Rebuilding India 21

Self-Reliance Through Swadeshi – Need of the Hour

- P. Kanagasabapathi

The COVID -19 pandemics has created an unprecedented situation in the World. It is not just the lives and the economies, but also the ideas and approaches that are at stake. The ideas that have been put forth and the approaches that have been advocated by the West over the previous centuries have once and for all failed miserably.

Even after the 2008 global economic crisis, the West –particularly the US - was hoping that they would be able to hold on to a higher position through their ‘advancements’ in science and technology and the status they enjoyed. But the coronavirus has proved them wrong. As a result, the US President has now been reiterating openly the need for manufacturing within their country. This only reveals the ultimate collapse of the very concept that they have been so painfully propagating over many decades, globalization.

So there is a definite U-turn towards a new paradigm with nation-centric approaches even in the West, that benefited a lot from their own versions of policies during the previous centuries. Even though nationalism and nation-based manufacturing were being advocated in countries such as the US during recent years, the intent seems to be definite now.

The economic approaches of the West beginning the middle of the second millennium have always been with the objective of benefiting the ruling and the dominant classes by exploiting the larger population in their territories and outside. The dominant economic system that prevailed from the sixteenth to eighteenth century called mercantilism, paved the way for colonialism leading to the exploitation of different countries in the World.