India and Socialism.
With Narendra Modi being elected Prime Minister of India in 2014, there is constant debate on which direction India should be heading, in terms of economy and governance. The economy is blooming in India and with the increase in jobs through the IT sector, many believe India is moving towards being completely developed country in the future.
Being a proud Indian myself, I have no doubt that India will be considered a first world country and be termed as ‘developed’ in the future. What concerns me the most is the time frame. Will we be developed in the next 20 years, 40 years or another 100 years? Modi has a big task on his hand. With rampant corruption in the government, this task is better solved theoretically than practically.
Along with this time frame, comes the small problem of population. We are only a country of 1.2 billion people and this number is fast increasing. India, the biggest democracy in the world, is run mostly with capitalistic ideology. In todays India, it is almost impossible to differentiate between socialist and capitalistic policies and from a overarching view, we run in terms of a capitalistic society. Citizens have the freedom of speech, capability to own a piece of land and do everything a capitalist democratic country can do in this world.
Capitalism as a form of governance is drawn from individualism, a fundamental dimension of culture. Promotion of oneself rather than the community as a whole is the biggest motivation. Now with our dwindling resources and our capitalistic governance, the rich are going to get more of these dwindling resources and the poor are going to get bigger in number. The gap between the rich and the poor gets bigger and as Karl Marx says ‘Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole’.
Now this is a drastic scenario, for which we can argue that it is more based on theory than practice. Now if Modi moves towards more socialistic policies, I strongly believe there will be changes that help India be suitable for a longer period of time in terms of governance and economy.
Dwindling resources and increasing population needs some form of regulation from the government in order to spread the wealth and resources across the population. A government that can allow capitalistic innovation, which a socialist state does, and at the same time ensure the population acquires its wealth is a state that will be more stable in the future. The need for this wealth to be separated across the population is vital for India at this moment as the gap between the rich and poor is widening.
When the majority of the population are the oppressed, there will need to be a drastic change to how we are governed.
