In 2018 Ashoka Mody wrote a book titled 'EuroTragedy- a drama in 9 Acts'. It's premise was that a single currency was bound to fail. The opposite conclusion seems more plausible. Confidence that the EU will do redistribution or regional or industrial policy has declined. But the advantages of having the Euro outweigh disappointment with the Brussels bureaucracy and the failure of coordinated action on a number of vital fronts. Thus, sadly for Mody's reputation as a prophet, the Eurobarometer shows increasing support for Brussels- despite quite poor handling of COVID. Nobody seems to want to imitate 'Brexit'. The Ukraine war may spur the creation of a European army and border security force.
Thus, there is no EuroTragedy. Mody, poor fellow, had to turn his gaze towards India so as to continue to publish worthless shite. This broken man has written a book titled 'India is broken- a people betrayed'. It is ignorant and stupid. Consider the following-
When Indian leaders first took control of their government in 1947,
They took control of the Provinces in 1937. Had Indians been able to agree to a power sharing formula, they could also have taken power at the Center.
they proclaimed the ideals of national unity and secular democracy.
Hilarious! After the 1946 election- when Muslims voted for the League and Pakistan while Hindus voted for Congress- there was partition. India chose to do 'secular democracy'- though this meant stripping Muslims of previous entitlements- but Pakistan did not.
Through the first half century of nation-building, leaders could point to uneven but measurable progress on key goals,
No. India became more dependent on charity during the Fifties and Sixties. It became less able to feed and defend itself. The Seventies and early Eighties saw if slip further behind not just Korea and Taiwan but even Pakistan. There was liberalization only from the Nineties onward but Indian politics was characterized by unstable coalitions, dynasticism, corruption and criminality. It was only after the BJP formed a Government that India began to move to political stability and policy dynamism at the center. Mody is saying 'first fifty years were good because BJP was not able to rule. Then BJP rose up so the subsequent 25 years have been horrible.' Just as Mody was wrong on the Euro- which is the one thing Europeans like about the EU- in the same manner he is wrong about India. Modi is the one positive aspect to the shit show that is Indian politics.
and after the mid-1980s, dire poverty declined for a few decades, inspiring declarations of victory.
Only in places where poor Indians had stopped having babies like crazy.
But today, a vast majority of Indians live in a state of underemployment
underemployment has decreased. That's why productivity has gone up.
and are one crisis away from despair.
Everybody is one crisis away from despair. That's why we don't like crises. Fuck is wrong with this cretin?
Public goods — health, education,
these are merit goods. A public good must be non-rival and non-excludable.
cities, air and water, and the judiciary — are in woeful condition.
Mody's brain is in woeful condition.
And good jobs will remain scarce as long as that is the case.
Nonsense! There is no connection whatsoever between the two. Good jobs will remain scarce so long as you have crazy labor legislation.
The lack of jobs will further undermine democracy, which will further undermine job creation.
Once again, there is no causal connection of any such sort. Undermining democracy means getting rid of paternalistic laws. That leads to job creation. Getting rural girls into giant factory dormitories and killing Trade Unionists is how you get demographic transition. You may also be able to move up the value chain.
India is Broken provides the most persuasive account available of this economic catch-22.
It is ignorant shite. The tl.dr version is- Modi is very bad. He destroyed the economy. Now he has broken an already fractured democracy. Hindus are very evil. It is they who are voting for Modi. Ban Hinduism!
Mody says, in an interview with the Times of India, that Japan only built Universities after it ensured everybody had access to primary and secondary education. This is nonsense. Japan secularized its ancient Buddhist universities from the 1870s onward. Keio- the first Japanese university focused on Western studies- was established in 1859. Many more soon sprang up. This meant that elementary education could be made compulsory in the 1870s though enrollment only rose after the the victory over China. Parents suddenly saw that their kids might rise through education into the Army and the Administration. Mody does not understand that you first have to have universities before you can start expanding schools. Illiterate yokels can't teach other to read and write. Mody picks up a comment by Nehru to the effect that the unemployed graduate was unemployable because his credential was worthless and puts too much emphasis on it. What he forgets is the economic theory of signaling. University education had to do with marriage opportunities and social standing. The choice was between College or a Madrasa or its Hindu equivalent. College was better because you might pick up a bit of English. Anyway, that's where the political parties recruited their future leaders.
Mody's other big point is that Nehru didn't encourage agriculture- which would have meant power shifting from Forward Castes to dominant 'Backward' cultivator castes who would prefer their own vernacular leader- and light manufacturing- which would have increased the power of trading castes and benefited the Jan Sangh or Swatantra party. Keeping the Army weak was Nehru's way of preventing a coup. Indira said to Mujib 'don't be President. Be Prime Minister.' Every General thinks he'd make a good President. But the don't quite understand what type of beast a Prime Minister is. What does the fellow do in his Cabinet? Is it defecation or masturbation or something really kinky?
Mody, like Amartya Sen, thinks Governments should think good thought and focus just on education, health and caring for the environment. This is fine if students can get an education from Rishis in the forest and if wandering Sadhu Mahatmas can cure any ailment by their spiritual powers. Hugging trees and worshipping rivers will also keep the country safe from invaders coz- as happens in Lord of the Rings- the Trees will rise up and go fight Sauron's evil army. Rivers will rise up and drown the invaders. Mountains will say mean things about the size of the genitals of invading forces forcing them to run crying to their mummies.
The following is from an interview with Kavitha Iyer in 'Article 14'
Since about the early 1990s, an Indian elite, which lives first world lives, has set the domestic narrative in the media and politics.
This had already happened by 1820 when Dwarkanath Tagore and Raja Ram Mohan Roy started printing newspapers to support increased European immigration into India. But some Indian princes and tycoons were already paying good money to people like Edmund Burke's brother so as to lobby Westminster.
After Independence a Nehruvian elite created a narrative which it sold to donors so as to get its hands on what Ambassador Kaul called 'free money' from Uncle Sam. This begging bowl diplomacy was accompanied by a narrative of India as being as poor as shit and twice as boring. That's why India promoted Satyajit Ray's films abroad though refusing to watch that shite at home.
By the early Nineties, you had a new type of tycoon who didn't give a shit about 'narratives'. He just wanted money.
A corresponding group in the first world has echoed that narrative.
