As early as January 1987, The Economist rightly remarked that socialism as practiced in India has been a fraud. Our brand of social- ism did not result in transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor but only from the honest rich to the dishonest rich.

We built up state-owned enterprises called the public sector in India. The sleeping sickness of socialism is now universally acknowledged, but not officially in India. More than 240 public sector enterprises are run by the Union government, and more than 700 by the state governments. These public sector enterprises are the black holes, the money guzzlers, and they have been extracting an exorbitant price for India’s doctrinaire socialism.

There is a tidal wave of privatization sweeping across the world from Bangladesh to Brazil, but it has turned aside in its course and passed India by.

The most persistent tendency in India has been to have too much government and too little  administration; too many laws and too little justice; too many public servants and too little public service; too many controls and too little welfare.

Our third disastrous mistake was to pay no attention to education. Value-based education has never any sex appeal in Indian politics. Unlike Lee Kuan Yew who gave education the priority of priorities in Singapore, our political parties treated literacy as a matter of no consequence. The result has been that more than half of our population is literally illiterate. Official statistics give a more comforting figure; but that is only because any person who can write or sign his name is considered to be literate according to official statistics.

Professor Amartya Sen has bluntly said India will be the only country in the world to enter the 21st century with half her population illiterate, and that successive state governments have demonstrated “incredible irresponsibility” with regard to primary education. In total disregard of Article 45 of the Constitution, state governments have completely ignored their obligation to provide compulsory primary education.

When I was in the United States, I was often asked one question — How does India, with its great human potential and natural resources, man- age to remain poor? The correct answer is very  unflattering and hardly the type of answer which an ambassador of any country may be expected to give: We are not poor by nature but poor by policy. You would not be far wrong if you called India the world’s leading expert in the art of perpetuating poverty.

Yes, the potential of India is so great! Sir William Ryrie, the executive vice -president of the International Finance Corporation, expressed the view that India has some of “the most creative entrepreneurs. The most dynamic business leaders and the sharpest financial brains in the world.” These words give you an idea of the magnitude of the effort needed to keep India impoverished.

Most of our politicians and bureaucrats, untainted by knowledge of development in the outside world, have no desire to search for genes of ideas which deserve to be called “a high-yielding variety of economics”. We are smugly reconciled to low yield from high ideals.

India is rattling — and rattling violently with spare human capacity. More than thirty million are registered on our 891 employment ex- changes. According to objective estimates, there must be at least thirty million more who are unemployed, but who are not registered.

As the chancellor of the exchequer pointed out in the House of Commons some time ago, the population of Hong Kong is less than one per cent of India’s (0.7 per cent to be precise) and its land area is 0.03 per cent of India’s and yet it has twice the trade of India.

The picture that emerges is that of a great nation in a state of moral decay, of which corruption and in- discipline are two of the several facets. In the land of Mahatma Gandhi, violence is on the throne today. Mobocracy has too often displaced democracy. The contribution of modern India to sociology has been a Bandh — the closure of an entire city by militant rowdies. One may apply to India the words used by the late Benigno Aquino about the Philip- pines — “Here is a land in which a few are spectacularly rich while the masses remain abjectly poor? where freedom and its blessings are a reality for a minority and an illusion for the many? a land consecrated to democracy but ? a land of privilege and rank ? a republic educated to equality but mired in an archaic system of caste.

” The greatest problem of India is that its finest men — men of caliber and vision, knowledge and character — are not in politics and stand little chance of getting elected, having regard to the murky atmosphere of our political life. I was one of the foolish people who told Hari Nanda to stand for Parliament. He stood for Parliament from the seat which was supposed to be the safest for him — Faridabad. He was not only defeated, but he forfeited his deposit!

If I am asked to name one curse which deserves to be regarded as the greatest curse of India, I would say it is casteism.

Unfortunately, divisiveness has become the Indian disease. Truly, divisiveness is the AIDS of India — a disease which is spreading fast and wide, preys on the public mind and is without a cure in sight. Communal hatred, linguistic fanaticism, regional fealty, and caste loyalty are gnawing at the vitals of the unity and integrity of the country. To the growing army of terrorists and professional hooligans, caste or clan, creed or tongue, is a sufficient ground to kill their fellow citizens.

National integration is born in the hearts of the citizens. When it dies there, no army, no government can save it. Inter-faith harmony and consciousness of the essential unity of all religions is the very heart of our national integration.

The soul of India aspires to integration and assimilation. Down the ages, Indian culture — a tremendous force of power and beauty — has been made richer and deeper as a result of absorbing what is best in outside influences and integrating those various influences to grace and enrich its own identity.

Yet, an objective overview would justify confidence in the long-term future of the country. A nation’s worth is not measured by its gross national product any more than an individual’s worth is measured by his bank ac- count. Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith remarked that while he had seen poverty in many countries of the world, he found one unusual attribute among the poor of India — “There is richness is their poverty.”

Hundreds of millions, who have no standard of living, still have a standard of life. The ancient civili- zation has survived and will survive when the raucous and fractious voices of today are lost in the    silence of the centuries.

Nature has been kind to India in one respect. It has endowed the country with the gift of producing great leaders in the darkest hour — leaders with the gift of grace who can arouse the trusting millions to lofty heights.

I believe the solution for India is not to be found in adult franchise. There is a basic lesson of Indian history. Our people have always taken their moral standards from their rulers; the people have risen to great heights when they have basked in the glow of noble kings or leaders. The present generation is waiting for a leader who will make it relearn the moral values, and who will inculcate in the people as Gandhiji did, a sense of the responsibilities which fall on every citizen of a free society.

It is true that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. But it is true, in even a deeper sense, that eternal responsibility is also part of the price of liberty. Excessive authority, with- out liberty, is intolerable; but excessive liberty, is intolerable; but excessive liberty, without authority and without responsibility, soon becomes equally intolerable.

De Tocqueville made the pro- found observation that liberty can- not stand-alone but must be paired with a companion virtue: liberty and morality; liberty and law; liberty and justice; liberty and the common good; liberty and civic responsibility.

One last thought, and I shall have done. Today, the unity and integrity of India seems to be at stake. But “even this shall pass away”. Indian society will, in course of time, acquire the requisite political culture — the attitudes and habits of tolerance, mutual respect and goodwill, which alone can make democracy workable.

The day will come when the 26 states of India will realize that in a profound sense they are culturally akin, ethnically identical, linguistically knit and historically related. The major task before India today is to acquire a keener sense of national identity, to gain the wisdom to cherish its priceless heritage, and to create a cohesive society with the cement of Indian culture. We shall then celebrate our Republic as the dependence of the states upon one another, the dependence of our numerous communities upon one another, the dependence of the many castes and clans upon one another — in the sure knowledge that we are one nation.