Is the Colonial Mentality Hindering India's Success

In September 2006 the Supreme Court of India, in the case brought by the former police chief Prakash Singh, directed the central and state governments to reform the police by setting up security commissions, giving officers fixed tenures and separating investigation from law and order. The reason for the order was that the Police Act of 1861, passed after the revolt of 1857 to control a subject population, was still the basis of policing in most of India. Nearly sixty years after independence, an instrument of colonial rule governed the relation between citizen and state. The example frames the topic, whether a colonial mentality is hindering India's success.

A colonial mentality is a set of attitudes formed under foreign rule and continuing after it ends. It may include deference to the former rulers and their culture, a belief that what is foreign is superior, a view of the state as a master and the citizen as a subject, and a sense of inferiority in the colonised. The Martiniquan psychiatrist Frantz Fanon described it in Black Skin, White Masks in 1952, and the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o called for the decolonising of the mind in 1986.

The legacy of British India is easy to trace. Many of the laws were written in the colonial era for control. The Indian Penal Code of 1860, the Police Act of 1861, the Official Secrets Act of 1923, and the sedition provision, Section 124A, which was used against Tilak and Gandhi, remain on the books. The administrative service descended from the Indian Civil Service, which Lloyd George called the steel frame, can still behave as a ruling caste, remote from the public it serves. Offices carry the habits of the file and the rubber stamp. The citizen is a petitioner, not a customer.

Language and culture provide further examples. Macaulay's Minute of 1835 argued for educating a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, opinions, morals and intellect, and English became the language of power. After independence, English remains the key to elite jobs, courts and higher education, and a child schooled in an Indian language may start with a disadvantage. Respect for foreign degrees, brands and accents, and a persistent preference for fair skin, which the market for creams exploits, show how deep the sense of inferiority can go. Indians often accept an idea from abroad more readily than the same idea from home. Traditional knowledge, in medicine, agriculture and crafts, was long treated as backward until foreign recognition, as with turmeric and neem patents, awoke interest.

Indians often accept an idea from abroad more readily than the same idea from home.

Economic consequences are real. The economy of British India was structured to serve imperial needs, exporting raw materials and importing manufactured goods. Dadabhai Naoroji described the drain of wealth in the nineteenth century. By the estimates of the economic historian Angus Maddison, India's share of world output fell from about a quarter in 1700 to under four per cent in 1950. After independence, planners set up a system of licences and controls that resembled the colonial state's apparatus, and the mistrust of private business reflected an earlier suspicion of foreign trading companies. The fear of foreign investment, long a feature of policy, owed something to the memory of the East India Company. The later reforms of 1991 broke from this stance.

But there are reasons to doubt that the colonial mentality is the main obstacle. India has been independent for over sixty years, longer than the period of direct Crown rule, and the generation in power has no memory of the Raj. Many problems that are attributed to colonialism have domestic roots in caste, poor governance and politics. To blame the past may serve as an excuse for the present. Countries that were colonised, such as South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, have grown rich, while others that were never colonised, such as Ethiopia and Afghanistan, remain poor. Colonial inheritance cannot by itself explain the difference.

Some of the inheritance has also been helpful. The English language has given Indians access to global science, business and literature and is a strength of the services industry. The railways, the legal system, the civil service and parliamentary democracy were adapted by Indians for their purposes, and the Constitution of 1950 has the marks of both inheritance and creation. Modern India is not a copy of Britain but a different thing, and the mixture is not entirely a burden. The mind that learns from outside and then creates something of its own is not colonised.

There are signs that the mentality is receding. A new generation of entrepreneurs builds companies without waiting for permission, and Indian scientists and artists win global respect. The Right to Information Act of 2005 reversed the colonial presumption of secrecy by giving citizens a right to ask the state for records. The reforms of 1991 opened the economy. The space mission to Mars launched in November 2013 was designed and built by Indian scientists. Yet the old reflexes persist where power is exercised, in the police station and the government office.

The task of the present is to review the old laws and structures with the question of whom they serve. Law reform commissions have identified hundreds of obsolete statutes for repeal. Education in the mother tongue can be strengthened alongside English, so that no child is held back by language. Civil servants can be trained for service, and citizens can learn to demand it. Self confidence grows from achievement, and from the study of history that tells the story of Indian creativity as well as of colonial rule.

A mentality is harder to repeal than a statute, because no one has to sign it away. It lives in habits that people do not know they have. The test of whether it has gone is whether Indians, when they face a problem, look for the answer in their own experience as readily as elsewhere. By that test, the answer is likely to differ from one office, one family and one person to the next, and no census has measured it.