Prof. Pulapre Balakrinshan writes in his new book 'India’s Economy From Nehru to Modi'
As I had pointed out, international comparison of economic development indicators is often met with the criticism that we could be comparing across political regimes.
There's nothing wrong in doing so. Democracies can do the harsh things that Dictatorships do just as well or, indeed, in a more brutal and effective manner.
However, this is irrelevant in a comparison within India where the states are all under the umbrella of one governance system, namely political democracy.
Which may mean the rule of gangsters in some districts or the rule of market friendly technocrats in other places.
What we found in such a comparison is that a wide variation in human development exists.
But such 'wide variations' are found within any big city or big enough country.
While at least some states appear to be inching towards the global standard of development in some dimensions,
because of demographic transition
democracy in India coexists with low human development in states accounting for a large part of the country.
because the very poorest are still having babies like crazy.
In a country as large as India is, some regional variation may be expected.
This guy lives in India. He must have noticed that there is considerable variation within his own neighborhood.
However, the divergence can be considerable and has been long lasting, not having been erased in seventy-five years.
Rapid development means much much more inequality and 'divergence'. Why does the Professor not know this?
As all states function under a common set of rules,
No. Different states are ruled very differently. Actual rules diverge from theoretical ones.
there must be something unique to the states that differences of such magnitude persist into the twenty-first century.
Not if more than one state is in the same boat- which is indeed the case. Unique means 'not like any where else'.
Why is it that democracy has not been able to eliminate basic deprivation in large parts of India?
Because democracy has no magic power. Fuck is wrong with Indian professors? Why do they think that having a particular bunch of rules will have a magical effect? Suppose Ashoka University adopted the rule 'all professors must prove P=NP' will he himself suddenly outshine Terence Tao in mathematical genius?
A clue may be found in the disquisition on democracy by the sociologist Barrington Moore,
who was a fucking sociologist- i.e. as stupid as shit.
who has studied the transition to democracy across the world. Moore sees the prior revolutions that took place in Europe and the United States as crucial in the transition to a democracy there. When it comes to India, he says: “. . . the nationalist movement did not take a revolutionary form,
yes it did, which is why the Brits hanged people like Bhagat Singh.
though civil disobedience forced the withdrawal of a weakened British Empire.
Civil disobedience had zero effect. The Brits imposed whatever solution was convenient to themselves. The reason Wavell wanted to evacuate the White population was that the civil administration had collapsed in some parts of India and was fragile almost everywhere. Moreover, India was a drain on the Treasury at a time when Britain was on its knees financially speaking. America refused to pay to keep the Brits in India and so they struck a good bargain with Nehru and Jinnah and left.
The outcome of these forces was indeed political democracy,
for Hindus- sure. Where Muslims ruled the roost, no such animal magically appeared.
but a democracy that has not done a great deal toward modernizing India’s social structure.
Because 'modernizing' involves buying modern stuff which costs money. But getting money involves not letting pointy headed intellectuals fucking over the economy. If you must have economists, make sure they are Sikhs. Even the smartest Sikh won't fuck up the economy for some ideological reason.
Hence famine still lurks in the background.”
Moore was writing this in the Sixties. Why quote him now? How fucking stupid is this Professor?
Strangely, when it came to India, Moore seems to have inverted his thesis to suggest that democracy can alter the social structure, presumably through parliamentary means.
This is fucking obvious. Parliament can pass laws redistributing land and criminalizing things like bonded labor and untouchability.
However, his general thesis, that a social transformation is essential for democracy to attain its potential, is useful in understanding the regional variation that we observe in India.
This is not a thesis. It is a tautology. Democracy has the potential to do 'social transformation'. If 'social transformation' is achieved then that potential is realized. Adding the word 'essential' alters nothing.
Arguably, the regions of India that have seen the most development, including the elimination of illiteracy and extreme poverty, are regions that have witnessed social transformation that eliminated the old order.
It is equally arguable that the regions of India that have seen the least development are regions that have witnessed the elimination of the old order. Where in India do you find the Maharajas and Zamindars of the Thirties? Nowhere at all. Goonda Raj was unknown under the Brits.
This is most pronounced in the case of Kerala, where as early as 1957 an elected communist government initiated a process of improvement of the conditions of life for the mass of the population.
