Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent appeal, with the eleven specific requests spanning fuel, gold, fertillisers, cooking oil, solar pumps and foreign travel, is being read by many as a prelude to administered price hikes. But there is a larger ambition: it is to make forex conservation a national movement, a civic mobilisation comparable in spirit, if not form, to Mahatma Gandhi’s Salt March of 1930.

Gandhi’s genius was to choose salt, an everyday item, symbolically powerful, to make the case for economic self-reliance and to turn it into a mass movement. Modi’s pitch is to make every Indian feel personally invested in the nation’s economic resilience, when conserving foreign exchange becomes a patriotic duty.

The instinct deserves credit. India’s dependence on imports of crude oil, fertiliser inputs, gold and edible oil is a structural vulnerability that has been diagnosed for decades without adequate remedies. Modi is asking citizens to connect their everyday choices to the national balance of payments.

Lal Bahadur Shastri did something similar with food in 1965, asking Indians to voluntarily fast on Monday evening as the country faced a war and food crisis. Socialist parliamentarian Madhu Limaye pressed the point further in Parliament, arguing that voluntary austerity was a constitutional duty in times of national stress, and that the political class must lead by example rather than just preach. The tradition of appealing to civic solidarity during economic emergencies is honourable, and has worked before.

But apart from the conviction he carried with the masses, the moral force of Gandhi’s salt satyagraha movement came from the fact that the salt tax was visibly, outrageously regressive. It hurt the poor more, and Gandhi chose salt for precisely that reason. On the other hand, the forex conservation........

© National Herald