Ram Madhav: ‘Even with 8% growth India will reach nowhere… It needs over 10% for 20 years'

Indian Express

7 hours ago

Senior BJP leader Ram Madhav's new book, 'The New World: 21st Century Global Order and India', was recently launched at an event in the national capital. In an interview with The Indian Express, Madhav speaks on various issues ranging from India's bid for the United Nations Security Council (UNSC)'s permanent membership to the need for building the brand Bharat. Excerpts:
India should consider its immediate neighbourhood and extended neighbourhood including ASEAN as its priority. Indians have a habit. They think that their utmost priority is the relationship with America and Europe. Nobody denies it's an important relationship. But your interests are today in your neighborhood and extended neighbourhood in the East, because that is where in fact you face China's challenge.
So my point is that India is not going to get (UNSC) permanent membership alone. Whenever India gets it, although India has a rightful claim to it, another five countries will come. So there will be 10-12 permanent members in the Security Council, and assume that all 10 have a veto. Can the Security Council function with five? It is not able to function. It's not able to make a single decision. Forget about a big decision. If you want to designate one fellow as a terrorist, international terrorist, we are not able to achieve it because China will block it. India has to think beyond those institutions. That is where regional leadership becomes important. It's a very important requirement, especially in the Indian Ocean region, where India enjoys very strong natural ties. We call America our natural ally. We would call Indonesia our natural ally. When Prime Minister Modi went there, he and Indonesia President inaugurated a big statue of Gitopadesha in the main square of Jakarta. Why don't you call Indonesia your natural ally?
So I mentioned to you about this romanticism of people in India in general. For example, we assume that we are already a Vishwaguru, no doubt. But for you to be really effective you have to be a strong economic power first. In the 20th century old world order, the economy was tied to trade. In the 21st century, remember, the economy is tied to technology.
Our economy is growing very fast. You will see that we have reached 8% growth, which is a very good thing for India. But even with 8% growth also we will reach nowhere in the next 20 years. You have to cross 10%, 10% consistently, for 20 years. No country in the world has achieved this, but in the last 75 years India has not achieved it even in one year. If India really wants to become a big player, it has to forget everything else, and focus on the economy.
So what happened in the last world order was that because of people like Hitler and Mussolini, the liberals in the West had made nationalism a bad sentiment and created a kind of a liberal international order. The new order will see a big change in that nationalism will come back as a respected ideology.
Today, nationalism is making a comeback in country after country. What is MAGA or 'Making America Great Again'? It is the American version of that nationalist sentiment. China is a staunchly nationalist country today. Yes, we think China is communist, everybody knows it's very nationalist. We are also a country that takes pride in its sovereign national identity, and that same thing is happening in Europe. So one big shift will be from that international liberal attitude to a nationalist sentiment.
But as a reaction, what's happening is that the liberals are going towards extreme liberalism, which is wokeism, in order to counter the rise of this nationalist or sovereign sentiment. Trump's victory of that scale he secured in the last year's election was also because of people's opposition to rising wokeism. People are scared that this wokeism will destroy our families, our whole systems.
When we become big, what is it that we offer to the world in terms of a certain value system? When America became big, it offered you a certain liberal ideology, which also included western institutions, western language, western customs. When China is becoming big and influential, it's offering a kind of political system that is dominant, dictatorial. It gives you all economic goodies, but no political freedom.
What will be India's contribution? Firstly, we are always a very democratic people, not because we adopted democracy in 1947 or 1950 through our Constitution. Ambedkar himself used to say that India has traditionally been democratic. So we shall always uphold democracy as a value. But together with democracy, we have to offer certain values, like family. We actually consider the whole world as a family. Environment protection is a very liberal idea in the West. Conservatives don't care about the environment, but we care about the environment. The Prime Minister's biggest contribution in the very beginning in terms of ideas and values was giving yoga to the whole world.
So India has to work on those ideas. Indian intellectuals, Indian scholars, have to work on those ideas. So I ended my book by saying that this brand Bharat is something that India has to seriously think about. Otherwise, you will become a carbon copy of a developed country.
I don't want to demean anybody. We have great intellectuals, but they don't give original ideas. We are happy reading here, reading there, except reading our own. The West has writers who contribute original ideas. Among the top 10 books with original ideas, not a single Indian book will be there. In R and D and innovation we are very weak. Despite the Prime Minister's great push, what we call innovation in India, I'm sorry to say, is just imitation.
Wars in this century will be very different. They will be fought in a manner that at the end of the day, you will not be able to determine who is a winner and who is a loser. Because here, war is not just what you are fighting, but also what you are telling the world, what you call propaganda war and perception management.
Whether the US succeeded in their real aim of taking away the capability of making nuclear weapons from Iran is the question. You claim so but there is a counterclaim by Iranians that their capabilities are intact.
That applies to Operation Sindoor too. We had a decisively strong response to terror that emanates from Pakistan. But together with that, for the management of global perception, all-party delegations were sent. Domestic Opposition has been silenced now because the very same Opposition went and told the world that, no, we punished the terrorists. It's a brilliant move by the Prime Minister.
As for the caste census, the Indian economy has a major welfare component today. Maybe having good data helps in implementing your programmes more effectively. So today, for example, we have schemes for OBCs. We are looking at them as a group, but they're not any homogeneous group. So who is moving forward, who is still remaining backward? Who needs more support? All these things become easy for the government if they have the data before them.
So far as delimitation is concerned, I have heard the Home Minister (Amit Shah) clearly saying that there won't be any injustice done to any region or state. I'm sure whenever that is undertaken, it will be a kind of a pro-rata system or something where somebody who is performing well is not punished. Anyway, it is a couple of years away.