India: Question of self-confidence

The world you will enter is a different one from the one I walked into when I graduated.

- Then finance minister Manmohan Singh giving final touches to the iconic budget of 1991.

There was one aspect of the world of my youth that I treasure, an aspect I would greatly like to see restored: that somehow the society in which I lived and worked was more united, more naturally, unself-consciously Indian than the one that is emerging today.

That all-permeating Indianness is still strong. My principal civil servants, for instance, come from four corners of India. One comes from Tamil Nadu, another from Kerala, one from Punjab and another from Gujarat; and they have all served India in their own ways.

The India in which I grew up, earned my livelihood, brought up my children -- this India has meant much to me. I have regarded all of it as my home, and I could not have been at home anywhere else.

But in some important respects, that India is being questioned, challenged. My own home state is rent by strife over its Indianness, a strife that fills me with great sadness.

Competitive politics has raised caste and communal tensions to a dangerous level in several parts of our country. There is more parochiality in the governments. Politics is ceasing to be a vehicle of purposeful social change. Even industry finds its cosmopolitan character under threat of erosion.

This is what I find most disturbing, even more for you than for myself. You have the future of this country in your hands; I would urge you to work to restore its Indianness, its instinctive unity.

There is another important respect which requires urgent national attention. I refer to the visible signs of erosion of national self-confidence and to the need for strong corrective action.

The sense of confident nationhood was the most palpable characteristic of the era of my youth. Our leaders Gandhiji, Nehru, Patel had this confidence in great abundance; they had no doubts about the potential of this nation, or about its ability to look after itself.