Indian Defence Review

A failure to do this could unleash socio-economic turbulence on a massive scale. The Indian Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh summed it up very succinctly when he said: “In the first 50 years of India’s Independence we were faced with two shortages – shortages of food and shortages of foreign exchange. Today, we have solved them both – the first through the Green Revolution and the second through higher export earnings and a more liberal trade regime. Today, our key problem is quite different. Our biggest single problem is the lack of jobs for ordinary people. We need employment for the semi-skilled workers on a large scale, and it is not happening to anything like the degree to which we are witnessing it in China. We need to industrialise to provide jobs for people with fewer skills. Why is this not happening on the scale that we should hope?”

Security Implications of Demographic Trends

There is a serious need to engage in a systematic study of the key drivers of our demography that are inexorably shaping India’s internal security environment. Historically, periods of massive youth bulges have unfortunately coincided with bloody revolutions and violent upsurges. The Islamic world incidentally, is in the throes of a youth bulge. Far from massive economic upsurges, it has led to the rise of violent anti state ideologies and nihilistic terrorist violence. The rise of Left Wing Extremism in India’s marginalised rural spaces is as much an outcome of a failure of the infrastructural penetration of the state in these tribal areas, as it is a mathematical implication of India’s rising youth population that is without jobs.

We need to generate one billion jobs by 2026. Today, we are stagnating at some 350 million jobs. Our economy cannot afford the luxury of jobless growth any longer.

The Naxalities and Maoists are all in the 15-30 age group. If the Indian state fails to provide large scale employment to its burgeoning youth population, it will have to prepare to deal with the consequences of unrest and violent movements amongst large bands of the rural unemployed. Left Wing Extremism already affects some 180 out of 602 districts in India.23 It could merely be a precursor to much higher levels of violence and unrest that could result from a failure to provide meaningful employment to our vast number of youngmen entering the working age group. An army of the unemployed gazing balefully at the shameless islands of affluence in our metropolitan centres, can be the best prescription for an internal security disaster. What we need is an attitudinal paradigm shift from capital intensive to manpower intensive growth strategies.

Mohan Das Karam Chand Gandhi’s rural egalitarian bias may have much more to recommend it that mere romanticism. The Mahtma’s insights into the Indian reality were not anachronistic. They were prophetic and unerring. We do not seem to have comprehended the sheer scale and enormity of the challenge we confront. We need to generate one billion jobs by 2026. Today, we are stagnating at some 350 million jobs. Our economy cannot afford the luxury of jobless growth any longer. The internal security pressures generated by such patently flawed growth strategies have the potential to rend the Indian nation state apart. The challenges we face are enormous. So paradoxically, are the opportunities.

At the very least, India’s youth bulge gives it the highest RMP (Recruitable Male Population) in the world. There is a need to revisit our basic axioms and come up with radically different growth paths that can usher in a labour (and not capital intensive) economy that is freed from its unsustainable dependence on fossil fuels and switches to solar and other alternative energies in a demassified fashion. Our very paradigm of what a sustainable human civilisation should be, needs to be reinvented. The consequences of a failure to do so could be a catastrophic for our national security. Let us not forget that the mighty Soviet Union had collapsed internally and not due to a massive external attack.

Notes

1. “Demographics of India,” Wikipidea.
2. Ibid.
3. Jayati Ghosh and CP Chandrashekhar,“India’s Potential Demographic Dividend,” The Hindu, January 17, 2006.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Jayati Ghosh, “The Uncertain Advantages of Demographic Change,” The Asian Age, January 26, 2006.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Edward Lace, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India, (London: Little Brown, 2006)
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Will Hutton, Writing on the Wall: Why we Must Embrace China as a Partner or Face it as an Enemy, (New York: Free Press [Simon & Schuster], 2006)
22. Edward, n. 15.
23. Prakash Singh, The Naxalite Movement in India, (New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 2006)