This was only important under Bretton Woods when many countries still had exchange controls and so capital flows to developing countries was through the World Bank or bilateral government channels. However, by the time Manmohan got to Geneva's UNCTAD in the mid Sixties, it was obvious that Corporate f.d.i was preferable though, no doubt, a Japanese MITI style strategic investment policy might pay dividends- but only if Indians were as smart as Japanese people. Still, at least Malaysia could have been emulated. Alternatively, India could simply have let the Rupee slide while turning a blind eye to sweat shops mushrooming all over the place.
The Indian elite does not easily relate to the subjects I deal with in the book.
There is no longer any 'Indian elite'. There are guys who have power and other guys who have money and some corrupt cunts who have both.
The members of that elite have an abstract notion that India has an employment problem.
No. Everybody in India knows that crazy labor laws have prevented the rise of the organized sector. We also have crazy land and farm laws and so on and so forth.
They’ve heard about or seen videos of rioting in January 2022 by young applicants for jobs with the Railways, who were frustrated because the Railways did not honour a promise of recruitment; they’ve heard about the protests against the Agniveer scheme for recruitment to the armed forces.
Indians know that young people from certain places like rioting. They don't like being shot at. Shoot rioters and suddenly there are no riots. These kids quietly take up jobs in the unorganized sector.
But none of the glowing assessments of India that you pointed to discusses our employment crisis.
Because the unorganized sector will take up the slack. 'India grows by night' as Gurcharan Das said.
While most analysts concede that we need a better education system,
not to mention better kids. Why is my son not able to speak Chinese? Over a billion Chinese people do. The answer is, he is a lazy fellow who takes after his Mother's side of the family.
they rarely focus on the enormity of the task; they are satisfied that most Indians have acquired basic literacy,
Whereas they should only be satisfied if most Indians have a PhD in worthless shite.
not recognizing that the nations we compete with have set the bar much higher.
No. They set the bar much lower. A school leaver can get the sort of job for which India demands a degree or yet higher qualification.
We say we want to receive investments moving out of China.
In which case, set up lots of SEZs which are outside the purview of India's sclerotic Judicial system.
We don’t ask why China has been so successful in becoming the world’s manufacturing hub.
It set up SEZs and killed agitators of various descriptions. A 'Human Rights lawyer' in China tends to have no fucking human rights.
The answer lies in a 1983 World Bank report, its first report on China. China had just become a member of the World Bank, having recently come out of its communist phase. Despite the scars inflicted by Communism, the report said, China starts from an extraordinary base of human development. Life expectancies were high, because nutrition levels were good. In a pointed comparison with India, the World Bank said China was miles ahead of India in these metrics.
But those metrics were based entirely on fantasy. Edwin Lim found that the Chinese didn't understand the first thing about how free markets work. Then, unexpectedly, some Marxist ideologue pointed out that what Marx had said was 'to each according to his contribution'. Still, it took time to smash the 'iron rice bowl'. What enabled China to rise was that Chinese leaders were keen on 'Tardean mimetics'- i.e. imitating what more successful countries had done. They liked Edwin Lim when they discovered his dad was born very poor. He had stowed away on a ship to the Philippines and had done well there through hard work and enterprise.
When Edwin Lim moved from China to India, he thought he had died and gone to heaven because the Indians were very well trained in free market economics. People like Montek and Manmohan wanted what he wanted. But India's 'activists' gained more in reputation and money by preventing development than any civil servant who tried to promote it. So, it was democracy that trapped India in relative poverty.
China had similarly made big strides in girls’ education.
Which didn't matter in the slightest. What did matter was shifting girls from the countryside to big factory dormitories where, however, they had less entitlements than the indigenous people. Since local party officials gained financially and reputationally by doing this sort of development, growth took off even though there were some associated pathologies.
You know the expression ‘women hold up half the sky’? It’s a phrase that the Chinese supreme leader Mao Zedong often used, and he lived up to it.
Mao offered Kissinger as many millions of Chinese women as he cared to take away with him. Women, in Mao's view, were useless. His widow was more than useless. She was an active menace.
Women were active members of the Chinese Communist Party,
just as they were active members of the Indian National Congress. Indeed, the INC had a female leader before the Chinese Communist Party came into existence.
and they had a large presence in the labour force. I'm not saying Chinese women did not suffer from gender inequities, which they continue to do; but Chinese women have made much more progress than Indian women have.
They have produced much more profit for plutocrats than Indian women have.
It is not surprising that the vast bulk of the movement of production out of China is going to Vietnam, where
Trade Unionists or other 'activists' will be shot- but only after they have been tortured.
education standards match or exceed those in Western industrialised nations
Nonsense! Vietnam is still rather poor. It has achieved high literacy because it is a totalitarian country but it will take decades for it to equal any advanced country.
and women have high labour force participation rates. We keep recycling one story about Apple investing in Chennai, but if you look at the data, much of the US investment moving from China is going to Mexico.
Indians know why it is so difficult and expensive to set up manufacturing plants in most parts of India. We don't need to look at any fucking data.
In Asia, Vietnam, a country of a hundred million people in comparison to our 1.4 billion, now has export levels at par with ours; Vietnam has come from behind us and is poised to go ahead.
Because it isn't a democracy. People who contribute to growth get very rich. In India, the andolanjivi sets up an NGO and has a better standard of living than the civil servant who sticks his neck out to generate jobs and tax revenue.
Bangladesh is also on a superior trajectory, of commitment to education and greater agency of women.
Getting rural girls into factory dormitories is the only thing which matters. It remains to be seen whether the Islamists will kill Sheikh Hasina and turn that country into a hell-hole.
Recently, Cambodia is becoming another significant international production site.
Because it isn't a democracy.
Despite the hype about the Apple project, India barely appears in the data on the production moving out of China.
There is little data on how much Indian capital has moved out to such countries. Anecdotally, the figure is pretty big.
Since the industrial revolution nearly 350 years ago, no country has achieved success without two fundamental achievements: good education and an increase in the participation of women in the workforce.
Unless it has lots of oil. The plain fact is that development leads to better education- because the returns on it increase- as well as higher participation of women because service industries burgeon.
These work as a combination.
No. You can force kids into school and girls into factories but if those factories make guns not butter, you sill have poverty. Look at North Korea.
As women come into the workforce, they have fewer children, they adopt better child-rearing practices, and they devote greater resources to educating the children. The children therefore grow up to be more productive. That cycle perpetuates itself over generations.
So, scrap paternalistic labor laws and just get rural girls into giant factory dormitories. Why won't this shithead say so in plain terms? The answer is that he is a virtue signaling shithead.
