ARSHID MALIK

Indian gained independence from the British imperialistic rule. What exactly does that confer? Was it just the retreat of British to their base or the real liberalisation of India? I believe it was the former. India somehow managed to push the British out although I have good reasons to believe that the British retreated owing to the fact that things “back home” were not very pleasant and the kind of attention and pure capital the British needed to keep India as a colony was too heavy on their pockets as things were running berserk economically and politically back where they belonged. I am not at all attempting to belittle the bravery and the sacrifices made by the India’s sons of the soil but rather pointing out something that is historically very important and if we do not heed to this “something” we may really end up misunderstanding the whole phenomenon of the post colonial history of our country.

The point in fact is that once India gained freedom from the British it was not “pure” freedom but rather a subjective deduction of historical facts that earned the people who fought the battle against the British some laurels after all and it was very necessary that things should have gone that very way for the common people who threw their heart and soul into gaining independence from the imperialistic rule. But the political elite should have tackled it otherwise. They should have understood that true freedom from all kinds of hegemonic imperialistic conjectures actually resides in the shade of the fact that you, as a nation, become independent in every possible manner and do not rely on structures and super structures of the imperialistic world. Rather than attempting to build the nation from scratch, from the very earth that bears our weight, the political elite started taking and asking favours from the imperialistic nations to build their own nation better.

India soon adopted many coveted economic and political structures from the imperialistic West, including the British who had ruled colonized their country for almost nine decades. These structures were not fit for India as it was a grossly multicultural society with people speaking different tongues, wearing different costumes, eating different foods every hundred kilometres. These were by all means major errors that crept into the system that India is as a country and eventually failed to meet the ends that they were supposed to meet. The incidental fact that deserves attention is that even though India gained independence it was and remains to be dependent on the powers which controlled it fully at a certain point of time in history. What is happening now, after having fought for decades against imperialistic and having sacrificed thousands of lives, we are offering control over our economic and political contours to the imperialists.

We rely on the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations and scores of other such bodies and organizations that have been formulated by the imperialistic world to orchestrate benign hegemonic control over the developing countries – or rather the third world countries. On must understand that switching ever-evident political terms with more polite ones does not bestow a developing nation with the respect and pride that it deserves. We would need somewhat like another seventy sessions to understand the world play of the imperialistic world via media the science called Semiotics – the science that studies signs and sign processes as eventually every world is a sign for something or the other.

Neo colonialism. Yes, that’s the word for what India welcomed post independence. “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.” Maybe we realize that or not and furthermore we may not even subscribe to the theory but it remains a fact that India is controlled by super powerful nations thousands of miles away from it. “Technically, colonialism has ended but the lust for domination still continues. Even after giving independence to their colonies, the mentality of the imperialist powers has not changed. With change in circumstances and the centers of power, colonialism has also changed its shape and still continues to do so with the result that imperialist powers still continue to dominate various countries of the world but through new methods.” Indira Gandhi declared at the seventh summit of the NAM held at New Delhi in 1983 that neo-colonialism came wrapped in all types of packages-in technology and communications, commerce and culture.

To cut the story short, neo-colonialism in very simple words means that the suppressed becomes the suppressor and inverts authority into foreign hands by attempting to capitalize on the much coveted “Free Trade and Globalization” which eventually boils down to the fact that while you are promised inestimable wealth and growth you are basically being continuously trapped into international power structures which grab labour, finished and unfinished goods, raw material and the likes of it from you at very cheap rates while lending you loans to up your ante and the loans carry heavy interest rate which you will never ever be able to repay.

When the suppressed turns into the suppressor what happens is depicted via an excellent example conducted by some psychologists in America. The experiment was conducted in the 1940s. Two psychiatrists used dolls to study children’s attitudes about race. They found that “black children often preferred to play with white dolls over black; that, asked to fill in a human figure with the color of their own skin, they frequently chose a lighter shade than was accurate; and that the children gave the color “white” attributes such as good and pretty, but “black” was qualified as bad and ugly”. So what is the point? The point is that we as a population, especially the younger generations identify with the West rather than with their own costumes and cultures. We love the jeans. We love Hollywood. We love reggae and rock. We go head-banging to the thumps of loud heavy metal music. We are generations lost. We go crazy when “Backstreet Boys” or “Britney Spears” makes a public appearance in India while we have forgotten all about our own.

As long as we do not secure all access to our indoors and identify with who and what we are we are doomed to turn into a puppet nation that will one day be thoroughly controlled by the imperialistic powers and believe me we won’t even notice for the lure of Western promises is so surrealistically magical that you simply cannot elude its allure.

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