Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: "Father of the Nation"; "Against Western consumerism for decades"; "Swadeshi's most ardent supporter"; "Charkha's Creator"--these are all labels that one easily attaches to Gandhi. But, "India's first capitalist"? Yes, I strongly believe so.
Just as October 2008 has shown that capitalism is not the erstwhile Washington Consensus or the Anglo-Saxon model, so too, I believe that the cloak of capitalism certainly covers (and fits well) the man who chose a loin-cloth as his symbol (in Madurai in 1921).
Why do I believe this. Simple: Gandhiji was for individuals going out and creating wealth for themselves. The charkha was his favored tool. He believed that if individuals labored on their own, they could create wealth for themselves and their families. He never approved communist-style collectivism; nor was he a believer in some "third-way" cooperative model. Yes, his capitalism wasn't about large listed companies, but it was about market forces and prices being set by the same laws that Adam Smith had postulated.
He postulated that India's demands for cloth was more than its domestic supply--and thus there was a market for handspun and hand-woven khadi. Yes, he didn't believe in foreign trade, but in the 1920s, when his economic beliefs became clearer, the un-divided India was truly a sub-continent with an economy that was large enough to grow on its own.
Apart from this fundamental belief in individuals, he had strong supported technology--only his was what he felt "appropriate" technology, and appropriate was defined as appropriate for India's villages. Indeed Gandhiji's belief about villages becoming economic entities is, in my view, nicely repackaged eighty plus years later as the pithy: "Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid". Gandhi was certainly aware of the bottom of the pyramid and he did all he could to increase its fortune.
Gandhiji's Gujarat was as mercantile a community as it is today. He went to South Africa to fight a case for a businessman--an early example of globalization in services (at least services in the British Empire), where qualifications in one part--the Inns of Court at London--were recognized in East London, thousands of kilometers away--just as the WTO now urges countries to do. MK Gandhi never hesitated to work with mill-owners, businessmen, and other sundry capitalists in Imperial India--from Ahmedabad's Sarabhais to Mumbai's Parsis--the Tatas and Godrejs were as large contributors to him then as they are to the rest of the nation today.
Gandhi had a clear idea of economics and its power. By substituting homegrown yarn and cloth for the mills of Lancashire, he consciously struck at the root of the Raj--the commercial interests that kept India part of an Empire. And, when those commercial interests were reduced--and weakened by World War 2--the British walked away--leaving Gandhi to father a nation, but also unconsciously become India's first capitalist
Monday, October 27, 2008
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