There have been quite a few intellectuals generated by the IT industry and they along with other Harvard MBA types have been recently trying to evolve the Indian economy towards certain goals. India in the South has been booming with modern technology and the cow-belt of the Northern India has been pretty poor in terms of technology and financial growth. These parameters also lead eventually to further backwardness of the north.
The situation is similar to the U.S. where the Americans in the states like California feel that the rest of the U.S. is very backward and they are a drag on their growth. This fundamental situation stems from the fact that these are the drier parts of the country where agriculture and cultivation are not possible and the emphasis is more on technology and engineering.
In the early part of the five-year plans of the India, it was decided as a strategy that certain states will focus on agriculture as their main industry and the rest of the drier portions of India in the South and West will develop industries and technology. These states have now become so dominating in terms of all modern growth parameters that they feel that they should form a new India that operates on its own terms without interaction with cow-belt areas of India.
The Ivy league MBAs have poor knowledge of India, just as our forefathers who became lawyers and barristers who studied in those days in London, like M.K.Ghandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and many others. In order to win elections in India the Congress party had to reinvent itself from being an Ivy league party to a party of the masses. At a cosmetic level Ghandhi decided to wear simple common man clothes and at a content level he decided call all Dalits as Harijans, thus joining them back into Hinduism. This gimmick worked like magic and he went on to become the father of the nation. Important contribution to the Indian constitution was made by B.R.Ambedkar whose intellectual caliber was not fully utilized by the Congress party to create a modern Indian state. Instead, it created a state based on Ghandhi's vision of a static changeless paradise with all illegal and immoral laws continuing just as it was before.
For Jawaharlal Nehru the discovery of India is similar to what was for Sidhartha, the Buddha, a great revelation, especially its primordial primitiveness warped in a static timelessness. What was for Jawaharlal Nehru a great challenge and the need for a change is now for P. Chidambaram, our home minister, an irritant or a GPA. These Ivy league intellectuals pour scorn on the Mayawati and Lallu Prasad Yadav, as if the rise of these backward castes is what has caused the backwardness of these states. In Tamil Nadu, despite the rise to power of lower caste party to power like the DMK, the state has remained quite advanced, so it is clear that the quality of beauracratic administration is not what is producing the growth of these states, an illusion that P. Chidambaram and his forefathers were made to believe by the British Raj.
To understand India, Ivy league intellectuals must travel beyond where Jawaharlal Nehru and M.K.Ghandhi traveled, to the realms of India indicated by B.R.Ambedkar and his great vision of a modern Indian State, a state for which changing the status quo is important, for which modern human rights values are important, not on paper but in practice. Recently the Indian government revoked a law on tribals that has been there from 1947, that any tribal who violates Forest department laws has to pay a fine of Rs.500 and that if he fails to pay it for six months then his/her land and house will be confiscated. This law has played its full course and all the tribal lands have been confiscated slowly inch-by-inch. So it is clear that most of the laws of the land are inhuman and immoral, both in paper and in practice.
Of course, all these inhuman and immoral practices break down in more developed areas like the South and the West where there is more industry and technology. Unlike Robots, human-beings need food to live and the food is provided by backward castes tilling land in backward areas of India where financial companies and technology companies do not care to help them. Instead, the Ivy league blame the lack of growth on the starving stomachs that just scratch a living from tilling the earth, as if these farmers are just taking all the subsidies and eating french fries and watching television, like what all the globalized middle-class does.
The fundamental changes require redistribution of land and resources of India in a just and fair manner. This require serious political action that the state lead by the Ivy league is incapable of doing but these Tweedledum and Tweedledee will go on their merry way cursing this and that, picking fights with Pakistan, Bangladesh and SriLanka and ultimately getting sold out for a pot of gold to Uncle Sam and the original Ivy league.
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