Page 63 - BrandZ Top 50 Most Valuable Indian Brands 2015

TOP 50 MOST VALUABLE INDIAN BRANDS 2015
India was reborn in the middle of the past century as an independent state, following decades of struggle to gain freedom from Great Britain. That India, the successor of multiple dynasties and colonial rule, is among the world’s oldest civilizations and youngest nations. It’s also the world’s largest democracy.
Prior to independence, the Indian Dream was about winning freedom. With the establishment of a modern Indian state, redeining the Indian Dream required leadership that could articulate not only what Indians opposed, but also the values they espoused and how they could achieve them.
Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s irst prime minister, spoke prophetically: “(The) future is not one of ease or resting. The service of India means the service of the millions who sufer.
It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity.”
That dream has been a work in process. It’s pursued more efectively today than in almost any time during India’s decades as a young state struggling through political upheavals and violent episodes, and dealing with the practical challenges that come with nationhood and freedom.
EVOLUTION OF THE DREAM
As a young socialist republic in the 1950s, the government’s priorities advanced a domestic agenda aimed at creating greater equality and helping people meet their basic necessities. Internationally, the country remained oicially neutral during the Cold War.
The 1960s opened with a border
war with China and a subsequent change in national leadership. India experienced diicult economic hardship during the decade, including food shortages that prompted mass migration from villages to the cities.
The government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi nationalized banks in the 1970s and, ultimately, consolidated power with a two-year state of
emergency that led to disillusionment about the possibility of achieving an Indian Dream.
Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister after his mother’s assassination. In the 1980s, he attempted to restore national pride, advancing the notion of India as
a world technology leader. But at the time he was assassinated, in 1991, India’s economy was close to defaulting on its international inancial obligations.
perspective of ancient traditions and spirituality.
A national dream and the personal dreams of a nation’s people can be aligned, or not. (Please see The Power and Potential of the Chinese Dream at www.brandz.com.) Americans believe that by pursuing their personal dreams they’re helping America achieve its national dream of freedom and opportunity for all. In America,
personal and national dreams exist in harmony. In contrast, the personal and national Chinese Dreams are slightly discordant. Both dreams extoll personal and family wellbeing. But the national dream adds the government goal of national greatness.
The personal and national dreams of India seem to exist more like the personal and national American Dreams, with the national agenda lowing from personal aspirations.
The modern Indian state has evolved to a time when more individuals feel that realizing their personal dreams is possible. And the government intends to help empower them. Every personal dream realized brings India closer to achieving the national dream.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who himself began life as a tea seller, personiies the possibilities. In his view, impoverished Indians will not be raised up by government programs alone, but by themselves with help from business and brands and from the government, as it removes barriers and makes opportunity more equally and widely available.
In India today there are 1.3 billion Narendra Modis, individuals who
can be part of the Indian Dream. Now, over ive millennia since settlements appeared in the Indus Valley, and almost seven decades since independence, Indians seek the same India as Mahatma Gandhi . “an India, in which there shall be no high class and low class of people, an India in which all communities shall live in perfect harmony. Women will enjoy the same rights as men. This is the India of my dreams.”
Subsequently, the government loosened its control of the economy. Economic and social liberalization unfolded in parallel, weakening the caste system, removing barriers for self-improvement and opening the possibility that how far you travel in life is not completely determined by where you begin the journey.
NEW POSSIBILITIES
Liberalization made possible the realization of a personal Indian Dream. Like the personal dreams of people everywhere, the personal Indian Dream is about achieving a good life for oneself and one’s family. A more particularly Indian aspect of this dream is its collective nature, the sense that individuals are responsible both for their own and their family’s wellbeing, along with the wellbeing of their extended family and the wider community.
There’s also a national Indian Dream,
to be a modern state, prosperous and inclusive at home and respected and inluential abroad; and also to be a model for how to enjoy the material beneits of the modern world and build a country that’s conident and powerful, but informed and balanced by the
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