Lessons that India can learn from the Scottish secession

The recent referendum on whether Scotland should secede from the United Kingdom was won with a 10 percent margin by the “no” camp, after opinion polls had predicted a virtual photo-finish. Unionists from England were relieved, but this may well be a Pyrrhic victory, as Scotland’s unhappiness persists, and anyway they will end up devolving a lot more authority to local administrations than they have done so far. Although, as a confirmed Anglophobe, I applauded the Scots’ efforts to break away from the United Kingdom, I must admit that, overall, it is probably better for the Scots to stay with the union, for several reasons. A small independent Scotland with five million people would be considerably less viable than a 64-million — strong United Kingdom. The question of economic viability also looms: what happens when North Sea oil runs out? As it is, Scotland gets a disproportionate amount of entitlement spending from Britain. What will replace that? [caption id=“attachment_1725969” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Scots celebrate the “Yes” vote. AFP[/caption] Then there is the question of defence. What would happen to the Nato nuclear submarines based in Scottish waters? And finally, what currency would Scotland use if the British refuse to allow them to use the pound, as their leaders swore they would? As for Britain, the secession would probably trigger off other moves against the despised English overlords from Wales and Northern Ireland. Further, it would underline Britain’s precipitous decline from global power to third-rate, tiny country: how could they justify their disproportionate and undeserving membership in the UN Security Council and similar pretensions to greatness (‘Great Britain’, hah!)? There was a lot of noise in the closing stages of the ballot, as the hitherto-complacent English establishment was rattled by the rapid rise of the “yes” vote’s share. The best commentary I heard, however, was from KQED San Francisco’s Forum programme, which featured a “yes” campaigner, a Financial Times journalist, and an expert on Europe from Stanford. I am indebted to this programme for several insights. It is also the case that this episode has relevance for India as it increases its own profile globally. It is interesting for India from three perspectives: the decline of Europe and the rise of its oppressed minorities; the periphery’s anger against a remote centre and the resentment against economic neo-liberalism; and the persistence of cultural memory. First, the long-term secular decline of Europe as a whole has been accelerated by this referendum. Already beset with a problem of low birth-rates, and troubled by increasingly radicalised immigrant populations, the dream of a united, prosperous, European Union that pulls its weight in global affairs as a large market looks increasingly remote. Taking a cue from the Scots, other groups with grievances, such as Basque/Catalans in Spain, Flemish in the Netherlands, and so forth, will no doubt bring up similar referenda in their respective countries. This strengthens my contention that the UK (and similarly France) are has-been powers, and that the only part of Europe that merits Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attention is Germany. Let us remember that Germans, rather than facing secession, successfully integrated their countries’ two estranged parts: that means people see value in a united Germany. Second, there is substantial anger in Scotland over what is seen as imperial rule by Westminster, the British bureaucratic system set up as a construct to run the (alas, long-vanished) empire. Westminster is seen as run by a more-or-less hereditary class of English elites, who treat the peripheral Scots with contempt, as they used to treat their dominions. For instance, it was when their citizens were massacred as mere cannon-fodder at Gallipoli in World War-I that Australia realised Westminster was evil. Jallianwallah Bagh was India’s wake-up call. The relevance to India is that in many ways India has retained the Westminster-style imperial bureaucracy, with, for example, “collectors” whose job description is as tax-collectors rather than public servants. Government is dominated by traditional upper-class public-school-educated elites and hereditary political families. Though it is the North-East that feels most alienated by this imperial rule, the entire periphery of India resents this. Before it reaches crisis proportions, it would be a good idea for Lutyens’ Delhi to recognise the animosity. The fact that a periphery-based (Gujarat, lower-middle-class) Prime Minister is in power is a good thing now. There are those who would suggest that the secessionist movement in Jammu and Kashmir is analogous to Scottish demands for self-rule. That is a false analogy. So far as I know, the Scots never ethnically cleansed, raped, and murdered stray English people who happened to live among them. No, on the contrary, Kashmiris have been the beneficiaries of great largesse from the Indian taxpayer: plenty of rights with few responsibilities. That situation cannot persist – Muslim Kashmiris will eventually face some tough choices: stay in India or emigrate out. They are not getting a separate country. Third, the feeling, especially among the young in Scotland (where unemployment is high, and many have never held a job) that there is brutal inequality, has led to much anger at Westminster’s neo-liberal, American-style capitalism. Scots look across the sea with envy at their more equitable Scandinavian neighbours, and dream of emulating their welfare states. Whether this is sensible or not, and on balance it isn’t, the palpable increase in inequality in Scotland has led to calls for socialism. This is food for thought for India, whose entire populace has been brainwashed into believing that socialism, and the mai-baap sarkar, presided over by the benign Nehru dynasty, are the answer to their woes: witness brain-dead schemes such as NREGA and Food Security – disastrous but popular, or so we are told – that have bankrupted the exchequer. Unless there is rapid growth and the fruits of that growth accrue to all segments of the public, there will be renewed calls to hark back to the alleged golden age of socialism, which in reality was a catastrophe all around, and made India increasingly backward and caused it to lose any competitive advantage it once had. Regression would be suicidal. Finally, there is the persistence of memory. Many Scots see the English as the Other: they remember as though it were yesterday their famous victory at Bannockburn in 1314, and even more so their utter defeat at Culloden in 1745. (Some call it the ‘Braveheart Effect’ after the vivid Mel Gibson movie, that was plumb on the side of the gallant Scots.) The attempts by the English to destroy Scottish culture, including the banning of Gaelic, never quite succeeded, but remain festering sores. I remember being startled by the vehemence of their hatred of the English when I visited Edinburgh some years ago. As an Indian, I thought of both Scots and English as part of the same brutal empire; indeed the Scots were enthusiastically part of British Indian rule. The British did cultural extermination in India, too: they tried their damnedest to destroy Indian culture and civilisation, and Sanskrit. They, and their successors, the Nehruvian Stalinists, have succeeded to a significant extent against Sanskrit, but happily, regional cultures have been more resilient. That is anyway one of India’s greatest strengths: that it is fundamentally a decentralised system of local autonomies. But it would behoove the Indian government to realise that while a certain amount of Hindi is palatable as a counterweight to excessive English, too much would be counterproductive. Instead of Hindi Prachar Sabhas alone, it should be looking at strengthening all the regional languages. The real solution for India, just as it is for the United Kingdom, lies in policies that produce inclusive growth. Anemic growth during the Nehruvian era led to fissiparous tendencies, as peripheral groups correctly figured that they gained little from being part of the Union. However, if India is able to accelerate growth, and rise to 10 percent GDP growth which may well have been the natural growth rate in India’s golden age centuries ago, the rationale for secession will disappear. Britain, as a country that hardly makes anything anybody else wants, is doomed to economic irrelevance: personally, the only things that I find interesting there are Scotch whisky, Burberry raincoats, and journalism (flawed with jingoism, as it may be). Once the workshop of the world, de-industrialising Britain will not be attractive to Scots, so there will be another referendum in the next five to ten years. 71 percent of young Scots voted to secede, and as they gain more prominence, the UK will eventually fragment. India needs to pursue precisely the opposite trajectory. Young Indians are far more optimistic about the country, and rightly so: this is the Indo-Pacific century, and according to some reports, India is following China’s trajectory, only 13 years behind. The task of the Modi government is to ensure that their hopes are not dashed.