India stood for the spread of knowledge

DC Pathak

(The writer is a former Director Intelligence Bureau)

There is a debate, set off, among other things, by the review of school textbooks in India, revolving around questions like whether young minds should be exposed to divisive and violent phases of the nation's past when the entire account of history is made available to researchers and students of socio-political evolution.

On the sides was also a comparison between Western knowledge attributed to scientific temper and Eastern thought rooted in traditional wisdom, with the implicit suggestion that they represented the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ ways of looking at things. The debate creates geographical and cultural divides in knowledge that are irrational in themselves because knowledge, unlike ‘information," is an integral concept applicable to humanity at large.

It is not difficult to imagine that universal knowledge would unite and not divide humanity. ‘Knowledge’ was always meant to be ‘spread" unless it fell into the category of secrets that were maintained for the cause of national security or information that had to be kept confidential till such time as was needed for declaring its ownership under the law of patents in the interest of the economic security of the country.

The advent of the IT revolution, with instant communication as its outcome, has enabled a complete bridging of the geographical divide of information, and the globalisation of business has further put a stamp on the universalization of knowledge.

Knowledge enforces transparency. The cultural values of India promoted respect for thinkers, adherence to human welfare, and the sharing of knowledge for the good of all.

With India’s rise on the world stage as a major influencer on issues of war and peace, the importance of 'history for history's sake"—beyond its use for drawing lessons for improving a lot of humanity in the future—needs to be examined further in the national context.

It goes to the credit of the Narendra Modi government that India is referring back to its civilizational moorings to bolster its claim as a major power in the world, fully prepared to opt for mutually beneficial bilateral relationships as the base of its foreign policy.

India maintains its freedom from "alignments" and supports the cause of sanity in situations of international conflict like the one created by the military confrontation between Ukraine and Russia.

India’s stand was that the security concerns of both warring nations should have been understood and peace between the two neighbours should have been worked out before NATO’s strength was pledged to Ukraine, reviving the Cold War environment.

India abstained from voting on anti-Russia resolutions at the UN on the one hand, but it also pledged its total commitment to Indo-US strategic friendship on the other. Prime Minister Modi’s emergence as a world leader acceptable to all on this conflict of global impact speaks of the importance India has attained by showing the political will to invoke its civilizational strength in pursuing a path that was deemed to be morally right.

The confidence with which India under Prime Minister Modi coined the motto 'Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam' (the whole world is one family) for its G20 Presidency is truly extraordinary and is rightly indicative of the need for the nation to reinvent its glorious past that was marked by the primacy of democratic outlook, the pursuit of knowledge and transparency in public life, and also known for the rulers taking care of their people, practising frugality, and attaching importance to public morality. Unfortunately, the political opposition today shuns the word ‘nationalism’, projects rule by the majority as a sign of ‘majoritarianism," disregards the merit of ‘one man, one vote," and upholds the divisive minority politics that exposed the country to the shock of Partition and its aftermath.

India has been a land of sages, and that is why, despite the violence of Muslim invaders, it readily accepted the Sufi philosophy that attached importance to Muslim ‘saints’ and Pirs and did not succumb to extremism in the name of Islam.

Today there is ‘supremacism’ of faith being projected by politically motivated groups; hopefully, this will not stand before the civilizational might of India that always propounded that ‘God is one; the ways of worshipping Him could be many’.

Faith-based conflict and extremist violence have to be put down, as India, in terms of its civilizational past, never subscribed to them. India has always followed the mandate that the rulers must look at all subjects with the same ‘paternal and nurturing" outlook.

A notion still widely prevalent in developing societies is that 'modernization' means "westernisation," and this was strengthened by the narrative that the progress of the West was mainly on account of the scientific temper of its people.

It is true that the West gained from the Industrial Revolution, but this happened also because the independent countries there could practise the economic ideology of a free and competitive market and had a head start over the countries less developed economically.

The point is proved clearly by the advent of the information technology revolution at the beginning of the Nineties, by which time a free India had acquired the wherewithal to take a lead over the developed world of the West in this technology and emerge as a leader in IT on the global stage. It was not a lack of scientific temperament but a lack of opportunity that held India back earlier. The enormous incentive generated in India for carrying the country economically forward has flown top-down, right from Prime Minister Modi himself, whose personal drive to push ahead with digitization has yielded unprecedented success.

The growth of entrepreneurship, the brisk pace of start-up launches, and a sharp reduction in the seepage of funds from public schemes are new developments, and they all reaffirm the fact that India as a nation could lay its own path of growth and 'modernization' given a certain elevation of the standard of governance and a conscious effort to shun political compromise with fiscal discipline. If invoking the civilizational virtues of India helps this upgradation of national output, this is welcome. It is a fact of India’s ancient past that this country was the land of sage thinkers who were so close to nature that they could reach empirical deductions without the benefit of later-day scientific experiments and lab research.

The conceptualization of the solar system, the belief that what existed in the physical plane could disappear into energy, and the mandate that life was the product of five elements of nature combining at some point in time were the ideas that proved to be the forerunners of the discovery of atomic structure, the scientific equation of the conversion of matter into energy, and the theory of evolution itself.

No less than the greatest scientist of all times, Albert Einstein, famously said that ‘imagination is more important than knowledge," thereby emphasising how the human mind had the capacity to look beyond the facts in front and get an insight into what lay ahead.

The thinking sages of India precisely did that and created a civilizational legacy that looked at all humanity as one entity and laid down the universally applicable philosophy of ‘Karma’, the pursuit of the right path and redemption without waiting for rebirth.

The ascendancy of India on the world stage is substantially aided by the cultural values that it upholds, rising above distinctions of group identity, region, and mode of worship. It is not wrong to describe India as the ‘mother of democracy," since the universalization and ‘openness’ of its civilizational approach transcend any parochial thoughts.

It is worth noting that President Xi Jinping of China, who has risen to become a leader of the class of Mao Zedong (his guidelines are now incorporated in the Party Book, and he is now deemed to be the President for life), has been carrying out the "Sinicization’ of Marxism and, as a part of that, highlighting the 5000-year-old civilization of China as a great source of pride for the country.

A Marxist dictatorship glorifying civilizational legacy reaffirms the fact that the process of nation-building has to be rooted in the positive aspects of the country's ancient past. It also proves that whatever stood for the larger good of humanity as opposed to an ideology that divides would have to be adopted by any country that was seeking to increase its influence in the international community.

India is truly capable of bridging the East-West divide of knowledge, the North-South gulf of the economy, and the universally existing distinctions of colour and creed. India works for assimilation, peace, and human compassion, which come naturally to it because of its timeless cultural tradition. The debate on what represented the true history of India need not become a political distraction; education of young minds should aim at freeing them from thoughts of a divided nation, unnecessary recall of violent periods of history, and exclusivist orientation.

The Modi government is rightly engaged in looking at India’s large population, which has exceeded that of China, as a source of a demographic dividend. Its national mission should be to achieve economic growth large enough to take care of the fundamental requirements of health, education, and purposeful employment so that this advantage is retained for the future.

Prime Minister Modi gives the impression of being fully aware of this larger objective; his calls for ‘vocal for local’, ‘aatmanirbharta," and clean public life are timely and appropriate.

Indian democracy must rise above religious and regional divides and focus on uplifting the common man economically, enhancing pride in the civilizational inheritance, and keeping issues of national security above party politics. This will be the idea of India in the years ahead.

National resilience is built on the adoption of all that was good in the civilizational past, acceptance of the lessons of history for the sake of a better future, and adherence to the principle that while pushing ahead with national interests, the cause of humanity at large should not be lost sight of. (IANS)