Today, India does not have well educated kids and it has an abysmally low labour force participation rate for women. So when people say to me, oh but we've got this United Payments Interface, I ask if UPI is going to educate your kids?
If it raises the return on education, sure.
Is it going to reduce the violence against women?
Is it going to stop this cunt from anally pleasuring himself with the Qutub Minar? No. I need hardly point out that this practice of his is deeply offensive to Muslims.
Is it going to prevent the sinking of Joshimath?
No, because it is not tackling the fundamental problem which is that this cunt keeps anally pleasuring himself with the Qutub Minar. This is causing Hindu pilgrimage centers to sink into the ground with shame.
Is it going to prevent the Hasdeo forest from being cut down? Is it going to prevent the denudation of the Aravallis? Is it going to revive all the dying rivers in this country? If not, are you telling me that none of that matters and UPI is going to be our ticket to success?
UPI must use proper electronic means to detect acts of anal gratification involving this cunt and various Minars and Minarets.
The Indian government’s production-linked incentives have attracted some investment in pharmaceuticals and in assembly of phones, but even there, the output targets are not being met, and certainly employment levels are falling well short of the targets.
Because of compliance burden created by crazy paternalistic laws.
The problem with the elite commentary on India
which is what this cunt is giving us in between anally pleasuring himself with Minars and Minarets.
is that instead of examining the lived reality of Indians, it focuses on this animal called GDP growth, and more recently on some magical GDP targets of several trillions.
But that magical target can easily be met by massaging the numbers.
This is juvenile economics. I am a former IMF economist
i.e. a cretin. Smart economists can become very rich in the private sector. Useless fellows are hired by the IMF. This is because, regardless of the scenario, the IMF just uses the same script- unless the US instructs them to do otherwise.
who believes in the Marxian focus on power relations
There is no Marxian theory of State directed economic activity. The plain fact is, those with power in China, Vietnam etc, chose one type of growth. But they may easily reverse course and go for guns not butter.
as key determinants of economic outcomes.
The key determinant of economic outcomes is the fitness landscape. You can have a swell policy but if the landscape turns treacherous you are shit out of luck.
In my IMF incarnation, I see so-called experts extrapolating from the growth rate this year to the next century, and I want to hold my head in my hand and sob uncontrollably.
Because your bum is sore due to excessive insertion of Minars and Minarets.
Because this is madness.
It is stupidity which nobody gives a toss about.
Even if we look at GDP growth, which as I noted is a faulty measure of human welfare, we have a problem. Recall that GDP growth had slowed to between 3% and 4% in 2019, before Covid-19.
Global growth fell to 2.3 percent in that year because of protracted trade disputes and investment slowdown reflecting declining expectations. Globalization was already unravelling. Indian elections meant that State and Central government doubled down on populist measures. Meanwhile the corrupt money-go-round between Nationalized Banks and financial institutions and crooked and incompetent plutocrats continued though 'extend and pretend' was becoming less and less feasible.
That, I would say, is the best estimate we have of India’s potential growth. All current growth rates suffer from the base effect: if a number falls from 100 to one, that's a 99% decrease; but if it goes from one to two, that is a 100% increase.
What's wrong with that? It is a fact that if income doubles, there is a 100 percent increase. It is a different matter that National Income statistics have a Laspeyres bias which, at a time of rapid change, is bound to underestimate growth.
So, today’s GDP growth rates are meaningless.
No. They have an interpretation which is useful.
My best reading is that Indian GDP growth rates will fall to 4% once the dust of the base effects settles.
But the cunt just said the rate was 3 to 4 percent in 2019! So there is no fall.
But we cannot allow these growth numbers to distract us from the important objectives: jobs, health, education, quality of cities, clean air and clean water, which are the right metrics of liveability, and hence in the long run are the foundation of sustainable long-term growth.
Liveability is not linked to sustainability. The former may decrease for the latter to increase and vice versa. It isn't true that stopping violence against women and preventing this cunt shoving Qutub Minar up his bum- both of which are desirable objectives- will have any magical effect on liveability or sustainability or fiscal subsidiarity or anything else.
I have given you a long response to your question on the commentary by so-called experts
says a so-called- by me- shover of Qutub Minars up his bum
who have fantastical visions of India’s future but have no knowledge of economic and social success achieved both historically in western nations and in our contemporary world by East Asian countries.
Everybody understand that getting girls out of rural shitholes into factory dormitories is all that matters. Boys can do security and construction or, in the case of meeker fellows, join the assembly line.
Human development and greater agency of women are the two fundamental ingredients why China succeeded despite having many of the pathologies we have, such as environmental degradation and over-reliance on construction as a motor of growth.
China kept the riff-raff out of its Universities. Mao first used University students to beat his enemies and then brought in blue collar workers and the Army to chase those students into the countryside. At Tianamen Square, the Government sowed students who was boss. If they studied, they had to study hard. There was no specific policy to help women. Either they contributed and rose by their own efforts or they were left to their devices. Still, if they had too many babies, the surplus kiddies were sold to American homosexuals.
China became the world’s manufacturing hub because of
SEZs and willingness to buy in state of the art tech. Edwin Lim gives the example of a factory which was told to accept Japanese management. The older engineers hated the Japs. But they had to bend the knee. A film was made showing the young hero arguing with the old chief engineer. The hero marries the chief engineer's daughter. This is like the old 'boy meets girl. Girl falls in love with Combine Harvester. Victory of the proletariat is achieved by building Stakhanovite Socialism.
the foundation of strong investment in human development and women working in export-oriented factories.
The Chinese rationed higher education such that the return on credentials tended to rise. India did the reverse. There is a democratic right for every cretin to get a PhD in Gramscian Grammatology.
In India, the demand for jobs keeps growing much faster than the supply.
Supply in the organized sector- sure. The problem is that rising incomes mean that some young people can stay idle doing worthless degrees or joining the ranks of the educated unemployed while hoping to accumulate enough capital to buy a Government job or pay off a trafficker to smuggle them to Amrika Yurop. The very poor have no choice but to work in the unorganized sector.
If all you care about is GDP growth, you can achieve that with petrochemical plants and maybe a semiconductor factory eventually. But how many jobs does such activity create?
If it generates tax revenue, the Government can spend that money on teachers or social workers or whatever.
The flip side of this highly capital-intensive growth is an economy that benefits maybe the top 5% of the people, their consumption embellished with a Louis Vuitton or a Lamborghini.
