The Hindu Business Line : The freedom-development interface

JUST over a week ago, Independent India became 58 years old. The Mahatma is remembered fondly for all the sacrifices he personally made and inspired thousands to make, just to ensure that the foreign ruler left. And to prepare the ground to shape our future development.

At the individual level, freedom refers to the ability to live and act as one chooses, subject, of course, to what the majority of individuals decides as the set of rules governing the exercise of individual freedom. To begin with, therefore, it is important that the people as a whole — that is, the nation-state — should be free in the first instance, free to enjoy self-rule with no interference from any external power. Then alone will the nation (people, not terra firma, mountains and rivers) be able to chart its course and shape its destiny.

More than the freedom struggle and his way of living, Gandhiji should be remembered (though perhaps many wish not to) for his firm adherence to truth and non-violence. What is the interface between freedom and the two core human values so dear to the Father of the Nation?

A vast majority of the people should enjoy reasonable levels of income, health and education. They can seldom derive enjoyment from income, health and education in the absence of individual freedom. It is easy to understand that people must have the freedom to choose the goods and services they like, occupations they wish to pursue, investments they want to make, innovations they are keen on introducing, places they feel comfortable living in, and so on.

That freedom, however, is not to be construed as, and should not be allowed to lead to, the freedom to cheat and to kill. Sad to say, high levels of achievement in terms of income and wealth, scientific and technological advance and healthy life and longevity may not guarantee that the population routinely adheres to non-violence and truth.

Freedom, unfortunately, has often been misused and abused in India. Students who are supposed to be embodiments of discipline and order have, since Independence, grown into politicians in their own right. They agitate for any cause, even ones quite unconnected to education.

Every other day, some procession or the other is taken out in the major cities disrupting traffic and reducing the productive working time of many people, sometimes even causing problems to those being rushed in ambulances for emergency medical treatment. Workers in the organised sector go on strikes and work-to-rules, not caring that several million workers in the unorganised sectors do not enjoy the privileges they do.

As the late Swami Ranganathananda said in 1984: "It is unfortunate that the Constitution failed to stress the fundamental duties of our citizens, while putting due stress on their fundamental rights... The exclusive stress on fundamental rights has resulted in a general clamour by individuals and groups for rights and privileges from the nation; and this clamour has drowned the great humanistic and ethical values of duties and responsibilities.

It is time that we correct this imbalance... Freedom of the individual is fundamental to human growth; it is also fundamental to a democratic socio-political order. But that freedom becomes a menace..., if it fails to inspire... the sense of social responsibility..."

Where a society is constantly exposed to crime, many people of all social and income classes feel insecure. They do not lead contented lives, despite achievements in terms of income, health and education. There is development but no peace and contentment, which, after all, are what we are really seeking when we are looking for higher levels of social and economic development.

Freedom to debate and discuss corruption and crime is not the same as their elimination. In the absence of a society's explicit recognition of the significance of the twin human values of truth and non-violence, and the conscious cultivation of those values by the people, none could ever know, even in the best of debates, what the truth is and what the lie is. This is over and above the enormous time and cost incurred in unearthing the truth, where people routinely do not tell the truth.

International agencies have devised, and publish, the indicators of bribe paying, corruption perception, freedom, human rights violations, and so on. Behind such efforts is the perception that true development should not permit such maladies.

At the end of the day, however, those maladies are the outcomes of the lack of practice of truth and non-violence. In the absence of a reasonable adherence to non-violence and truth, especially within the political and policy-making segment, freedom might deliver development but not to the fullest possible extent. That less than full development will certainly not deliver the grand goal of all development — `freedom' that is the state of contentment.

Why is it that we do not explicitly refer to non-violence and truth as integral to human development? Part of the reason is our habit of sidelining the staunch practitioners of those human values, such as Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Theresa, as outliers on the normal pattern of our own construction of the human race. That attitude has to change through the explicit emphasis on the value of cultivating truth and non-violence.

It should be worth remembering that it was the practice of these twin values that made possible much of human progress over the millennia. If each strong man were to routinely kill the weaklings, the earth would not now be hosting over six billion guests. If each producer and trader were to routinely tell untruths, industry and trade would have come to a grinding halt long ago.

We certainly aim for an India free from unduly high levels of illiteracy, infant mortality, pollution, gender inequality, AIDS, and so on.

We even set targets for these and many others in our routine five-year development plans. Must we shy away from routinely emphasising what the Mahatma stood for? When was the last time an industrialist or a politician publicly confessed to an untruth she or he had imposed on society? When was the last time a killer came directly to an assembly of the people and confessed his or her crime? Mahatma, please forgive us for forgetting you.

(The author, formerly with the National University of Singapore and the World Bank, is Professor Emeritus, GITAM Institute of Foreign Trade, Visakhapatnam. He can be reached at bhanoji@gmail.com)

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