Gandhi’s khadi to Modi’s ‘no matter the colour of investment’: A new shade of Swadeshi

The words Swadeshi and Aatmanirbhar have a long history in India, going back more than a century, to the days of the freedom struggle. While for Mahatma Gandhi it meant production in India – in what he considered the non-mechanised, Indian way – Modi’s interpretation is production in India, irrespective of the origins of the company making the goods.

Before Gandhi, and after

Before Gandhi burst on to the political scene, Swadeshi (or from one’s own land) rose as a powerful idea starting 1905, when Indians protested against the Partition of Bengal by the British government into a Hindu-majority and a Muslim-majority province.

However, it acquired greater intensity from 1920 onwards under Gandhi, who identified it as not just a cultural metaphor for Indianness against colonial culture, but also as a powerful form of resistance against British colonialism.

Much of the riches of the British Empire were built on cotton and other fabrics taken from India to the textile factories of Manchester – just as the Industrial Revolution was taking off. So raw cotton was taken at throwaway prices from India, sent to England via ships, processed into mass-produced clothes, shipped back to India, and circulated throughout India via the Railways.

Additionally, a 70%-80% duty was imposed on Indian cotton textiles to help Manchester, without which, according to British historian H H Wilson, “even the power of steam would not have helped the British city compete”. Even as the prohibitive tariffs kept down the demand for Indian textiles, machine-made cotton clothes made in the UK, which were cheaper, took over the Indian market.

In his book Inglorious Empire – What the British Did To India, Shashi Tharoor writes that the move wiped out 25% of India’s share of global trade in textiles even as British exports of cotton goods soared from 60 million yards in 1830 to 968 million yards in 1858, and 1 billion yards in 1870. “(Indian) Master weavers became beggars,” Tharoor writes.

As the Independence movement adopted the concept of Swadeshi, and called for the boycott of all things foreign, the impact showed. By 1936, 62% of the cloth sold in India was made by Indians, Tharoor writes, with the figure jumping to 76% in 1945.

Gandhi’s push for the charkha (spinning wheel), on which people could spin their own yarn, took the Swadeshi concept one step further – challenging colonialism in a simple language while also striking deep at its core economic logic.

The imagery of the rough khadi also struck a chord with rural India, which for the first time saw leaders who dressed like them.

In India’s Struggle for Independence, historian Bipan Chandra recounted an episode from 1921, when Gandhi was addressing a student gathering in Madurai. Some students complained that khadi was too expensive, Chandra wrote. Gandhi replied that the answer lay not in wearing foreign clothes but wearing fewer clothes, and announced that he was discarding the dhoti and kurta and would now wear only a “langot (loin cloth)”.

For the next 27 years, till his assassination in 1948, Gandhi stuck to this vow. This attire worn by him to a round-table conference in London in 1928 was what invited the famous barb from UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill, dismissing him as a “half-naked fakir”.

After Independence

The idea of Atmanirbharta, or self-reliance, was one of the defining features of a newly independent and struggling India in the Jawaharlal Nehru years.

In his paper A Brief Economic History of Swadeshi, published in Indian Public Policy Review in 2021, Nitin Pai writes that, for Nehru, “the context of the Great Depression of the 1930s and the decline in foreign trade resulted in disillusionment with capitalism and the urge towards self-sufficiency”. “There was also a fear of economic imperialism replacing political imperialism if India encouraged foreign investment and undue trade dependency,” Pai adds.

This was seen also in foreign policy, with political scientist Ashwini K Ray pointing out that India’s preference for “non-alignment” during the Cold War era was a sign of a “resurgent post-colonial nationalism”.

Consequently, the Nehru years saw a commanding role for the public sector within a mixed economy, apart from building of top-notch public institutions in the fields of technology and medicine – such as the IITs and AIIMS. Large dams came up, as did many large PSUs.

Many of these moves were later criticised by critics as slowing down India’s growth.

Post-Nehru

Trying to find her feet in the large shadow cast by her father, Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi turned to redistribution as her economic priority framework, coming up with the slogan of poverty alleviation. The tensions with the US, which was seen as pro-Pakistan, also made her government lean towards the Soviet Union, further injecting a streak of socialism in her government.

An added rush of the Swadeshi pitch was brought by George Fernandes as Industry Minister when the Janata Party came to power in 1977, overthrowing Mrs Gandhi, after the Emergency. Fernandes famously threw out Coca Cola and IBM from India for refusing to reduce their stakes in their local partners.

The 1980s saw some liberalisation measures in export-import policy, fiscal policy and foreign investment – signifying that the grip of Swadeshi as an idea of national policy was loosening. But even as imports shot up in the late 1980s, this wasn’t matched by a rise in exports.

It eventually led to the grave foreign exchange crisis of 1991, persuading India under Congress Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao to approach the World Bank and IMF, and to open up its economy. What followed was ‘LPG (liberalisation, privatisation, globalisation)’, steered by Rao and his Finance Minister Manmohan Singh.

Post-liberalisation

With globalisation and liberalisation becoming State policy, the discourse of Swadeshi became the mantra of the Opposition. Thus was born the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, finding a corner under the large umbrella of the Sangh Parivar. On the other end of the spectrum, the Left opposed the policy shift as bringing in evils of “neoliberalism”.

The renewed focus on Swadeshi and Atmanirbhar Bharat by PM Modi now reflects both the tight corner the US administration has put India in, as well as his own government’s muscular nationalistic imagination of itself. As the Chief Minister of Gujarat, Modi prided himself on his Vibrant Gujarat Summits, which showcased investment into the country. As PM, the ambition of his government was becoming “Vishwaguru”, a destination the world would make a beeline to.

As US President Donald Trump deals a huge setback to these visions of the Modi government, the definition of Swadeshi in the narrow terms of production in India means the PM has kept the door open for a switch should circumstances change.

The Congress says no one is fooled by Modi’s words and that he is using Swadeshi and Atmanirbharta as “a cloak to cover up his government’s massive diplomatic failure, resulting in the tariffs”. “Swadeshi as a rejection of colonial exploitation was appropriate during the freedom struggle. Today, what we need are beneficial exports and imports with our trading partners,” AICC research department chairman and former MP Rajeev Gowda told The Indian Express.

BJP leader Vinay Sahasrabuddhe argues that what Modi is saying is not new to the party or the Sangh Parivar. “Since the days of Lokmanya Tilak, the ‘swa’ was part of terms like Swaraj and Swadeshi. It is about our identity, of which our language, economy and politics are a part… We should not lose the ‘swa’ – our identity,” he says.