Glimpses of the times beginning 2025
The COVID-19 brought out a different world. In the post COVID19 era, the social institutions are devoid of any moral cord. The human bond is judged by material calculations of time bound targets. Since that moral cord is missing, the world has become a place for selected sections, enjoying the good of all the places, always mobile with all potential advantages. Might is right and materialism matters.
Therefore, social movements of reformation are not appearing. Moral altruism is hardly being internalized. Religious solidarities provide notional understanding of good past, while real stick is economic might, military muscle and trusteeships for survival. It has created a new political consciousness of looking for that leadership, which provides ownership and gives hope of trusteeship. It is measured through AIs and social media ratings, through value added individuals and resource generating institutions.
This is new order managed by technologies and mapped by economic nationalism. It diffuses patriotic fervor of national solidarity and religious passion for communal commonality. The future of the children is perceived in technical education, skilled labour and economic adventurism and moving out from the native places, through symbolic capital of social networking.
This is new thinking about the way of life, replacing the belief in the political religious discourses to trace the trail. The communal divides are in subtle forms, it is noticeable, plain without moral content, which exhibit no constraint and no exteriority in the religious vocalizations. The religious moral is delinked from instrumental unanimity; social is separated from economic, as health from medicine. It has made an individual anchorless in communal politics.
The uneducated working class perceives peace paramount for its survival. Previously, it would be used for violence and made believe that its opportunity lies in communal or class strife. That line of thinking is not here It is not easy to generate funds for sustaining the protest. Disengagement from work means possible perish for a working class person. He hardly can afford joining protests without work and income.
India has relatively done better internally and externally, in this post COVID economic order. It has overtaken China in its population growth. Its fifty percent population is below 25 years that furnishes it opportunity of demographic dividend advantage. There are apprehensions about widespread unemployment, growing income inequality, and persistent corruption, poor quality of public services, environmental degradation and weakening of social institutions.
But then, it is global phenomenon. India’s diverse development and unique pluralism have made working class diverse, preferring to work away from their native places. It is engaged in selling, servicing and busy in constructions, roads, buildings and networking. The state of over unemployment makes a daily wager on pins for sustained employment. If he does not work, he is replaceable from unemployed migrant chunk, available in sufficient numbers. The other classes, mostly housed in online work are too busy in procuring agenda and meeting economic targets of multinational corporations.
This class is internationally mobile, in non extensive mode of time. It is understood that ‘Microsoft has announced a US$3 billion investment to expand its artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing capabilitie’ in India. This will generate rapidly evolving developer community and profound technology service sector at a time when American firms are on the path of redesigning new factories to go for fresh manufacturing plants, for its gains and for the installation of robots. They need our technological experts to help them in this endeavor.
It would be a prime source of foreign exchange. At present, China is far ahead in manufacturing and finish technologies. It could prompt its development through its authoritarian regime that could work for people’s welfare and push its agenda of becoming superpower by changing the social geographies with displacement of population at will. This becomes difficult in democratic countries with public dissent and waste of time in bureaucratic niggle. It is now changing by putting limitations through the defined limits.
Since globalization has made time, space and knowledge compressed, unlike in past, the informal preaching and sermons from institutional sources and familiar groups are not believed, but talked about. It does not stir movements. Any protest is a protest in pieces, disregarded as media noise or misinformation campaign from different sites. It does not hold any threat for the ruling elites. The mass movements to topple the ruling elite can only happen in a nation-state, if the economics of global elites is derailed. The interest of global elites is organically linked for maneuvering the potential of youth.
The educated skilled youth does not need familiar work places, well-known masters and same working sites for its career bargain. The unskilled, if not engaged, turn into lumpen proletariat and face instant rejection. The excessive internal migration of unskilled workers and the external immigration of skilled and semiskilled working class have distinct cultural contours of new places, both inside the country and outside their country.
That is generating divisive social formations, engaged on time bound pattern of internal- external identities, for their economic survival. Hybridism of cultural economics is so dynamic and quick that it leaves no space to generate the social movements. Indian pluralism has an advantage from time to time to produce that cult leadership, which has clear acceptance for its hegemonic policies. The present ruling disposition has made it clear that the peace is paramount for internal stability. It has clearly defined patriotism, as codified nationalism, like codified religion. With robust security apparatus and technological surveillance, data bank is always in making and unmaking of classifications.
The educated middle class is controlled through the institutional mechanism. The internal peace has allowed huge investments on infrastructure and construction works all over the country. India’s foreign policy is heralded as a success story outside its neighborhood. China, through dam and OROB initiative, is amassing its energy sources in a big leap for developing super technologies to conquer space, even. Indian diplomacy with China is to engage it for mutual interests.
The ‘Jaishankar-Misri canon’ is working on the doctrine of peace dividend internationally, and economic interweaving stretchable maneuvering, nationally. While Pakistan is wooing Tajikistan for help from the Northern Alliances against Taliban, Afghanistan is coming closer to India. Once regarded as strategic external asset, Taliban is fast turning into inherent internal threat for Pakistan. One hopes that the subcontinent remains peaceful, unlike the devastated Middle East. Trump’s arrival, if read well, would bring perceptible global changes. His dream of American glory, beset with annexation of Canada, claim on Greenland and control over Panama Canal might be rhetoric, but it has a tacit memo for China and caring message for Israel.
Prof. Ashok Kaul, Retired Professor in Sociology, Banaras Hindu University