The Asian Revolution

Abstract

I SHALL be talking primarily about India, but what I say applies to India's immediate neighbours-hence the title 'The Asian Revolution'-and indeed applies also to many countries outside Asia: for instance to the Middle East (which Indians call, with some justice, West Asia) and to Africa, where I spent two and a half months at the very beginning of last year. I think that the historians of the future will not regard this as primarily the space-age; they will regard it as primarily the age of the Asian Revolution. This is a far more important thing than hurling hardware; it is, in fact, something that concerns very many more people than are concerned in any way whatsoever with the Sputnik and the Explorer. What is meant by the term 'Asian Revolution' is that all over Asia an attempt is being made to catch up with the West by having an industrial revolution in the twentieth century. In this way underdeveloped countries all over the world hope to improve their standard of living, to cease being dependent primarily on agriculture and primary products, and to become industrialized countries with their own steel plants and their own ability to produce their own goods for their own people. I call it the Asian Revolution because in Asia it involves the two most populous countries in the world-India and China, which between them have about a thousand million souls-and what is happening there is the core of what is happening in the world today. For these two countries are not only both involved in the same revolution; they are in competition with each other over the methods to be used. In this particular competition, India is our standardbearer, the standard-bearer of the free world, and China is the standardbearer of the Communist world. It is easy to say that India is not necessarily the best standard-bearer of the free world. What is certain is that it is so, and that peoples far outside Asia recognize this. I have found many people who would question whether India is, in fact, part of the free world and who would, in particular, point to India's actions in Kashmir, her vote over Hungary, her opposition to most Anglo-American policies, the way that she behaved at the time of Suez, and so on, as examples of India's faithlessness to the West. This is a key question: how do you judge whether a country is part of the free world or not? Partly, of course, by its foreign policy, but only partly, and India's foreign policy is too much discussedbecause while it is extremely difficult to write about India's internal 273