Why India’s journey to Viksit Bharat goes through dharmic, civilisational path – Firstpost

It’s a story that sums up what went wrong with the Indian economy post-Independence. Jawaharlal Nehru was having lunch with JRD Tata. India’s first prime minister, being the unswerving socialist that he was, took the occasion to hit out at India’s leading industrialist for being obsessed with money and profit-making. Tata reminded him that the business wouldn’t run without making a profit. To this, Nehru’s response was astounding. “Jeh, profit is a dirty word. Let’s not spoil our lunch by talking about it!”

From 1947 till 1991, such Nehruvian disdain, if not distrust, for money and profit-making was a reality. This didn’t mean that money wasn’t made and profit not accrued upon. Instead, while the official, institutional way of making money/profit was discouraged, there was a parallel black economy booming in the shadows.

By the mid-1980s, it was obvious that India had taken a wrong train, and if it didn’t disembark it on time, the consequences could be disastrous. The day of reckoning came in 1991 when the country had to not just pledge its gold but also say goodbye to socialist policies to keep the economy running.

India hasn’t looked back since then. Its economy in the past three decades has grown significantly, with the country all set to become the third largest economy—behind just the United States and China—in a couple of years. But, as the economy has grown exponentially, one can also see the not-so-savoury side of Western capitalism, which is largely Protestant in outlook. Over the passage of time, the exploitative nature of the Anglo-Saxon economic model has been normalised. Greed has become good, to use a monumental line from the 1987 film Wall Street.

Every country with a history of its own has evolved its unique economic model of development. The Japanese did that splendidly well in the late 19th century and again in the second half of the 20th century. The Chinese have put that to great use since the late 1970s. India, in that way, has failed to come up with something of its own. It first blindly pursued socialism, inspired by the orchestrated successes of the erstwhile Soviet Union, and then took a complete U-turn to go the American capitalist way. Both these economic models were alien to the Indic sense and sensibilities.

To add to India’s woes, Swadeshi, a supposedly indigenous economic model that came up in opposition to socialism and capitalism, too was hardly Indic in its outlook. Anyone who has read the history of India, especially the ancient era, would know how alien the notion of Swadeshi has been to the dharmic economic model or ‘dharmanomics’, to use the term used by Sriram Balasubramanian as the title of his new book.

The Indic/dharmic economic model, in sharp contrast to socialism, doesn’t distrust the market. In fact, artha finds an unapologetic space in the four purusharthas (goals of life) for an individual—the other three being dharma, kama, and moksha. And, unlike the capitalist system, it doesn’t legitimise greed. The dharmic order, while strongly recommending the notion of labh (profit), calls for stringent action against any kind of lobh (greed). The emphasis was on doing business for profit but the righteous way.

Also, unlike the capitalist order, which espouses the phenomenon of trickle-down impact, according to which economic well-being over the passage of time trickles down from the upper echelons of society to the socio-economically disadvantaged ones, the dharmic economic model prescribes the bottom-up phenomenon.

This is where Balasubramanian’s seminal book, Dharmanomics: An Indigenous and Sustainable Economic Model, comes handy. The book puts forward an Indic economic framework that’s both entrepreneurial and sustainable, profit-orientated and righteous-centric. The author quite rightly traces the continuity of dharmanomics from the times of the Saraswati civilisation and finds an unbreakable continuity through the Maurya, Gupta, Pallava, Chola, Pala, and up to the Vijayanagar empire.

Francis Fukuyama, in his book The Origins of Political Order, argues that a strong state often paves the way for a tyrannical state. He cites the example of China. And in India’s context, he uses the term: ‘a weak state with a strong society’. What he fails to realise is that in ancient India the state is invariably strong but not tyrannical. This was possible primarily because in ancient India, a king was supposed to act as per dharma. A strong state, thus, never came in the way of a strong society. The two lived and thrived together.

According to Balasubramanian, dharmanomics is “a function of Kautilyan Dharmic Capitalism, a dharmic ecosystem driven by temples, and Sreṇi dharma”. While the author had focused on Kautilyan Dharmic Capitalism in his previous book, here he delves into temple economy as well as the commercial activities conducted by the Sreṇis.

Dharmanomics highlights the centrality of temples in the economy. Temples, after all, not only served as a place of worship but also were the hub of both administrative and economic activities in the society. Funds from temples used to be utilised for dam building, irrigation, education, and other public welfare activities. Temples also served as commercial banks for Sreṇis and others, especially providing funds for the long-distance sea trades, which were highly hazardous commercial activities then. The close connection of these temples with trade and commerce could be seen from the presence of some of the biggest ancient Indian temples near the big commercial centres.

Interestingly, the temples, which revolutionised the Indian economy in the ancient and mediaeval times—from the beginning of the Common Era till 1700 AD, if economic historian Angus Madison is to be believed, India’s contribution ranged from a third to the fourth of the World GDP—find themselves under state control today. While minority institutions are free to run their institutions the way they like, Hindu temples are run by the secular state! Time is ripe to free Hindu temples. Sceptics need to look at how the Ram temple in Ayodhya has changed the economic profile of Ayodhya (last year, more people visited the Ram temple than the Taj Mahal). And the ongoing Mahakumbh, as per some estimates, may up the country’s GDP by one percentage point.

India is a civilisational state. And its economic revival cannot be delinked from its civilisational/sanatan identity. The journey to “Viksit Bharat”, thus, goes through its dharmic, civilisational path. As Balasubramanian writes towards the end of the book, “Dharmanomics, with purusharthas and sustainability at its core, will serve as the philosophical foundation for Bharat to provide an alternate socio-economic narrative to the Anglo-Saxon world’s status quo”.

One must realise that economic growth alone isn’t enough; one also needs inclusive and sustainable growth—a growth coming from the bottom and not trickling down from the top. Since 2014, dharma has been back in some form in Indian politics. It’s time it’s reintroduced institutionally in the economy too.

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.