An Austere 25th Birthday

NEW DELHI had planned to put on a dazzling show for this week's 25th anniversary of India's independence from Britain. Lights were to be strung along the domes and arches of the massive red and beige sandstone government buildings in the capital; batteries of floodlights would bathe the buildings in India's national colors of orange, white and green. Then, shortly before the workmen were finished, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi frugally ordered the lights kept to a minimum. With inflation and the specter of another disastrous drought uppermost in many Indians' minds, the celebrations will be fittingly austere.

Mrs. Gandhi's directive unerringly caught the mood of her countrymen as they assessed the painfully slow progress of the last quarter-century--and perceived lessons for the next one. It is difficult to overestimate the hope, not only of its own millions but of many peoples round the globe, that accompanied India's birth as the world's largest democracy. "A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history," declared Jawaharlal Nehru in one of his most eloquent speeches on that historic independence eve 25 years ago, "when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance."

So much hope invested in a venture fraught with so many pitfalls was bound to yield disappointments, and it is not to slight India to say that as a nation it is still largely a promise unfulfilled. It has yet to become a modern power with a commanding presence on the world stage. Yet the distance India has traveled is truly measurable only by the distance it had to go. For months after that August midnight in 1947, it looked as if the newborn nation would never even make it through the first year.

The cause of it all was the partition of British India into two independent countries: Moslem Pakistan and predominantly Hindu India. Horrendous communal massacres broke out, and many more people became casualties in probably the greatest refugee exodus in history as 12 million Moslems and Hindus crossed the borders into the land of their choice. Partition left a legacy of lasting bitterness between the two countries that has since culminated in four wasteful wars. To complicate matters further, six months after independence, Mahatma Gandhi, who had inspired and directed the march toward freedom, was assassinated.

Consumer Society. Gandhi's successor, the Cambridge-educated Brahman Nehru, guided the new nation for 17 years and personally pushed through a raft of remarkable social changes. He saw to it that the 1950 constitution outlawed the age-old caste of the untouchables and guaranteed that the state shall not discriminate on the grounds of race, caste, sex or place of birth. At Nehru's insistence, Hindu women after 2,000 years were given the right to divorce and equal property rights. He even went so far as to order his Congress Party to establish quotas for the number of women candidates to run for office. In 1966, Nehru's daughter, Mrs. Gandhi, became the first woman in Indian history to lead the nation.

Despite Nehru's efforts, the position of the majority of women and harijans ("children of God," as Gandhi called the untouchables) in Indian society has not been greatly changed. Impressive educational advances have been made, but girls account for a vast majority of the children not in school. Accordingly, the literacy rate among women is a mere 18% compared with 39% for males. The 80 million harijans, moreover, still do mostly menial tasks and frequently live in segregated areas.

The most visible change in India since independence is in the beginnings of a consumer society. Bicycles, wristwatches and sewing machines are now commonplace. TV has come to New Delhi, and will shortly be extended to other cities. The skylines of Bombay and Calcutta have been changed by high-rise buildings, and factories that did not exist 25 years ago today manufacture jet planes, atomic reactors and computers. But perhaps the most important measure of the distance India has come is the fact that for the first time in history it has become self-sufficient in food production. Today the government has 9,000,000 metric tons of food stocks, the biggest hoard in its history, and more than enough to cope with the drought that has struck every five years for a century and is widely expected in 1972.

Averting famine in a land where millions perennially live on the edge of starvation is no small accomplishment. Yet according to recent government figures, half of India's 550 million people continue to live on less than $2.76 a month. In south and east India, 15% of the hospital beds are filled by malnutrition cases, and some economists worry that Indian children will be so stunted by their poor diet that they will grow up to be a "nation of mediocrities." As Finance Minister Y.B. Chavan notes: "Eighty percent of the downtrodden have remained virtually untouched by the development process and it would be perilous to ignore them."

Disparity Continues. Could the government have done better? In hindsight, some Indians now believe that Nehru placed undue emphasis on dams, electrical power projects and industrialization. "Gandhi said we should begin from the village upward and release the energies of the masses of the people," says Novelist Mulk Raj Anand. "Nehru and the Western-educated intelligentsia began with the cities and worked downward. So disparity continues. While we have jumbo jets, luxury automobiles and 100,000-guest wedding receptions, in many villages women have to walk a mile to get potable water for their badly lit homes." Indira Gandhi recently admitted that "some of the directions which we have taken in all good faith are not perhaps entirely adequate for the needs of our people."

It is, of course, all too easy now to fault Nehru for his vaulting ambition to create a modern India through industrialization that would make it independent of the West. For one thing, his aim to a large degree has been accomplished; one of the reasons India was able to defeat Pakistan in last December's war was the fact that it now can produce its own planes and weapons.

But the fact remains that as a land that is 80% rural, India must seek a greater return from its agriculture. As Planning Minister D.P. Dhar told TIME Correspondent James Shepherd last week: "Both wheels of the chariot have to move in unison and harmony. To develop agriculture we had to have technical development. Before we could have irrigation, we had to have power; we had to have roads so the farmer could get his produce to market, trucks to carry it, modernized credit facilities."

Over the years, Indian leaders have talked much of socialism, and no one more so than Mrs. Gandhi. She has nationalized the country's 14 banks and last year pushed through a constitutional amendment eliminating the maharajahs' privy purses, but she has yet to move to break up large agricultural holdings or redistribute wealth and property as she promised in her last campaign. One reason is that few any longer believe that public ownership, with its accompanying reams of red tape, will necessarily provide a panacea for India's problems. Indira's efforts have been aimed at generating greater production both in the private and public sector and hence providing greater employment while curbing inflation.

Another reason Mrs. Gandhi has not moved as rapidly as might be desired is that unlike her father, who was unchallenged in his leadership, she has had to spend a good deal of her time fighting intraparty battles. Now that she has reshaped the Congress Party and achieved an ample majority both in the Parliament and in all but four of the 21 state houses, her programs are expected to have smoother sailing. Her next five-year plan, just announced, will address itself to rural development, including specific programs to create employment, improve education and public health, and build new homes for landless rural laborers.

Mrs. Gandhi has also given top priority to family planning since coming into national leadership in 1966. Had earlier Indian leaders given the program greater emphasis, India's population would not have grown disastrously from 344 million in 1947 to 550 million today. Nonetheless, the slogan "Only two children" has seeped into the Indian consciousness, and the government estimates that there are 15 million fewer babies today than there would have been had family planning not been promoted during the past decade.

Thus, despite a harrowing beginning, India has not only survived its first 25 years, it has demonstrated remarkable resilience as a developing nation. Its disparate states, religious and ethnic groups (who speak 15 different languages) have managed to stay together. After six national elections, democracy has proved to be a rather sturdy institution. "Our greatest achievement is to have survived as a free and democratic nation," said Mrs. Gandhi in her anniversary message. "We have grown to maturity."

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