"The 21st century belongs to India” – such a dream is enticing many Indians. But there are too many nagging
doubts about the realism of such a prospect. How can India blossom if over half our population continues to be
poor and miserable, with millions under-nourished and driven to early death? How can we embrace the future
if so many regions and so many people are left behind or grow from bad to worse even as the national income or GDP races ahead?
"The 21st century belongs to India” – such a dream is enticing many Indians. But there are too many nagging
doubts about the realism of such a prospect. How can India blossom if over half our population continues to be
poor and miserable, with millions under-nourished and driven to early death? How can we embrace the future
if so many regions and so many people are left behind or grow from bad to worse even as the national income or GDP races ahead?
Ours is an ancient land and civilization, and we have inherited a rich body of thought material from our past.
Our forefathers gave the concept of zero to the world. Bordered by the Himalayas, the Arabian Sea, Indian
Ocean and the Bay of Bengal, this sub-continent has had a long and rich experience with philosophy and theories of economy and statecraft. However, we suffer from the colonial legacy of negating our heritage.
The leaders of independent India in 1947 chose to retain the foundations of the British Indian state and the
colonial notion of trusteeship. They chose not to make a break with the past, but to prolong its life. The perpetuation of European institutions and concepts of peace, order and good government, complemented by the so-called free market reforms in the present period, has led to an acute and deepening crisis of values in Indian society.
The leading ideologues of the ruling elite believe and propagate the view that wisdom can only be obtained
from Oxford or Cambridge, or from Harvard or Duke University. They paint everything from our past as
backward and obscurantist, creating the impression that we Indians have no heritage of thought material that
is worth anything in the present or for the future. In apparent conflict with the English educated elite, there
are so-called nationalists who resist everything foreign and glorify everything from the past, especially what is
most backward and obscurantist. Between them, these trends leave Indian minds rudderless.
Within the Marxist school, too, there are some who think with European brains and western concepts. They
accept the existing political theory and institutions of democracy as the most advanced. They accept capitalist
development as inevitable. They rely on colonial laws to legitimise repression of those who resist capitalist development.
There are others who, in the name of giving an indubitably Indian form to Marxism, deny the universal
lessons from the experience of the worldwide movements for progress. Some of them bury themselves in remote forests or hills, in the name of implementing Marxism in the concrete conditions of India, leaving the population in the cities to be bombarded by Euro-centric values and theories.
The times are calling on enlightened Indian minds to make a clean break with the colonial legacy and with all
forms of backwardness from the past.
The need of the hour is to elaborate and develop modern Indian thought – philosophy, political and economic
theory – so as to address the problem that stares us in the face. This is the problem of ending the arbitrariness
of power and the colonial style plunder in new and varied forms. It is the problem of redefining the foundations
and reconstituting the structure of the Indian polity and economy, based on modern Indian thought and
consistent with the most advanced scientific knowledge internationally. This magazine, called Ghadar Jaari
Hai, is dedicated to this call of the times.
The struggle is alive for the Navnirman or reconstitution of India – on the basis of a modern definition of democracy, and the principle that the State is duty bound to ensure prosperity and protection for all. A prosperous future requires us to overcome the poverty of material conditions as well as the poverty of thought in command of social life.
This magazine is a forum for advancing the struggle in the realm of ideas, which is linked closely with the
struggle to open the door to progress for Indian society.
This inaugural issue is devoted to the lessons of the Ghadar of 1857, in honour of the 150th anniversary
of that historic milestone in the political life of South Asia.