They use money from nationalized banks to do 'capital intensive growth' while setting up their family offices in Mauritius, Singapore, London etc. If you crack down on them, they will simply shift overseas and the Nationalized Banks will be left with Non Performing Assets on their hands.
The vast bulk are struggling to buy scooters and pressure cookers. And in the heat of summer, they have to wonder, can I afford a table fan?
Load shedding will make it useless. But this was always the case.
So is the idea of a $7 trillion economy misplaced on our wishlist or is it an empty promise?
It is feasible and desirable. As for promises- when and where have they not been empty? All that matters is whether you think the reptile you vote for is less repellent than the other reptile standing for election.
It is both misplaced and empty.
Your book begins with a retelling of a scene from the 1946 film Dharti Ke Lal,
Communist propaganda. Everybody knew that Suhrawardy and the Ipsahanis and so forth had looted the Famine Relief fund. The Commies tried to pretend that actually all was the work of evil Capitalists- i.e. the guys who financed Gandhi & Co.
in which you describe an exodus from famine-struck Bengal towards Calcutta.
Suhrawardy launched a pogrom of Hindus on 'Direct Action Day'. Sadly the Hindus turned the tables on the Muslims and so Calcutta remained part of India. The Commies who had agitated for Pakistan had to run away from there.
In greater numbers, climate migrants
or just migrants
continue to alight at railway stations in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, etc. Is rural India's move to the cities, persistent over decades, a crisis or is it a solution to unequal growth?
The Chinese have an internal passport system whereby even if migrants are allowed to re-locate, their entitlements are meager relative to indigenous people. That's why Chinese Cities aint utterly shite. The lesson here is clear- keep the riff raff out of Universities or nice neighborhoods. Treat the poor like shit and stop them having babies like crazy. This motivates them to stop being so fucking poor.
I was struck in Dharti Ke Lal not so much by the migration to Calcutta but by the return of the migrants to their villages.
The Commies realized that if they focused on the Cities, they'd be easily rounded up and killed. Go to the villages and nobody will give a shit what you get up to.
That reverse trek sunk into my heart for that was the very moment I was writing about the Covid-19 reverse trek.
That 'reverse trek' showed that internal migration was much greater than the statistics suggested.
The reverse trek from the city to the village is heartrending. It tells me that agriculture is distressed, which makes people want to move to the city, but the cities do not have jobs and are inhospitable, which forces people to go back to the very place they want to leave.
So, be smart smart like Mody. Move to Amrika.
We have made much progress since 1946,
If we moved to Amrika- sure.
but in one fundamental sense we have failed: the lack of honourable jobs either on the farm or in the cities.
American cities? That's very bad news.
On the day after the lockdown was announced in March 2020, the factories in Surat closed down. A story of two migrants, narrated beautifully in the New York Times, was about two men who decided to stay on in Surat because going back did not hold much promise for them. Their ancestral lands had been fragmented to a degree where, if they went back, they wouldn’t have a living.
Mody wanted to go back to his village to till the land. His daddy said 'beta, land has been fragmented. Also there is no Minar or Minaret nearby with which you can anally pleasure yourself. Kindly remain in Amrika.'
However, after a few weeks out of a job in Surat, their savings ran out and they were forced to go back.
Because the factories had closed down.
What happened during the pandemic was extreme and does not happen regularly, but it does tell you that
when factories close down, factory workers go home.
the cities are still inhospitable because there are too few good jobs.
If Surat was so inhospitable, why did those two guys move there?
Additionally, we are facing a climate crisis which, as you quite rightly point out, is forcing more people out of the rural areas. Where are we going to absorb them? What are the opportunities for them? Things will become even more serious as the climate crisis causes coastal erosion, causes more frequent extreme weather events in urban areas, and reduces productivity in industry. For rural migrants to urban areas, the future is set to get harder.
My future is going to get harder and harder as I age. Eventually this will lead to my death.
You write that the government's promises on nutrition, health, education tend to be like Groundhog Day, a sort of a continuing winter despite promises of change,
Yet change has occurred. We are not stuck in a time-loop.
while development has tended to focus on construction of dams, riverfronts, overpasses, etc.
as opposed to what? Destroying roads and railway tracks?
How far back do you do trace this misplaced focus on big capital expenditures,
It was easier to get Aid and soft loans for big ticket items of that sort. There were obvious scope and scale economies- not to mention pay-offs from contractors.
who got it wrong first?
The Sumerians. Then the fucking Indus Valley civilization focused on building cities and ports and other such ungodly projects. Why didn't they tackle urgent problems like violence against women and Mody sticking Minars and Minarets up his bum?
This process began with heavy industrialisation under Jawaharlal Nehru,
But the Tatas had already got into 'heavy industry' as Nehru well knew. Visvesarayya had built dams and so forth. Some Princely States had invested in electrification and railways and mines and foundries. There was the Scindia shipping line and one or two indigenous air-lines.
but as I have emphasised, Nehru was an idealist and had a vision, even if it was mistaken.
It wasn't mistaken. The execution was flawed. Anyway, the thing ran out of steam once the British debt was repaid. But, politically, it helped concentrate power in the hands of the PMO.
With Mrs Gandhi onwards, policy-making became a business of headline-grabbing.
In an illiterate country where everybody knew that newspaper owners were corrupt and greedy.
In her case, it was bank nationalisation and Garibi Hatao. With the onset of the so-called liberalisation, the focus shifted to mining and construction.
Indira had nationalized Coal. Cement had been tightly controlled since '61 and there was a big black market
The hard work of development, you will hear me say a million times, is
virtue signaling. Only if everybody attends a Seminar twice a day in which they gas on about
human development, empowerment of women, making the judiciary fairer and responsive, cleaning the air and water.
will the hard work of development be done by those who make a profit from it and don't give a shit about any of the things mentioned above.
The river Musi that runs through Hyderabad is dying because the much-celebrated pharma industry is dumping its pollutants in the Musi.
but the place produces enough sewage to kill off the river anyway. Why don't they do sewage treatment?
Does any of the elite reporting that believes in the Indian century refer to the slow death of that river or of virtually every Indian river?
Dead rivers can come back to life. When I was born, London still had 'pea-soup' fogs and the Thames was dead. Now the river has come back to life. In the mid Nineteenth Century, Parliament had to be shut down because the Thames smelled so bad. Nowadays, it is beautiful and quite sweet smelling- save in the vicinity of the new American Embassy.
This raises the question, who is development for?
People develop if it pays them to do so.