Only because unelected monarchs had initiated that process many years previously.
This mainly involved the spread of health and education, resulting in a social emancipation of the lower orders of its society.
A process which was well underway under the old order.
A significant event in this transformation was the land reforms initiated within weeks of the installation of the government.
Kashmir had already had similar land reform. Why not simply say 'Congress was shit'?
This led to the ending of landlordism and the associated suppression of the labouring classes. So the social structure was altered, awareness grew, and with it an unstated but recognisable demand for a better life.
Whereas Biharis kept demanding a worse life- right?
Competing political parties had no option but to respond with policies that enhanced human capabilities if they were to survive.
Fuck off! They responded with stupid policies which forced the people to migrate and remit money. It is only now that Kerala has a CM who says he wants to be the Deng Xioaping of India. Indian Communism is a mere 40 years behind China.
Though the culmination of the social transformation in Kerala was the installation of a communist party, the transition was long. Having commenced in the late nineteenth century, it had involved a caste-reform movement that initiated social mobility, the work of Christian missionaries that spread literacy, and an enlightened public policy of the princes who had ruled a large part of what is now Kerala.
The Communists fell when they tried to fuck with the Christians. But, it must be said, Kerala's Communists are perfectly sensible. They condemn 'Love Jihad' if that can get them a few votes.
A transformation of a kind took place in Tamilnadu too, though its origin was a caste-based movement
a film industry based movement. The Justice Party had collapsed long ago.
aimed at eliminating the hegemony of the Brahmins. However, it could come to power only by riding on ethnic nationalism fuelled by the attempt to impose Hindi as the sole official language of the country.
There was no such attempt. There were other non-Hindi speaking states. They would have noticed. It was the film industry which enabled T.N to escape the orbit of the utterly useless Congress Party.
Since then the “Dravidian movement” has had great political success and parties that draw inspiration from it have now been in power in the state for over half a century. As with the rise of the communists in Kerala, so too has the Dravidian movement left its imprint on society. Tamilnadu has achieved relatively good development indicators, though they are yet to reach the levels achieved in Kerala.
Because a much smaller proportion of the population goes to the Gulf to work.
No social change comparable to that in Kerala and Tamilnadu has taken place in the three other states in our sample in Table 5.3. Not even Zamindari abolition in UP and the land reforms of the Left Front in West Bengal seem to have achieved a similar success in the social sphere, necessary to bring about development in the sense that we use the term.
So, being ruled by a Communist party does not correlate in any way with better social welfare outcomes.
These states have higher poverty and poorer social indicators than Kerala, the shortfall in women’s literacy being particularly noticeable.
Kerala exports nurses. UP exports coolies. Sad.
The case of Gujarat suggests that overall economic prosperity may be insufficient to bring about the expansion of freedoms of the population.
No it doesn't. It suggests that if you are prosperous you have more, much more, freedom. But simply being Gujerati wont' make you hard working and enterprising. Sad.
We saw in Table 5.3 that though it is one of India’s richest states, it harbours significant poverty and its social indicators are not much better than the national average.
But its statistics are better. The fact is a well run State has statistics showing higher poverty because this means it can then get its mitts on more funds from the Center. A badly run state doesn't bother because everybody knows the money would just get stolen anyway.
A change in social structure that redistributes power appears to be essential to widespread development in a society, including the elimination of poverty.
Why not say a change in magical power is essential to bring about a change in social structure? The fact is social structures supervene on an economic substructure. You could try going down the Hugo Chavez route and redistribute power but, it turns out, that will destroy society.
Interestingly, in his final speech to the Constituent Assembly, Ambedkar had recognised the role of the social structure in perpetuating social and economic inequality when he pointed out that, in the India that was to come,
“In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognising the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?
Not long if you are diabetic. Sad.
How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril.”
Ambedkar was wrong. America had political democracy and Jim Crow at the same time. He knew it but, after all, he was a politician and needed to compete with other shitheads in talking bollocks.
Ambedkar was prescient in seeing that political democracy is no guarantor of the expansion of freedoms,
No prescience was involved in seeing that America was a democracy where Blacks were denied plenty of freedoms.
an insight that is crucial to our understanding of the history of both democracy and development in India.
If you want to have a truly shitty understanding it may be crucial that your read this tripe.
