for India’s decline.

When the country finally secured independence in 1947, it had extremely high rates of poverty and unemployment. The literacy rate was just about 17 per cent while people living below the poverty line, a romantic description for the inability to secure two square meals a day, hovered around 70 per cent.

But can we perpetually hold the British responsible for all our evils even after 78 years of their departure? The three other coun­tries discussed earlier, too, were almost in a similar economic and de­velopmental mess. India and China were at the same levels of GDP in 1980. While those nations rushed ahead, India struggled to catch up. Finally, the last decade under Prime Minister Modi witnessed an enhanced pace of growth with India becoming the fourth-largest economy in the world. Yet, its per capita places it at around the 137th position, even behind neighbours like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

THIS INDEPENDENCE DAY is special. It comes at a time when global geopolitics is undergoing a major transformation. Friends are turning ‘frenemies’, enemies are proposing to be friends, and the global power balance is eroding. History offers opportunities to countries occasionally. We seem to be passing through a phase of opportunity today. When a similar opportunity came before the Chinese leadership in the 1980s—when the Soviet leadership dumped them and the US offered carte blanche—that country de­cided to chart its own pragmatic course. Deng’s famous statement that “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice” summarised the new Chinese approach.

India, too, needs such a new and pragmatic outlook to convert the current global instability into a great opportunity to bounce back on the world stage with its own imprint. Today’s India is not the same as the one a decade ago. It has grown in prosperity, strength and global recognition. Its leadership has the ambition and determination to take it to the pinnacle of glory. That India should emerge as a ‘Vishwa Guru’ is the aspiration of 1.4 billion Indians. Given the country’s hoary history and rapid rise it has witnessed in the last decade, such ambition is justified. But there is an important question that it needs to ponder at this crucial juncture. Should it simply emulate the West or the rest in its pur­suit of greatness? Or should it rise as a brand by itself?

Leaders in the present government come from that school of thought which always upheld the view that India should rise as a great nation not merely by imitating others but by present­ing an idealist vision based on its age-old wisdom. From taking yoga to the world through a UN resolution in 2014 to adopting Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam—a lofty ideal proclaimed by ancient Indian scripture—as the motto of the G20 summit during India’s presidency in 2023, Prime Minister Modi demonstrated that com­mitment time and again.

Modi also introduced a quintessentially Indian nomenclature and symbolism into Indian polity. Rajpath, the central ceremo­nial boulevard of British vintage, became Kartavya Path, and Race Course Road, where the prime minister’s residence is located, became Lok Kalyan Marg. The pinnacle of this transformation came when the Sengol, the sacred sceptre that symbolises the supreme authority of Dharma in statecraft, was installed in the new Parliament building. Modi insisted that the country has now entered the “Amrit Kaal” of indepen­dence and “preserving the heritage and forging new dimensions of de­velopment” would be the leitmotif of this new age.

Nehru viewed religion as obsolete and saw a dichotomy between culture and modernity. But there was Gandhi for whom politics bereft of religion was a sin. He declared, “I could not live for a single second without religion. Many of my political friends despair of me because they say that even my politics are derived from religion. And they are right. My politics and all other activities of mine are derived from my religion,” and admonished Nehruvians that they “do not know what reli­gion means”. After Independence, Gandhi was installed outside Parliament but the inside was overwhelmed by the Nehruvian vision. Gandhi continues to be there outside the new Parliament building, but the Sengol—representing Gandhi’s Ram Rajya, the ‘Dharma Rajya’—is inside Parliament now.

The signs of a new order that the world is entering are too glar­ing to be missed. Western powers, who dominated the world or­der till yesterday, are declining in influence. China has risen as an economic and technological superpower. Several other middle powers, including India, are also rising. Technology has become the most important agent of change in the new world. Economic, demographic and climate challenges are posing serious threats to a number of countries. In the face of these challenges, and also in light of the rise of new anarchist movements like wokeism, countries are increasingly shedding globalism and turning in­wards. There is a great anxiety about the need to find a new order for humanity, one that synthesises the noble aspects of human experience and offers a new way of life to mankind.

As India rises in the new world as a confident power, it should not allow itself to be dominated by the same Western institutions and thought processes once again. It should come forward to as­suage the global anxiety by proactively promoting its distinct ideas and solutions to the global challenges in light of its cultural and civilisational uniqueness.

Prime Minister Modi has set that process in motion through various domestic and foreign policy initiatives—from Atmanirb­harta to strategic autonomy—that unshackled the country from Nehruvian romanticism. It is important to stitch them into a coherent national doctrine—something along the lines of a Yo­shida or a Ben-Gurion or a Deng—that synthesises pragmatism and a grand national vision. That is how India can and should build its influence—Brand Bharat, the time for which has come.

Brand Bharatfreedom issue 2025global anxietyNarendra ModiSardar Vallabhbhai Patelself-confidenceSri AurobindoVD SavarkarWestern institutions