In Varanasi, the river Assi, a tributary of the Ganga, gives the holy city its name along with the Varuna. The Assi has narrowed to a drain, and is extremely polluted, a fact that stays out of sight and out of mind, while the headline is that there is fancy riverfront development along the Ganga and a luxury cruise that only a handful can afford.
India shouldn't have anything 'fancy'. It should smell and look like shit. How else can we stop violence against women and the use of Minars and Minarets as anal dildos by Mody?
Everybody knows of the Sabarmati riverfront, but do people know that downstream, the Sabarmati is a highly polluted river?
It will become less so once Gujarat has prospered sufficiently.
How many people are aware that Sabarmati riverfront is essentially a lake that's cordoned off on both sides to collect water so that a select few people can enjoy it.
But those 'select few' will pay a lot in the way of expenditure taxes so as to enjoy that amenity. If there is no tax revenue because smart people have run away from a shithole country, then it will get shittier.
A seaplane service from the Statue of Unity (the Sardar Patel statue) to the Sabarmati riverfront is a glitzy detail embedded in the headline-grabbing pattern of development which, when extrapolated to an extreme, gives us a message that this is India’s century.
It gives us the message that life in Gujarat has its attractions. There are alternatives to emigration.
Joshimath in Uttarakhand has been sinking since 1976 when the M C Mishra committee report directed that construction activity in the Himalayas be undertaken with the utmost care because those mountains are very fragile. For years, we did exactly the opposite,
Mexico City has been sinking for some time now. It is much more important than Joshimath.
building on that fragile surface without restraint or discipline. In February 2021, there was another warning that went unheeded.
Now when the town is sinking, people have suddenly woken up. But we don’t know how long this new concern will last. We also don’t know how much of the rest of the area is sinking and what we can do about it.
Nor do we greatly care because we don't live there. The fact is the mountains would have been depopulated long ago if India had gone in for export led growth based on labor intensive manufacturing.
These examples highlight the deep erosion of social norms and public accountability.
Nonsense! No such beasties ever existed.
We may be in a trap. Unaccountable politicians do not impose accountability on themselves, and this becomes a Catch 22: How do you restore norms and accountability once they have eroded to such an extent?
By virtue signaling and shoving Qutub Minar up your bum.
The headline-grabbing will continue. The head of Microsoft, who was in India recently, said Indian kids are contributing to the growth of artificial intelligence.
Also, they are not incessantly shoving Qutub Minar up their bum.
We have somehow developed a view that technology will be a substitute for long, time-honoured processes of development, that the new technological tools will seamlessly take us out of the current situation into a blissful Nirvana.
because Qutub Minar will be up Mody's bum.
Apart from Nehru's temples of industry, what about extractive industry? How far back do you trace the collusion between government and extractive industry, and what has been the impact of that on the people of India?
Either you can have mining in the organized sector or you can leave it to 'ninja' miners
In its current form it first became manifest in the UPA period. If I had to give a precise date, I would say it was June 2005, when the Tatas signed an MoU to set up a steel plant in Bastar. Almost exactly at the same time, the vigilante group Salwa Judum was set up to protect corporate interests in the region.
Manmohan understood that Corporates would prefer to pay off the Naxals because they charged less. Thus there would be an economic motive for turning large parts of the mineral rich areas into Naxal strongholds. Salwa Judum was set up by indigenous leaders who didn't like being killed by Naxals from outside the state. They wanted to monopolize both murder and extortion.
Salwa Judum is a historically important marker.
Not really. Killing people matters. Gassing on about the rights of indigenous people is simply a way to pass the time.
Its leader was a Congressman
He was first elected on a Communist ticket
who was also the opposition leader in the Chhattisgarh assembly. The government was under the BJP. There was complete bipartisan consensus on this one thing: exploitation of natural resources is crucial for India’s model of economic development, never mind the costs of deforestation, the pollution of rivers and waterways, and damage to the livelihoods of the long-time forest dwellers.
If you don't do this type of development in tribal areas, the Naxals will so as to buy superior quality weapons which will then allow them to expand. This is the Maoist strategy.
In 2005, world trade was booming at a rate that had not been seen since the immediate post-War years. Subprime lending in the US had revved up that country’s growth. China, a recent member of the World Trade Organization, had burst on to the global scene and was importing gobs of iron and gobs of coal. Prices of coal and iron ore were rising giddily.
So, there was an 'accelerator effect' based on a speculative bubble. Still, the fact remains, Corporates were preferring to pay the Naxals rather than the Government. There was a slippery slope. Businessmen might prefer a Maoist party running things because Maoists don't give a fuck about human rights or environmental rights etc. Also they kill activist 'andolanjivis' with great enthusiasm.
Suddenly, Indian and international investors became interested in these areas that were mineral-rich. These areas were also forest-rich and were occupied by a population that had suffered the worst indignities since Independence and was now being further deprived of livelihoods. And the government couched its policy approach to protesting forest-dwellers not as a matter of social justice, which it was, but as a national security issue.
India is too poor to do social justice. Try to tax the rich and they run away leaving the Nationalized Banks with Non Performing Assets. The Naxals are just one type of robber-baron who will exchange raw materials and a cowed work force for fancy armaments. What follows is war-lordism and the collapse of the State.
We used the fig-leaf of national security to perpetuate inequities for another generation.
No. We didn't give a fuck about things which did not affect us and which we had no control over. Lots of Indians were against America's war of revenge on Muslims. But they could do nothing about it.
The entire model of development shifted at the time to a contestation for natural resources—in effect, we were privatising the environment, including land and water.
But a thing has to be nationalized before it can be privatized.
This model of development then morphed in its full-blown form into the Gujarat model of development marked by easy access to land, cheap funding, and no-fuss environmental clearances.
Like China, Vietnam and other such countries- right?
Indian and international elites celebrated.
They didn't give a fuck. The fact is, it is more profitable to export raw materials to India then to rely on India being able to sporadically supply anything but the bottom end of any such market.
The examples continue to multiply. Look at the international seaport being constructed in Vizhinjam in Kerala.
The Communist C.M of Kerala wants to be the Deng Xioping of India.
The fisherfolk are up in arms, as they should be for their livelihoods are at stake.
The Church is playing a role in this. I think the Commies will now try to ally with the Muslims.
To those who call this development,
i.e. the Communist Party of Kerala
I ask what are you giving them in return for their displacement?
I know what Kerala's Communists will give Mody. He will learn not to ask stupid questions.
Are you giving them urban jobs?
