SWADESHI Rediscovering India's Independence

India's economy is in crisis. Inflation has raised its ugly head, putting our huge new middle class in trouble and sinking the poor completely. The greatest difficulty is that it is the most essential of commodities - food and fuel - which have seen the fastest rising rates.

At the same time, complexity takes hold of our economic, political, religious, and cultural fronts. Yet we are being sold a strange brew of oversimplifications. It's the cost of development they say, or, reform is always painful to implement...

I also sense a deliberate bid to reduce the political fallout by confusing the issues. Great and somewhat relentless forces have silently been unleashed in our nation. Though we can see the evil clearly in our neighbors' experiences, we are blinded to our own involvements.

Strategically and with global implications, the restoration of democracy in Pakistan followed by the apparent sidelining of 'Mushy' Musharraf, had led the US, Britain, and the EU to seek much closer ties with India. We see the rise of the West most clearly in the field of defense. More subtle signs include the red carpet welcome to MNCs, as well as a deliberate (but silent) turning away from the independence theme of Swadeshi that formed the economic backbone of Mahatma Gandhi's freedom movement.

And it is not just one Indian national party that has changed their tune to welcome the latest trend of welcoming global forces to dominate us...

Just a couple of small examples of how far we have come since our 'non-aligned' days of standing tall for freedom: On the one hand our politicians try to convince us that our economic needs dictate our ongoing trade with Myanmar (Burma). They can sense no necessity to continue to stand up for democracy or for freedom. On the other hand, we are not willing to accept desperately needed gas from Iran. Iran's policy of seeking nuclear self-sufficiency (as we too used to) apparently offends our new highly valued principle of pandering to the Americans, not to mention our current quest for increasing dependence.

The logic now lies only in the depths of the pockets involved

Myanmar is of course the politicians' goldmine. The amount of money involved in cheating world sanctions on behalf of big business is not something that any of our politicians is willing to sneeze at.

No similar 'pots of gold' await any deal with Iran. While our nation may benefit immensely from the low cost of sorely needed Iranian gas, this pales in comparison to the loss of secret revenues from those neoglobalists who want to call the shots for us.

As Mahatma Gandhi knew, when there is no Swadesh there can be no Swaraj. Yet we no longer care for the Mahatma's advice.

The spirit of Swadeshi is also prominently missing in agriculture with the obvious result that while the prices of basic foods skyrocket, the traditional farmer gets poorer and poorer. Those that benefit directly, and immensely, are the stockists and middle 'men' - now a misnomer in itself for this niche has been fully occupied by MNC and local corporate minions.

The new breed of MNC trading house can stock (it used to be called 'hoard') while exercising empty 'value addition' with impunity, and then sell at self-created demand peaks without a whimper from our wonderful politicos. The obfuscation is most clearly visible when the government continues to blame 'global' factors including that wonderful commodity, crude oil. The recent global spike in the prices of foodgrains should actually have had absolutely no impact on domestic prices when our own agricultural production is more than self sufficient! The same goes for cooking oil where retail prices initially rose by more than 50% over just a six month period!

Meanwhile, the farmers starve, fail to pay their debts, and commit suicide. On the sidelines await the ever-eager property speculators who will pick up excellent farmland at distress sale prices and then comfortably wait for the cash-rich agri-corps to come by.

As Gandhiji remarked so many years ago, "Swadeshi is that spirit in us which requires us to serve our immediate neighbours before others, and to use things produced in our neighbourhood in preference to those more remote. So doing, we serve humanity to the best of our capacity. We cannot serve humanity by neglecting our neighbours"

And further and more pointedly, Swadeshi is "a call to the consumer to be aware of the violence he is causing by supporting those industries that result in poverty, harm to workers and to humans and other creatures"

Would that Gandhi's maha atma come back to rescue us from our oh so 'Gandhian' politicians. Or, failing that unlikely happening, that our youth would discover the true power of the ballot, voting for persons who are not so bent on first taking care of lining their own pockets, but who have instead a vision for humanity and for the India that can be built by caring, committed Indians.

This post has been slightly refurbished and is issued to coincide with Gandhi Jayanti 2011.