Enter the Age of Enlightenment

The Soul of a Nation, Long Suppressed, Finds Utterance

Development is a spiritual quest. India’s journey on this path has been a long and arduous one. Various leaders have taken the nation in different directions according to their own respective spiritual progress. The public policy developed, from time to time, in keeping with the evolution of this search.

The latest thrust to the mission came, on May 12, in the form of the Prime Minister’s exhortation, contained in the aphorism, ‘Ātma-Nirbhar Bhārat’ meaning, ‘Self-Reliant India’. That he advanced it at the crucial juncture of the collapse of the Western global order, and the existential crisis it has brought in its wake, is significant.

Universal Consciousness

The Prime Minister has emphatically stated that ‘Self-Reliant India’ is not an isolationist paradigm but one that includes in its ambit the welfare of all living creatures. “India's self-reliance is ingrained in the happiness, co-operation and peace of the world,” he said, reflecting his vision of the nation’s central role in the new world order.

The Prime Minister’s confidence indicates that he has perhaps realised the true Self, beyond the body and mind, which will complete our nation’s developmental trajectory.

The clue to this Self can be gained from Vedānta Śāstra. It is the Upanişads that refer to it as the Ātmā. It is of the nature of Truth-Consciousness-Bliss, Sat-Cit-Ānanda. They say that it is no different from the supreme Brahman.

This Self or Ātmā is that effulgence within us that animates and stands as witness to both the body and mind. Through the body and mind, it witnesses the entire world. Since the world itself is within the ambit of this infinite consciousness, it follows that the perceived world is part of the Self.

The Ātmā is ever Ātma-Nirbhar. Being complete in itself, there is nothing that this Bliss-incarnate Self has to seek. Yet, the body and mind exist as instruments of the Self. They are there to play their part in upholding and building the world. This function is what the Śāstra calls Dharma.

It must be underscored that the manuals of Dharma do not advocate a life of total asceticism. Rather, the path they advocate traverses harmoniously through the puruşārthas, artha (material wealth) and kāma (fulfilment of personal desires), before taking one to the final pinnacle of mokşa (absolute freedom).

Development is Self Discovery

The Merriam-Webster dictionary explains Soul as “a person’s total Self”. It also states that it is the embodied spiritual principle. The same dictionary defines Soul-Searching as an “examination of one's conscience especially with regard to motives and values”.

Development is a euphemism in public policy for the process of collective Soul-Searching. It leads to freedom and endows a sense of social purpose. This is important, for humans are social beings. They constantly seek harmony with society.

Development, consequently, implies a society’s pursuit to find its rightful place in the world.

Body-Mind Trap

Analysts who are wary that the new policy direction is a throw-back to the pre-liberalisation era seem to be still trapped at the level of the body and mind. The gross body is made up of skin, flesh, bone, marrow and so on. Is the Self a physical entity, a conglomerate of these disparate parts?

Self-reliance, in that case, would imply being dependent on our physical capabilities. Such a society would exist at the animal level and certainly cannot contribute much to the world. Indians have proved over much of their colonial past and more so in the last 73 years that we are much more than mere sweatshop labourers. Therefore, this interpretation of India’s Self simply cannot be true.

Is the mind, then, which perceives the gross body, the Self? Our experiments with Neo-Liberalism disprove this regressive interpretation as well.

The mind-body complex is nothing but the petty ego.

While liberalisation led to material advancement, it was at the cost of spurring competition among individuals by encouraging the aggrandisation of their respective egos. We became unsustainably narcissistic. By putting individual egos ahead of the society, the policy divided us perilously. It has very much driven us to the present impasse.

What the Prime Minister has given is thus a novel paradigm that plugs the holes in the earlier interpretations of the Self. Ātma-Nirbhartā or Self-Reliance effectively addresses all the failures of the earlier world orders. It presents us the rare opportunity to create the beautiful world of our dreams.

Let us rise to the occasion by affirming our true Self.

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