Jobs which are given to people are jobs which they refuse to do. After all, if they are sacked for laziness, they can hope to be given another job. That's the problem with charity. If you get it once, you think you can always get it. There is no incentive to work hard.
Are you giving them a good education?
The same point must be made. We see women from disadvantaged communities complaining that they are not able to complete their PhDs in Nanotechnology because their male, privileged class, supervisors are suggesting they should learn to read and write which is totes triggering.
Are you giving them good health?
Are you helping them shove Qutub Minar up their bum so that they gain sexual gratification?
Will their next generation have greater opportunities?
Yes. Not being a fishermen actually opens more doors for you.
The most number of index entries in your book are for Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.
Because it is lazy tosh.
Did these two leaders have the most impact on India, with outcomes both good and bad?
They did what they needed to do to stay in power. This involved centralizing power and making capital dependent on the Government in a corrupt manner.
I don’t think that the book pays disproportionate importance to Nehru and Mrs Gandhi. Pandit Nehru gets about a quarter of the total number of pages of the book, Mrs Gandhi about the same, and the others more or less the other half of the book.
Since Nehru did pretty much what other similar leaders were doing, as did Indira, there is not much that can be said about either. Their political instincts were good. Neither knew shit about Econ.
As a storyteller,
the man tells lies so as to send his reader to sleep.
I have to tell the story through the words and actions of the leaders because that is where the drama is. But as an analyst, the leaders are less important than the frame, which I call the lived reality of people.
as opposed to what? Its dead fantasies?
That lived reality is jobs, education, and the other public goods we discussed earlier.
No. Lived reality involves utility and disutility.
And the quality of the lived reality depends on social norms and public accountability.
No. Lived reality can greatly improve without any change in social norms or public accountability. Look at Saudi Arabia.
And it is my contention in the book that the decay of social norms and public accountability prevents the delivery of public goods.
This is false. The most important public good is Defense. A country can have a kick-ass military without any fucking social norms or accountability. The opposite is also true. In 1962, India had better norms and accountability than China. But they beat the shit out of us and made fun of our puny genitals. This was entirely avoidable.
I use that interplay of the lived reality with norms and accountability to assess every leader.
In other words, this guy just pulls arbitrary, bigoted, shite out of his arse so as to pontificate and virtue signal.
You have said the early years under Dr Manmohan Singh's prime ministership saw a ‘deceptive’ economic glow.
And I have said that Mody's early years saw a deceptive glow of the Qutub Minar up his ass.
Would you compare that situation with the present markets, the addition of all these new Indian billionaires into the world's richest list?
Lots of Indian billionaires have lost all their money and may go to jail. Obviously, the winners took over the assets built up by the losers so there is greater wealth concentration.
I think the two are very different. The world economy grew very rapidly between approximately 2002 and 2007. For reasons we discussed a minute ago, world trade grew on a scale not seen since the immediate post-War years.
The real reason was that Clinton and Bush gave China a free hand to rise. The War on Terror led to a doubling down on this policy.
All countries in the world participated in that boom, including India. But that boom was a bubble in the sense that it could not last.
China consolidated its gains as did India, Indonesia etc.
In India, we also developed a homegrown finance-construction bubble.
This happened all over the world.
By 2018, both these bubbles had fizzled. World trade growth had slowed down
Trump, in the White House, signaled the end of Globalization.
after about 2010 and, with the collapse of IL&FS in mid-2018, the finance-construction bubble deflated. That is why Indian growth slowed dramatically in 2019.
It seemed likely that Trump would be re-elected in which case trade barriers would go up all over the world.
Today there is no similar bubble to prop up growth. Some individuals are thriving, but the GDP growth of 6% or thereabouts this year is purely a bounce-back from Covid-19, with the underlying growth being closer to 4% or even 3%.
Still, there is a lower real exchange rate and plenty of scope for exports.
My final question is about communalism and right wing Hindutva in India, described in your book through the lens of the unrest around the time of Partition and then subsequently in 1992-1993. How do you see the current wave of Hindutva taking over India, and what do you think the impact of this is going to be, in the long term?
Since Mody lives in America he will now engage in Hindu bashing.
Hindutva lay hidden in the bloodstream of the Indian polity at least since the early 1900s.
It was open and militant.
Gandhi and then Nehru, by the weight of their personalities, were able to marginalise this tendency.
No. Gandhi's unilateral surrender in 1922 put an end to the Congress-Khilafat combine though this was not immediately obvious. By 1924 Muslims in Delhi saw the writing on the wall. They told the Ali brothers to fuck off. If India became independent, they would be ethnically cleansed. That is what in fact happened when Nehru became PM. The Muslim population fell from one third to less than five percent.
Gandhi and Nehru were important because they delivered as much as was possible for Hindus though, no doubt, they initially pretended they could fool the Muslims into accepting Hindu hegemony. Gandhi promoted 'Ahimsa' as this magic power while Nehru spoke of 'Socialism'. But the thing was eye-wash pure and simple. Gandhi and Nehru would keep poodles like Maulana Azad on a leash- Kidwai wasn't a poodle but he was very useful to the Nehrus- but the thing was purely cosmetic.
In Nehru’s case, a national unifying force based on a newfound freedom from colonial rule helped contain Hindutva, at least in the initial post-Independence years.
What contained 'Hindutva' was the Hindu belief that Hindus have shit for brains. We thought Indians who looked and talked like British Sahibs would also be as smart. We were wrong. Hindus with posh accents are stupider than cows and their shit is less useful.
But as has been the experience of other countries, national bonds forged by freedom from colonialism are apt to wear out,
India could have become independent in 1924. However, partition was the nettle which had to be grasped. The other problem was the Princes. Thankfully, they sank into indolence and sloth during the inter-war period.
to be replaced by a more primitive national identification based on local origins and roots.
Hindus feared the Muslims so much that they decided to hang together rather than once more fall prey to salami tactics.
For India, that meant that Hindu nationalism was bound to emerge as a political force.
This stupid cunt has forgotten that he himself said Hindu nationalism had already emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Even during the Nehru years, a sense of Hindu nationalism prevailed not just in non-Congress parties but in the Congress party itself. Mrs Gandhi began moving towards soft Hindutva for getting votes.
Unlike Vajpayee or Advani, Mrs G was genuinely spiritual and interested in Hindu rituals. Sadly there was a superstitious element to this. Her sycophant, Mohamad Yunus published a book in which he accused Menaka and her mother of using Tantric rituals to cut short the lives of their own husbands!
And the 1983 textile strike was a precipitating moment.
