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Foreign Policy
Summer 1999
India 2020: A Vision for the New
Millennium
By A.P.J. Abdul Kalam with Y.S. Rajan
Reviewed by Eqbal Ahmad*
On April 11, 1999, India test-fired Agni II, its fourth and most advanced ballistic missile, which has a range of over 2,000 kilometers and can carry—so the official statement claims—a “special weapons payload.” The missile was fired exactly 11 months after India conducted a series of five nuclear tests in the Rajasthan desert. Abdul Kalam, the author of India 2020: A Vision for the New Millennium, is the innovator behind this missile.
Kalam, in fact, is a man of many talents. He is the scientific adviser to India’s defense minister and head of the ministry’s Defence Research and Development Organisation. He played a major role in the construction of the nuclear devices that were tested in Pokhran last May. And in July 1980, he directed the flight of Rohini, his country’s first satellite, allowing him to assert proudly that India was now “one of four nations to have a satellite launch facility.” As a legendary and influential figure in India, Kalam’s “vision” deserves attention, not only because of his unique stature in his country’s society, but also because his views reflect the hopes and assumptions of India’s burgeoning national-security élite.
India watchers in the United States and elsewhere may have already noted the themes and argument of this book. Kalam’s collaborator, Y.S. Rajan, is the executive director of the Technology Information Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC), which issued a series of Technology Vision 2020 reports. Kalam was among the authors. Like the TIFAC reports, India 2020 focuses on specific themes—each constituting a chapter in the book—as central to India’s future development. These topics include food and agriculture, chemical industries and biological resources, manufacturing, the services sector, public health, and an enabling network of infrastructure. Each chapter connects the problem—of food, manufacturing, self-reliance in defense production, etc.—to its technological solution and projects the author’s assessment and “vision” for India’s future. Cumulatively, Kalam envisions India in 2020 as a modern and prosperous country endowed with “multimodal” transport networks (air, ocean, highway, and rail), state-of-the-art industries, marshaling yards, and nuclear-power stations servicing a well-fed, adequately housed, and educated population. He prophesies that by 2020, India will become “one of the five biggest economic powers, having self-reliance in national security.”
This attractive vision is shared by many in India’s growing community of scientists and engineers who work in the modern sector, especially the state-supported research-and-development organizations, and in the information and biotechnology outfits that service foreign and national corporations. The trouble with this outlook is that it is a rather instrumentalist take on how India’s complex problems of poverty and social fragmentation will be overcome. There is an overriding faith in the power of technology to solve social and economic problems. Kalam describes this preoccupation unabashedly as “a technology vision for the nation” and focuses solely on “the technological imperatives for India to develop her internal strengths.”
Kalam believes that India will attain its full potential through a “confluence of civilian and defence technologies.” Strategic industries that service the military have, of course, their intrinsic value too. His aphorism is that “Only strength respects strength.” It is a viewpoint that many of India’s leaders share, but most of its intellectuals do not. Meanwhile, the populace swings between the patriotic pride stimulated by a successful space launch or triumphant weapons tests and the doldrums that result from rising prices and falling employment. There were celebrations throughout India immediately after the Pokhran II nuclear tests in May 1998. A few months later, the impoverished masses were in the streets protesting the increase in onion prices. “The mighty onion may bring down the government,” read a newspaper headline. On April 11, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee declaimed: “Agni is a symbol of that resurgent India which is able to say: Yes, we will stand on our feet.” Maybe, but a mere two days afterwards Vajpayee’s coalition was struggling to survive. Less than a week later it collapsed. One constant remained: About one-third of India’s nearly 1 billion people still live below the poverty line.
Unlike the United States, where post–World War II defense spending served for a while as an engine of growth, in South Asia, military Keynesianism has failed to work even temporary wonders. In such poverty-stricken and low-skill environments, defense spending—as it is capital-intensive—does not yield the multiplier effects and “dual uses” of technology that the author of this book envisions. To the contrary, evidence suggests that Kalam’s honor-winning achievements may have set India back both economically and politically.
After decades of lackluster economic performance, India’s gross domestic product saw an annual growth rate in the 7 percent range for several years in the mid 1990s—breaking out of what pundits had sarcastically dubbed the “Hindu rate of growth.” But last year’s nuclear tests and the international sanctions that followed have helped push India back toward the “Hindu rate” of 3.5–4 percent per year. It is unlikely that even the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party of former prime minister Vajpayee would claim this development as an achievement.
More ominously, India’s achievements in defense technology, and its willingness to test them, have stimulated a dangerous arms race in South Asia that only hurts the region’s future. Shooting itself in the foot, Pakistan matched India’s five nuclear tests in the Rajasthan desert with six of its own in the mountains of Baluchistan. Pakistani television is ablaze with Islamabad’s retaliatory missile tests of the Ghauri II and Shaheen I missiles. The authors of this book provide glimpses into the mindset behind this problematic development but, understandably, offer no solutions.
Endnotes
*: Eqbal Ahmad was professor emeritus of international relations at Hampshire College and a columnist for several newspapers worldwide. This reveiew was written shortly before he passed away in May. Back.