By Valson Thampu
I was among the most excited when Modi broke upon the scene with his development mantra. His promise mesmerized nearly the whole country. I expected, naturally, that he had a radical vision for development. Now, half-way through his tenure, I am uncertain if he has.
Development is a word of French origin. To envelop is to cover from all sides. That is what you do when you put something in an envelope. To de-envelop is to uncover: to set free. De-envelopment became development. The core function of development is, therefore, to unshackle, to liberate. Liberate what? Liberate the full potential of every human being. To develop a human being is to help him reach the stage at which he can be fully himself and think rationally.
Thinking of development as GDP numbers is misleading and dishonest. It is a sophisticated sham; for it has no reference to the development-empowerment of citizens. From this perspective the foremost emphasis in development should be on education. Individuals and societies cannot be developed meaningfully except through education.
Modi’s vision for development is blind on education, which is today in extreme disarray. Modi talks of skill development, without even making any effort to hide the fact that this reduces education to training, and subjugates the individual to economic purposes. It implies a creed of human instrumentality. Man is nothing more than a pair of hands.
The second disturbing aspect of Modi’s vision for development is the slogan, “Make in India.” It is not clear how turning our country into a manufacturing backyard for developed countries amounts to our development. It blurs the distinction between racing on our own feet and hobbling along on someone else’s crutches.
The present developmental paradigm is short-term glitter and long-term blister. We could see, for a while, an increase in wealth generation, which could be mistaken for development. But it will not be long before we realize that a view of development that views citizens as superfluous or as mere tools, caricatures it in an age of democracy.
The current pride is about burgeoning billionaires. That glare blinds us to the basic needs of a billion people. No one is even asking if this increased industrial and polluting activity has anything to do with the accelerating degradation of our environment. What is development worth, if it makes breathing difficult and deadly? Why, do you think, are developed nations glad and eager to shift manufacturing to Afro-Asian sites.
We now stand at the crossroads. Here on, the divergence between material development and human development will increase starkly. The blame for it cannot be put wholly at Modi’s doorstep. The national ambience that prevails today is inimical to our development as human beings.
To develop humanly is to develop in our capacity to think. We are only as developed as our minds are. No one will dispute that human enlightenment is today at its lowest ebb since Independence. Enlightenment involves the ability to think and act according to one’s own understanding.
Abject and unthinking dependence on opinions afloat all around, an intrusive phenomenon in this our media age, is what Immanuel Kant calls “immaturity.” Immaturity is the inability or unwillingness to use one’s own understanding without being remote controlled by external agents. Today most people are reluctant to think for themselves. They love the ease of going by what’s heard, analogous to the ease of doing business. We are happily enslaved by the tyranny of public opinion, which is anything but public. We are growing smartly in immaturity.
This degrades citizens to pliable herds; easy preys to unscrupulous demagogues. In the best of times, as Reinhold Niebuhr points out in Moral Man in an Immoral Society, that individuals, who acting by themselves, seek to maximize their interests, go perversely against their own interests, when made to act as a hypnotized group. Especially in the last three years, Indian democracy has been reduced to the mobilization and manipulation of crowds, with electronic media serving as the force multiplier. The idiot box has now metamorphosed into a deadly control box. It decides even what we think and how we vote.
The synergy between this and the underdevelopment of the people is only too obvious. The massification of citizens can have a free run only in a state of foggy un-enlightenment.
Unenlightened crowds lap up all that the demagogue says in blind faith. The developmental rhetoric was lapped up zestfully by the masses precisely because they did not understand it. In the absence of understanding, high decibel rhetoric suffices to hypnotize the masses.
Consider this illustrative instance. Benny Hinn is a thriving Christian god man. He causes people to fall in a feint with a sweep of his hand. Not everyone falls down, though. Those who fall are deficient in understanding and mental powers. The rest stand their ground. This explains why the god-men of religion and politics are averse to allowing education and enlightenment to spread.
The same pattern holds good in the demonetization, which sharply polarized our economists. One group hailed it as a masterstroke. The other damned it as a monumental failure. But the barely educated man, standing for days on end on queues, knew, miracle of miracles, that his long-term gains were assured and exciting through this sleight of hands!
Supreme irony, this. Demonetization, touted as a blow in favor of development, is riding on the wave of people’s under-development.
It is the same old story, yet again. In case after case of aggression against the citizens – whether of mammoth corruption or of massive coercion – the operative principle is the assumption that the common man is an ass. This is the reigning political dogma. It is on the selfsame dogma that the developmental ‘bitter tea’ (Modi’s words) too is being brewed.
To what shall we liken this? Perhaps to a patient, who knows not whether the man treating him is a doctor or a quack. The cavalier freedom and unfettered authority of the quack will increase or decrease in proportion to the ignorance of the patient. This alone suffices to highlight the need to broad base quality education and scientific temper in the country. There can be no development without the enlightenment of the people. Only animals can be trained sans enlightenment.
For our own sake we must distrust every developmental posturing that does not prioritize the educational empowerment and enlightenment of citizens.
So long as citizens remain un-enlightened and docile, demagogues can continue to hypnotize them with their sound and fury and lead them by the nose. This will change only when citizens are educated to think for themselves. Then development will cease to be what politicians do to us, but what we–the leaders and the led, the rulers and the ruled-seek together, in a spirit of public service and mutual respect.
Development without enlightenment is the opium of the masses. To proffer it is to treat human beings like animals: well fed or half-fed animals; but animals all the same.
(Valson Thampu is former principal of St. Stephen’s College, Delhi)