Organized labor overplayed its hand and was disintermediated. But the same thing was happening in the UK (coal strike) and the US (air traffic controllers).
The many tentacles of that strike spread to this day.
No they don't. Dutta Samant was killed but he was already a forgotten man though he had managed to get elected to the Lok Sabha in 1984.
In terms of economics, the loss of jobs that followed the strike meant that labour’s bargaining power fell sharply.
They had no bargaining power. The question was whether the Government would pay employers to bribe the workers. Indira took a dim view of Samant's challenge to the Congress party's Trade Union.
Millowners lost interest in manufacturing and instead found it more attractive to speculate in property and enter the construction and property development businesses.
It is obvious that Bombay should concentrate on high value adding services. It can't do manufacturing because land is too scarce.
So the de-industrialisation of India began with the textile strike, which kept the bargaining power of labour low.
If your productivity is low your bargaining power is low.
Some workers were sucked into criminal gangs that formed around property speculation and construction, a fertile area for organised crime worldwide.
Trade Unions can themselves be a criminal enterprise- remember Jimmy Hoffa?
And some workers were attracted to Hindutva’s silent call.
Nobody in India is silently calling anybody at all. Everybody is shouting their fucking head off.
They became foot soldiers of Hindutva. That is the moment in Bombay when the Shiv Sena turned away from its anti-south Indian rhetoric to an anti-Muslim stance. And nationwide, the Vishva Hindu Parishad began organising the first of the many yatras to propagate the Hindutva narrative. The Bombay riots in 1992-1993, which followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid, imparted further strength to Hindutva.
Why is this cunt focusing on Bombay? It is not representative of India. He should say 'Mandir was the alternative to Mandal- i.e. Religious consolidation was needed to prevent caste rivalry re. reservations from destroying the cohesiveness of the majority community.'
Once unleashed, Hindutva forces had powerful momentum, a potential that Savarkar recognized in the 1920s.
But the Anushilar committees had recognized it much earlier.
The political power of Hindutva stems from the
fact that Muslims hated Kaffirs and believed that they should dominate any successor state to the Raj. Either Hindus became cohesive or, as Tagore warned, they would once again come under Muslim domination. Gandhi, in 1939, said the Brits must hand over the Army to Congress before they left otherwise the Muslims and the Punjabis would take over the country. Hindus are addicted to Ahimsa and thus can't fight worth a damn.
friend-enemy relationship, a theme developed by the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt a few years after Savarkar emphasised that pointing an antagonistic finger at an enemy helps sustain a politically potent group identity.
By the time Savarkar had enough freedom to raise his voice, some Muslim politicians were saying that Muslims must side with any Muslim invader or usurper as a matter of religious obligation. The reason Savarkar & Co failed to have much impact is because they attacked the practice of untouchability which the caste Hindus remained, very stupidly, attached to.
Therefore, I am not able to see a clear path out of Hindutva because it has very deep historical roots and is sustained by the friend-enemy distinction.
The solution is simple. If Muslims stop threatening to chop off the heads of Kaffirs then the 'friend-enemy distinction' will disappear. Hindus get along very well with Muslims in well-run Muslim or Christian countries. Anyway, there are many parts of India where there is no Hindu-Muslim antagonism save when some nutters go mad and start chucking bombs.
To overcome it, we need a very deep cleansing of social norms, a process that is extraordinarily difficult.
If Muslims decide that it is normative to denounce and get locked up any nutters of their own, then everything will be fine. There are plenty of Muslims holding high positions in the UK. Each and every one of them denounces any wrongdoing on the part of their own. It is White 'liberals' who cozy up to the nutjobs.
Is there anything heartening at all? What's your silver lining?
I live in Amrika unlike the rest of you dot Indians. That's my silver lining! Also kindly ship me Qutub Minar for purposes of anal insertion.
We need to see more experiments such as the Kerala decentralisation model.
Kerala is rather exceptional in that highly educated and skilled people would still want to live in their ancestral homes. This is because the country is beautiful, the people are handsome and the language and culture are as sweet as sugar while being impregnated with the highest spiritual truths.
That model will help generate a new civic consciousness, which is essential to repair social norms, restore accountability, and overcome development deficits.
Yet, as CM Vijayan realizes, Kerala will only come up when it keeps its talented people in high value adding professions. This is already happening and will gather pace. But there are many other such parts of India.
Essentially, a decentralised governance structure places the governed and those who govern them into close proximity with each other,
which is bad news if the local bosses are greedy rapists
and for that reason it creates an institutional framework that demands a restoration of social norms and public accountability.
which is what the Taliban is giving Afghanistan. The plain fact is, if local people want to do evil shit then 'decentralization' means more evil shit will go down.
My hope is that such institutionalised demand for restoration of norms and accountability spreads to jurisdictions beyond Kerala and percolates up to higher levels of government.
A bad idea of the people want bad or stupid things. Smart people run away. Productivity falls because of Capital flight.
A positive diffusion of institutionalised civic consciousness is possible because,
incessantly talking virtue signaling bollocks will cause pigs to develop aeronautical capacity. They will fly around shitting on people I don't like.
when its energies are harnessed, it improves the delivery of public goods, increases economic productivity, and allows people to live with dignity and integrity.
Says an American citizen who is living with dignity and integrity in a land very far away from that of his ancestors.
Today, anybody who talks about dignity and integrity is at risk of being labelled a hopeless romantic.
No. We understand that the guy is a virtue signaling cunt.
What I hope is that we will have a time when people will admire those virtues.
One can admire dignity, integrity and the ability to levitate without believing they have any relevance to a political or economic question.
Rather than an existence where corruption, criminals in politics, and social violence are woven into the fabric of life, where it is rational to cheat others before they cheat you, to dig the groundwater deeper before your neighbour does, a moral restraint fosters trust and cooperation for shared economic progress.
No it doesn't. Those who show 'moral restraint' go to the wall. The Nash equilibrium is a tragedy of the commons. Public signals won't alter this. Those signals have to be backed up by punishments. But there must be an incentive that such remedies are provided. Thus only mechanism design matters. Because Mody is shit at economics, he prefers to gas on about dignity and integrity and violence against women and why is nobody shipping me Qutub Minar so I can shove it up my bum? Is it due to rampant Hindutva? Fuck you, BJP! Fuck you very much!
And it is my contention in the book that the decay of social norms and public accountability prevents the delivery of public goods.
