Editor's Note

For more than a decade, India has been among the fastest growing economies in the world. India's rise in the arena of information technology has had such an impact that outsourcing, in particular India taking over jobs from other countries, has become a significant factor in the world economy.

Editor's Note

Introduction

The significance of education for economic growth and a progressive society needs no argument, but providing even basic education to a billion people is a gargantuan task. So how can the Indian masses be educated? What are the roles of the state, the market and civil society in this venture? This discussion on the delivery of quality education is India centric, but its lessons are applicable generally, particularly in the countries of South Asia.

This book was in essence the brainchild of Chanaka Amaratunga, leader of the Liberal Party of Sri Lanka until his tragic death in a car accident in August 1996. He had founded the party ten years previously, at a time when the word liberalism seemed to many in Sri Lanka an anachronism. It is a tribute to the intensity of his vision, and the single mindedness with which he articulated it, that by the time of his death almost all major politicians in the country claimed to be upholders of liberal democracy, thus acknowledging the claims of a doctrine none of them had taken seriously a decade previously.

Of course the increasing popularity of the views Dr Amaratunga articulated owes something also to the times in which he lived. He was born in 1958, ten years after Sri Lankan independence, in a period in which the subcontinent was dominated by statism. In Sri Lanka it was of the socialist variety that had been propounded by Laski at the London School of Economics, a philosophy that also held most Indian political theorists of the time in its thrall; while even under ostensibly right wing military regimes in Pakistan, the necessity of centralised control was never challenged.

It cannot be denied that these dispensations enjoyed some successes. Sri Lanka developed an enviable score on the quality of life index; while India, a regular victim of famines in the colonial period, advanced towards agricultural self-sufficiency, laid the basis for future industrialisation, and also managed despite various fissiparous tendencies to maintain both unity and democracy.

Editor's Note

Thus goes the opening of John Gray's introduction to the volume of essays on Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy.

Few would give such a sentence a second glance. Such generalisations are a commonplace, not only of scholarship, but of the modern Western tradition that cherishes a concept of culture-bound values which places what seem the more appealing of those values squarely within the West. And such attitudes are almost subconscious – there is little doubt that a statement such as the above is, not to any great extent, concerned with asserting or establishing a dichotomy between Western and Eastern (or, to use the term such commentators would prefer, non-Western) traditions. Such a dichotomy would be taken for granted, not worth a further glance. Instead what would be argued for (as is indeed the case with Gray), so as to make the statement necessarily true, indeed tautologically so, is that particular conceptions of liberty or the weight attached to them vary. Gray in fact deals also with Western thinkers ‘who have sought to devalue freedom as a political ideal’ and a later essay in the book is concerned with ‘The Marxian Conception of Freedom’, characterised as central to Marxist philosophy, though of course, with a somewhat different meaning attached to freedom from that commonly associated with it.

When Liberal Values for South Asia was published, way back in 1998, the future of democracy seemed reasonably secure in South Asia. India of course, except during the relatively brief period of the Emergency, had never really swerved from the path of democracy and the rule of law, and the preceding decade had shown how governments could change at the polls without extravagant rivalries or ill effects; but every other country in South Asia had suffered the rigours of authoritarianism, from which a few at least seemed to have moved into democratic systems during the nineties.

Though previous lapses in Sri Lanka had been less protracted than elsewhere, during the eighties the impact of the Jayewardene regime, and its efforts to guide democracy (on what its less authoritarian apologists presented as an East Asian model) had been tragically divisive. Though his efforts had been accompanied by what was seen as economic liberalism, the entrenched statist mentality had meant that little of the economy that had been taken into government hands was actually privatised. An open economy for Jayewardene only meant the encouragement of private business and trade, without the shrinking of the government sector or the opening up of the social sector, so that rent seeking became further entrenched. Insistence on continuing centralised control of government, with a growing economy, meant that disparities grew worse, and in the end the state had to deal with two youth insurgencies.

In both political and intellectual terms, liberalism is at present in the midst of a powerful advance. The word revival is deliberately not being used in this context. Certainly, the recent flowering of liberal writing in Western Europe and North America, which has made the intellectual running in this respect in the modern era, testifies to the revival of interest in a form of ideological writing that had been surpassed in influence during the very different intellectual debates of the 1930s and after. But at the directly political level, that is to say with regard to direct influence in terms of political parties and political programmes, ‘revival’ is an inappropriate word because the last decade has seen, in fact, an advance of liberal ideas and values in areas where they had seldom or never existed in the past.

In a sense the process initially began as an enterprise at the highest level of ideas to combat the apparent mastery of the Marxist left and its intellectual, though bitterly hostile kinsman, the Fascist right. But the process was undertaken with a power of thought and expression which, though slow to make converts, has at last impacted upon the intellectual consciousness of the world with an unvanquishable authority: the writings of Friedrich Hayek, of Karl Popper, of Isaiah Berlin have now flowed into and become the mainstream of ideas. And thus today an explicit interest in liberalism as an ideology accompanies an advance of liberalism across the political agenda and at the ballot box.