India’s Way

Sep 18, 2008 Editorial

The latest meltdown on Wall Street is a reminder that at some level, economics cannot be disjunctured from morality and ethics: the whole subprime mortgage fiasco is at its most fundamental level, an example of human greed allowed to run unchecked.

It is nowadays almost completely forgotten in the west that Adam Smith, the acknowledged father of capitalist philosophy, saw himself as a moral philosopher and that Max Weber discerned in the growth of European capitalism, a “Protestant work ethic”.

The growth of China and India in the last few decades has raised the question as to whether in their quest to join the club of “developed” nations, they too would abandon the linkage between economic development and the deeper issue that affect the human condition.

In China, after the first heady rush of material success, there has been a sobering realisation of these wider concerns and a concomitant reintegration of traditional Confucian values into their developmental ethos.

In India, from the first days of their struggle for independence from Britain, there were a host of individuals and organisations that insisted on an indigenous model of development.

Many of these alternative visions have fallen by the wayside or, like the Gandhian “satyagraha” movement, were abandoned as not being sufficiently “modern” by their successors.

However, one effort that has withstood the test of time and is evidently poised to become the dominant driving force of the new dynamic India is the work of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or more mundanely, the National Volunteer Organisation, whose General Secretary, Mr Mohan Rao Bhagwat, is in Guyana as part of his Caribbean tour.

Founded in 1925, the premises of the organisation were very simple: after India was under foreign domination for some eight hundred years, real independence had to include a complete overhaul of the worldview of the citizens of India.

The hegemony imposed by the British and others to justify their rule had to be overthrown. The new worldview, they concluded, could not reject the progress engendered by the western enlightenment but would have to be integrated into the millennia-old traditions of Indian civilisation.

This conclusion, of course, is not unique and can be found in almost all of the anti-colonial movements across the British and other empires.

What was unique was the methodology through which they sought to inculcate the ethos they believed to be central to the “Indian way” – life as a “sacrifice” or “service”.

The values of the new India were to be transmitted to youths through play and games in small groups called “shakas”. Patriotism, cooperation, togetherness, unity in diversity, courage and leadership for service, etc, were not mere verbal exhortations but discovered through concrete activities.

Today, there are fifty thousand shakas that meet daily in India to transmit their man and woman-making values. Their million-plus volunteers make them the largest volunteer organisation in the world.

It is acknowledged that in any national disaster, for instance, like the present floods in Bihar, RSS volunteers are invariably first on the scene to offer help.

Their “graduates” in the decades since the formation of the volunteer organisation have gone on to form the largest Trade Union and the largest student union in the world. They run more than 100,000 service projects all over India along with over eighteen thousand schools.

For their remote tribal people they organised forty thousand innovative “one teacher schools”. The political party, the BJP, which held national office for one term and is always a viable alternative to the present government of India, has a close relationship with the RSS, which has steadfastly stuck to its commitment not to enter politics.

There has been renewed discussion of the merits of a National Service for Guyanese youths to simultaneously help them by imparting work-skills to them and by helping the country by inculcating values of nationalism.

Responding to a question, Mr Bhagwat gave the assurance that RSS and groups modelled after it are not exclusive and actively seek to work with other organisations to help build their countries.

Maybe it is time that we in Guyana look at other models of nation building represented by the new kids on the bloc – China and India.

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