“India is an annual market of USD 800 million.” - A statement by a marketing guru of a multinational company, way back in late 1990s.

“India is an ever-expanding market that can absorb almost the whole world’s production of consumer goods.”

- Assessment of an international market consultancy company, around the year 2010.

 

THIS image -- as a terrific market -- is the narrative now being forced upon the people of India for the past some time. And almost thoughtlessly, we, the people of India, are rejoicing the idea, basking in the thought. Nothing can be sadder than this development. And the best way to counter this perverse narrative is to introduce in our thought and action what wise people call ‘Bharat’ narrative. There is an urgency to achieve this goal, failing which we will reduce ourselves to people without identity to talk about, to fall back upon, to stand on and grow the tallest in the world.

 

Where is the need to feel happy about our collective identity only as an ever-expanding market where the world will sell its merchandise and take back home massive bag-fulls of money? That was what the British did for nearly 150 years. They looted India’s money, made the country abysmally poor, left its rich culture high and dry, denuded its education of its core depth and height, enslaved us politically and told the world through an ugly narrative that India was a terribly backward country.

 

Now also, they propose to do the same -- by selling us the grand idea of being an ever-expanding market. The effort, thus, is to tell us that we are eternal consumer of goods produced by others, and that we are incapable of being entrepreneurs. Is this the narrative we want? This question needs a deep probing.

 

For over a thousand years before the British proclaimed us a terribly poor country, India’s share in global GDP floated around 25%. A thousand years and plus, mind you! It was then that Indian ships roamed the seas all over the world engaging in great trade. The world waited for Indian ships to bring in merchandises that other countries could not produce -- textiles, tools, steel, food-grains, arts and crafts, architecture, books, wood-craft, paper-craft -- you name it!

 

But then came a systematic effort to denude India of all this glory. Bah!

That story is all too well known to all. That was the reason some intellectuals and leaders have begun demanding from Britain a compensation of trillions of dollars for the loot the British did. When this demand was voiced very vociferously by Dr. Shashi Tharoor at the University of Edinborough, a storm let loose. The Britons were shocked beyond belief. Their discomfiture got added to when Swami Ramdev also voiced a similar demand, insisting that Britain owes to India all its fortune.

 

This compensation is only a cosmetic issue. The core issue is that India must realise that it needs to start asserting its own narrative -- to script its own story of a New India in the new world! It is time to start scripting the ‘Bharat’ narrative that will promote the idea of India as it used to be in its glorious past.

 

Of course, a lot of efforts are already going on in this direction -- for the past one hundred-plus years. The ‘Bharat’ narrative is being practised at multiple levels across India, pushing the ancient knowledge that had taken India to the top of the world. That knowledge had proved test of time, and still has the capacity to continue doing so. On the strength of original knowledge India owned for thousands of years, we can bounce back to the global leadership position -- without having to fall prey to borrowed narratives imposed on us by foreigners and their compradors.

 

There is also a need to assert that talking about the ‘Bharat’ narrative is not making a statement as part of some political propagandism. The effort is to return to our roots that are as glorious today as they used to be in the past. The effort is to bring into practicable reality the actual, original Indian knowledge bank in the present era.

 

Let us take the example of dairy-farming. At countless hundreds of places across the Indian landscape at this present moment, practitioners of ancient Indian knowledge of dairy farming are proving not just the scientific correctness but also commercial viability and feasibility of the effort. The accusation -- mainly promoted by compradors of foreign masters -- that Indian breeds of cow do not offer good yields of milk and are commercially unviable, is being proved totally false and craftily imposed upon the Indian society.

 

These successful experiments have proved that the dairies thus run become nuclei of overall social development, taking care of collective as well as individual health and means of livelihood in a grand manner.

 

At the time of Independence, we were about 30 crore Indians, with a desi cows population of about 52 crore distributed among about a hundred original breeds. Seventy years later, many of the original desi breeds have vanished -- thanks to our indifference borne out of an imposed narrative -- and the total population of desi cows in just a few breeds is just about 2 crore.

 

This terrible decline speaks volumes of how India fell prey to an absolutely false and fake narrative, highlighting the need to restore the primacy of the ‘Bharat’ narrative. The narrative these great experimenters are now scripting about indigenous dairy farming is just very glorious, just awesome by any definition.

 

This is the story of only one vertical. There are many such stories that need reinventing, and rescripting -- as part of the ‘Bharat’ narrative!