The 12th Five Year Plan foresees three possible scenarios for India’s growth, which have been named by the citizens’ groups who helped to prepare them, as Muddling Along, Falling Apart, and The Flotilla Advances. These scenarios project that GDP growth in the Plan period will be 8% in the Flotilla Advances scenario, 6% in Muddling Along, and 5% in Falling Apart. Clearly we want the flotilla to advance and produce the best outcomes for all aboard.
Democratic India is not a unitary battleship. With its many contending interest groups, its federal state structure, and jostling political parties, India is a flotilla of independent, albeit inter-dependent boats. For a flotilla of independent boats to advance together, they must wish to go to the same destination and follow the same course. Therefore the flotilla needs a shared vision of what it wants to achieve and how it will do it.
The Old Testament warns in stern Biblical language that nations without vision shall perish. A vision cannot be merely a number. It must be an evocative idea representing the aspirations of citizens for the quality of society and economy they want to be part of and will help to shape. This is a lesson that business corporations have learned. In the 1990s when the pursuit of shareholder value became a corporate mantra, many companies expressed their vision of the future as a number (revenue or market capitalization) they aimed to achieve. However such visions did little to inspire employees down the line to change their behavior. Shop floor workers would not wake up in the morning looking forward to what they could do that day to increase shareholder value—an outcome far removed from their lives. Similarly, the pursuit of GDP numbers inspires very few citizens. What do these numbers mean to them? What matters to them is how the quality of their lives will change and the opportunities they will have for better livelihoods.
Religions do not offer their visions of heaven as a big number. They describe heaven in desirable qualities of the external environment—such as gardens and fountains, or in qualities of inner peace—nirvana. Moreover religions also explain what their followers must do in their lives to realize heaven and nirvana. Thus they provide integrated and evocative visions of the goals and the means to attain those goals.
India’s founding fathers used the evocative power of vision to shape movements of change. Ananya Vajpeyi recounts in “Righteous Republic: Political Foundations of India”, how Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar and Tagore communicated their visions to India’s people in stories of India, rooted in the past, and projecting into a future shaped with collective efforts. Their stories connected with the aspirations of masses. Gandhi and Nehru offered visions of a good society and a democratic polity. Ambedkar led the shaping of a democratic constitution to provide the laws to govern the nation, after which he turned to religion for a deeper, Buddhist, vision of a just society. All three knew the need for laws and economics. And all three also understood the need for something deeper in a vision for a nation. Tagore, the poet, had much less patience than the others with concepts of national power and the mechanics of governance. However it his poetic visions that have been adopted as national anthems by India and Bangladesh too.
India’s GDP growth rate has been stumbling. The Indian flotilla is muddling along. Sometimes it even seems to be falling apart in cacophonies of contention and confusion. The need of the hour is to rally the flotilla of boats and the people in them with a vision. This vision cannot be merely a number, or even just a slogan. It has to be an evocative story of the nation’s progress. We are far from our goals of becoming, in Tagore’s words, a nation in which every head is held high, and which is not broken into fragments by narrow domestic walls. Economic reforms had become imperative in 1991. Fortunately India had leaders then with the courage and skills required to implement them. However an inadvertent casualty of the era of economic reforms is that, since then, a vision of a large GDP seems to have overshadowed a shared vision of a good society. Those who point to the narrowness of GDP as a measure of good growth are accused of being ‘anti-growth’ when in reality they are also calling for growth—the growth of a good society and inclusive economy.
India is the world’s largest democracy. It is also the world’s greatest diversity. The design of democracy’s structures—constitutions and electoral processes—is important for democracy to function smoothly. India can be proud of its constitution and its ability to conduct elections on a scale no other country can. However, the nature of the dialogue and deliberations amongst citizens produces democracy’s quality. The structures are like the hardware of a computer. Dialogue and deliberations are the software of democracy. And, as in computer systems, given adequate hardware, the system’s performance depends entirely on the quality of the software. Diverse India needs much better processes for citizens to listen to each other, deliberate together, and develop a shared vision of the country they want to build.
The Indian flotilla needs a vision to unite it. It needs credible leaders who can speak to people’s hearts about a vision of India’s path to a future in which all citizens will enjoy accountable, participative and effective governance; a future in which there will be many opportunities for good livelihoods for India’s burgeoning population of youth who could become violent when they have better education and skills but no jobs; and a future in which the country’s natural environment will not be further destroyed in the pursuit of GDP growth.