Mandate of the 21st centuryAt long last, India is shaking off its chains to emerge a free nation. In many ways, what is happening harks back to the days of the 15th century when India was a prominent world trader, mostly in its peninsular region. In his book, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India published as part of The New Cambridge History of India, Om Prakash, a professor of economic history at Delhi University, describes “how, over a period of three centuries, the Indian economy expanded and was integrated into the pre-modern world economy”.Prof. Prakash‚s book was published in 1998. Nine years before that, Citibank (India) chief Jerry Rao was charged by his boss John Reed, global chairman of Citicorp the parent company, to launch consumer financial services in India. Those were the bad old days of licence-permit raj, when inept government officials and corrupt politicians exercised crippling controls over the economy. Banking was seen as an instrument of government-ordained ‚Ëœdevelopment‚ programmes rather than the enabling vehicle of commerce it is meant to be. Jerry accepted the challenge to change the paradigm.As his comrade-in-arms, I did the research that showed that India‚s robust mercantile tradition was first usurped by British colonialists, who overcame the challenge of the French, Dutch and the Portuguese. Later it was denied by Indian nationalists who were influenced by Mohandas Gandhi‚s aversion to Western modernism, and Jawaharlal Nehru‚s ideological opposition to Western capitalism. Long before the British consolidated their hold and the Indian nationalist movement flowered, Indian merchants and traders dealt with the world on their own terms. For example, the Multani hundi was honoured as far afield as Constantinople, the forerunner of modern-day Istanbul, which served as the capital of the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Empires between 330 AD and 1923. The hundi was, in effect, a letter of credit that enabled Indian traders to do business across Europe through Turkey.This innate genius of Indians was utilised by the British East India Company to build up its holdings. Things went south after the British Crown asserted its paramount power to nationalise the East India Company. Later, Indian nationalists with their political and ideological disdain for mercantile activity suppressed the Indian flair for trade and commerce. In its place rose an army of bureaucrats, who held power at the behest of the state and its political leaders. By the time Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi were done, trade and commerce was reviled as unworthy and “planned development” as ordained by bureaucrats and politicians became the norm.From the 1830s onward, English was introduced as a medium of instruction and a suitably adapted Western liberal curriculum became the norm. During this time, India‚s great universities were established and generations of students were “instructed” so they could become adequate civil servants serving the Crown. The nationalist movement was led by a British civil servant but influenced by professionals such as doctors and lawyers and they fought for independence on the basis of fairness and common law.In the end, what a Dutch official Van Rheede observed with admiration ‚ the culture of entrepreneurship ‚ was lost. Generations of university graduates, skilled in Byzantine bureaucracy and arrogantly disdainful of commerce, began to rule India. The politics, the philosophy and the economics of the Raj became deeply entrenched in the university system. Entrepreneurial talent was driven underground to the nether levels of Indian society. After 1991, when the government of the day scrapped licence-permit raj, the state was forced to retreat and loosen its all-pervasive control. India‚s traditional entrepreneurial skills began to surface again. Trade and commerce started to flourish as the privilegentsia increasingly found itself ill-equipped to handle the demands of the modern information society. Even the fine arts and performing arts began to blossom. Today, the process has proceeded further apace. Buoyed by the explosion of personal freedom, the economy is booming; the arts are on a steady climb to international recognition and political freedom has been embellished by civic action that calls the state to account at all levels.On a trip to China in 1998, US President Bill Clinton called personal freedom “the mandate of the 21st century” and asserted that it is “indivisible”. His speech was obviously aimed at China, whose totalitarian regime has embraced capitalism and delivered, in terms of economic growth, results on a par with any Western country. Millions of its poor have been lifted out of grim and hopeless predicament. But they lack the political freedom that is essential to guarantee justice and fair play. In India, willy-nilly we‚ve played the role of the tortoise, moving slowly but surely to become the only other giant nation to embrace liberty as a right, and the global responsibility to go with it. If indeed the 21st century will be dominated by competition between the two Asian giants, proponents of personal freedom will side with India.(Rajiv Desai is the Delhi-based president of Comma and a well-known political commentator)