Making India Great Again: Opportunities, threats, and the path forward

The ruling dispensation is actively promoting the greatness of the Indian past through what has come, ubiquitously, albeit somewhat vaguely, to be termed “Indian Knowledge Systems” (IKT). There is, in addition, a huge emphasis on decolonization, albeit somewhat belated after 75 years of independence.

The opportunities are, of course, immense. India, the world’s most populous nation, also boasts of the world’s largest working-age population. It is a rising economy and regional power. A combination of public and private sector companies, many of which are over a century old, including scores of multinationals attract investments from around the world. The Indian diaspora, moreover, has come to occupy positions of power, prestige, and wealth in North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Australasia. India, with its stable government and diverse but peaceable populace, seems to be, by universal reckoning, in a sweet spot.

What, then, is missing? The answer is simple. The Indian Renaissance, as Sri Aurobindo, the great revolutionary poet-philosopher-yogi, explained over 100 years back, is not a return to the past. Nor is it an imitation of the West. It is, rather, what he termed “new creation.” Are we ready for that and investing adequately in it? Or are we losing our way in what another famous modern Indian and Asia’s first Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, called “the dreary desert sand of dead habit”?

Yes, India’s renaissance, which began under the unfortunate aegis of British colonialism, is unfinished. In the current political and cultural landscape of India, there is even a pronounced emphasis on finishing this great task, to borrow a leaf from US President Donald J. Trump’s vocabulary, of Making India Great Again (MIGA).

The ruling dispensation actively promotes the idea of India's historical greatness alongside reviving what is perceived as the nation’s glorious past. But the more important issue, to my mind, is that amidst this resurgence of national pride and identity, something fundamental appears to be missing. India’s renaissance demands a totally unprecedented response that transcends both tradition and modernity and the East vs West dichotomy.

The question remains whether contemporary India is prepared for such a renaissance or whether we are losing our way in trumpeting past greatness while discouraging creativity and critical thinking in the present. As I have said before, we in India face the peculiar paradox of an immense competence deficit coupled with an equally huge competence phobia. Mediocrity and sycophancy are, it would appear, the national norm — barring a few rare exceptions.

Even the inordinate largesse funneled towards IKT seems without sufficient forethought let alone analysis or evaluation. No doubt, the emphasis on India's historical achievements and traditional knowledge systems represents, in one sense, a necessary corrective to colonial narratives that diminished India's intellectual and cultural contributions. Colonial historiography often portrayed India as a civilization in perpetual decline, requiring Western enlightenment to progress. The current movement to reclaim India's intellectual heritage - from mathematics and astronomy to medicine and philosophy - serves as a counter-narrative to these colonial distortions.

However, this revival often manifests as selective glorification rather than critical engagement. The past becomes not a complex and storied tapestry of achievements and limitations but an idealized golden age to be reclaimed. From this point of view, nothing was wrong with India of yore. This approach risks transforming history into hagiography and tradition into dogma.

When the past becomes sacrosanct, it loses its capacity to inform the present critically. Moreover, this promoted revivalism frequently overlooks the internal contradictions and inequities that existed within traditional Indian society. There is no clear answer as to why India succumbed to conquest and foreign rule for nearly a thousand years. What went wrong? Where did we fail? Who was responsible? How can we learn from our failures?

Such questions are rarely asked. Or, if they are asked, then I do not find many honest or convincing answers to them. Rather, the emphasis is to return to self-glorification and blaming others. The danger lies not in celebrating India's historical achievements but in converting them into static monuments rather than dynamic resources for contemporary creativity. When tradition becomes merely a refuge from the complexities of modernity rather than a foundation for engaging with them, it loses its regenerative potential.

The call for decolonization, while essential, often remains at the level of rhetoric rather than substantive reconstruction. True decolonization requires more than rejecting Western influence; it demands a critical reassessment of both indigenous and foreign elements to create something genuinely new and responsive to contemporary challenges.

Mahatma Gandhi, in his famous treatise “Hind Swaraj” (1909), writing during the depths of India’s subjugation, recognized that simply replacing British administrators with Indian ones would not constitute genuine independence if the fundamental structures and assumptions of colonial governance remained intact. Similarly, today's decolonization cannot succeed if it merely substitutes Western terminology with desi equivalents while retaining the same epistemological frameworks.

Authentic decolonization requires a deep and ongoing engagement with the past. Again, we notice that the very promoters of IKS, I shall not descend to the level of calling them brokers, are unable sufficiently to understand Indian traditions. If they are expert in Sanskrit, they rarely have an understanding of the modern, even Western world. Instead, they glorify everything India and denigrate everything foreign.

Tradition is not merely an artefact or fossil to be preserved or museumized, but a living resource to be reinterpreted in light of contemporary challenges. This involves acknowledging both the wisdom and the limitations of traditional knowledge systems while remaining open to insights from diverse sources, including Western thought. The modern world, created largely by Europe and, more recently, by America, cannot be dismissed or ignored. It also must be understood profoundly before India can make its own unique contribution to world society.