Quite often, when it is suggested that India’s democracy is diminished by the presence of deprivation on so large a scale,
our reply is that Sen-tentious shitheads are diminished by their appetite for dog turds.
it is asserted that democracy is really a form of government by discussion,
but this is only asserted by people who scour the streets for doggie doo-doo which they eagerly devour
and expecting it to deliver human development is to see it merely as an instrumentality.
rather than a nice steaming pile of puppy poo which they can eagerly devour.
An antidote to this line of argument is offered in Moore’s recounting of the history of democracy. He sees its development as “a long and certainly incomplete struggle” to do three related things: (1) to check arbitrary rulers, (2) to replace arbitrary rules with just and rational ones, and (3) to obtain a share for the underlying population in the making of rules.
These conditions may be met by an Enlightened Despot or a One Party State.
He sees the ending of monarchy,
the guy had obviously never heard of Britain or Belgium or Sweden or Denmark all of which are monarchies.
the efforts to establish the rule of law
which existed under the Stuarts
and the power of the legislature,
ditto
and, later, use of the state as an engine of social change
like in Soviet Russia?
as the best known aspects of these three aims. The definition of democracy as “government by discussion”, attributed to Bagehot,
is foolish. There was plenty of discussion at the Tzarist Court.
may well reflect a consensus on how it was intended to function, but remains ahistorical, and leaves us blind to its potential to improve the conditions of life for the mass of the population, a matter of urgency in India.
What possible benefit could India gain by discussing stuff with Sen-tentious cretins?
Democracy in India has received worldwide attention, especially from observers based in Western democracies.
But nobody pays any attention to them.
The cynic might observe that the admiration has turned particularly vocal ever since India’s economy has billowed out. Some recent congratulatory reviews of India’s democracy emanating from overseas have been those by Mathews (2015), Shani (2017), and Desai (2017).
Desai? Would that be a Nicaraguan Desai or a Japanese Desai?
These observers have generally marvelled at one or the other of two features of Indian democracy – such as that a country of such great diversity has held together.
It has done so because Hindus would rather hang together than succumb once again to Muslim salami tactics.
Others have remarked upon not only the successful conduct of elections but also the peaceful transition once they are completed, both quite remarkable in a poor country which till recently had very low levels of literacy.
Yes, yes. India is a shithole. But shitholes can have elections just as often as nice places.
Surprisingly, none of them has wondered why poverty is tolerated to such an extent in India’s democracy.
It's because if you stop tolerating poverty you will stop tolerating Indian democracy. Then you will stop tolerating India. Finally you leave or die of frustration.
It is understandable that some in India should feel elated by the praise
who? Modi? Shah? Yogi? They don't give a shit about some Shani or Mathews.
but it should also leave us circumspect.
why not circumcised? Is Balakrishnan a closet Hindutvadi? I demand that he immediately cut off his foreskin to show respect to the Jewish religion! Shanit will write something nice about him and he will feel very elated.
Is democracy about procedural routines such as elections and guidebooks such as written constitutions, or is it about the transformations wrought after its adoption as the form of government?
The former. Only if the economic substructure changes will there be any 'social transformation'.
To paraphrase Moore, how much has democracy done for India?
It has kept together the Hindu parts though, no doubt, non-Hindu areas harbor secessionist sentiments unless threatened by the Chinese.
The evidence on human development in the country implies that the praise needs to be tempered.
Neither praise nor blame matters when stupid academics teaching worthless shite are dishing it out.
Significant deprivation exists in the country even after seventy-five years of its formation.
This is also true of England and Amrika.
This has not received as much attention, but it is high time it does.
But attention from cretins won't make things better. Let them scour the streets for dog turds which they can eagerly devour.
Few democracies have tolerated so much deprivation for so long.
Nonsense! All democracies extant in 1939 tolerated worse for longer.
The substantial divergence in the progress of human development across the country implies that it is possible to eliminate its worst forms through public policy.
No. The implication is that public policy can't do shit. People can by moving to the Gulf to work and send money back to their families.
I conclude by asking to what extent India’s impressive Constitution can advance this outcome.
It has no magical power to advance anything. On the other hand, a dysfunctional judiciary can retard things unless people figure out cheap ways to disintermediate it.
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