But norms only decay, accountability only disappears, when what J.S Mill called 'punishability' disappears. Mechanism design matters. Talking bollocks is a waste of time.
I use that interplay of the lived reality with norms and accountability to assess every leader.
With the result that you have written a shitty book. The plain fact is that India should have incentivized rapid growth in both the public and private sector. It should have penalized stupid 'activists' throwing endless spanners into the works in the name of dignity, integrity, social justice etc, etc.
That is the day I am waiting for, when change comes in a fundamental form,
e.g. Qutub Minar being crammed up his bum
rather than in the superficial gloss we are now celebrating.
Who is celebrating? I think Mody thinks all the other Econ Professors have been invited to a party by thrown by the plutocracy where they are being sucked off by Super-Models. Also Qutub Minar is being freely used for anal pleasure. Sadly, Mody did not get invite. So he has written a book to complain bitterly of his fate.
I will now turn to the abstract of each chapter in his book to explain what fallacy Mody is committing
Introduction
India's continuing economic failure lies in creating an internationally competitive economy, one that taps into an expanded global market to sell labor-intensive products.
India failed to even create a fiscally unified internal market such that scale and scope economies became available. Moreover, Indian capitalists preferred to sell shoddy stuff in the domestic market rather than risk plunging into the global market. India should have supported the Managing Agency system and let it expand by taking over some downside risk for Banks and Institutional investors. This was simply a matter of sound public finance. Spend so as to increase the tax yield in the future. By itself, this will reduce the riskless rate of return.
That competitiveness failure, in turn, is the consequence of a woeful neglect of public goods
Fuck off! Public goods don't matter. Budgets do. Spend on what will raise your revenue. Don't do stupid shit.
—education,
raise the return on education by ensuring that stupid kids drop out quickly
health,
defeat 'Baumol cost-disease' by getting internals scope and scale economies in Medical education and pharma and then export Doctors and Nurses and Medicines. It is what Cuba did. So did Kerala, come to think of it. But this means keeping stupid kids out of Medical Colleges. India should have gone for Freidman type student loans repaid out of future earnings. Indeed, informally, that was what actually happened. But this was only possible for better off communities.
cities,
have an internal passport system. Don't give migrants votes and entitlements.
a clean environment,
which can generate revenue. Make sure there are incentive compatible control rights over congestible or 'free' goods. This is mechanism design 101.
and a fair and responsive judiciary.
Justice is a service industry. Let it pay for itself and stay the fuck away from 'political questions'.
In turn, the failure to provide public goods on the scale needed arose
from the fact that the country was as poor as shit.
because politics became increasingly narrow-minded,
being very very poor does tend to narrow your focus. India, an agricultural nation, was living 'ship to mouth' in the Sixties. If the US pulled the PL 480 plug there would have been a big famine- as there was in Bangladesh in 1974.
tuned to the short-term interests of political leaders.
Let the short-term interests of leaders be linked to good economic outcomes. Also pay the bureaucrats properly while keeping out the riff raff and reducing compliance costs.
In this story, the damage to economic and political prospects gathered pace with the prime ministership of Indira Gandhi, who started chipping away at democratic norms and political accountability.
Fuck off! South Korea started to rise when it got rid of democratic norms and accountability and other such useless stuff. But, like Taiwan, it faced an existential military threat. It had to grow or risk being abandoned by Uncle Sam. That's also why so many South Koreans served in Vietnam.
From there on, the damage gathered pace.
This is a morality tale. Though Mrs G inherited a starving shithole she was naughty and so things got worse. But the truth is things got a little better precisely because Mrs G didn't give a shit about 'accountability'. The only reason she held elections in 1977 was because she thought Sanju's chums would grow impatient and arrange a nice little 'accident' for her. No doubt, the CIA would be delighted to help.
Second chapter- an uncertain beginning
The early post-independence years opened up but did not resolve some of the key questions that India has dealt with ever since.
A meaningless sentence. The early years were promising. India was owed a lot of money and could have industrialized rapidly by borrowing on Wall Street and bringing in GE and GM and so on.
The uncertainty arose because the two principal leaders, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel, had very different personalities, with Nehru more of a thinker and Patel more of a doer.
This did not create any uncertainty at all. Nehru had a low opinion of Congress wallahs and brought in right wing people to manage Finance. Patel died quite soon. His legacy was a stronger IAS. Nehru favored a technocratic cadre at a later point, but this was strangled at birth by the Babus.
As a doer, Patel's signature achievement was incorporating all the princely states into the Indian Union.
Jinnah achieved the same thing. As Nehru pointed out, the Indian Army could crush all the armies of the Princely states jointly or separately.
But Kashmir's position in the Indian Union, the construction of India as a secular society, and the country's guiding economic ideology remained undefined.
But Kashmir doesn't matter.
With Patel's early death, Nehru became India's undisputed leader. And the question was whether Nehru the thinker could also be a doer.
No. The question was whether Nehru would lurch to the left as people like Sukarno and Nkrumah would do a little later. He opted for a half way house. Congress committed to Socialism and there was an ambitious Second Five Year plan. But it ran out of money very quickly. Budgets matter. Plans don't- unless, like Stalin and Mao, you don't mind starving the peasantry.
Third chapter- the path not taken-
From the very start, it was clear that employment was India's number-one economic problem.
The solution was also clear. Let the textile and wage-good sector grow rapidly so as to get more and more tax revenue which could be invested in infrastructure and skill acquisition. However, this would have increased the power of Congress's traditional financiers. Moreover, Delhi would be weak compared to Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Kanpur etc, etc. Thus Nehru used the Planning Commission to cut down the economic power of the industrialists. The decision not to allow the organized textile industry to expand was explained by supposed 'export pessimism'. The story people like VS Naipaul were told was that Indian businessmen were shitty. Today they will supply good quality shirts. Tomorrow they will send rubbish even though they won't get paid and will go bankrupt. This was like Nehru's belief that the Indian farmer shouldn't be given title to land or working capital. Why? Barristocrats believed that once a farmer gets some money he immediately kills one or two of his friends or relatives so as to have the pleasure of paying a lawyer to get him out of jail.
The plain fact is that if young people can get private sector jobs then they don't want boring clerical berths in the Civil Service. Make jobs disappear and everybody and their cat dreams of nothing higher than gaining 'sarkari naukari'. Caste based politics in India was about who got Government jobs. It increased the power of politicians. Kids like me- i.e. those too stupid to study Medicine or get into IIT- would memorize the 20 point program or other such shite so as to score in the Civil Service exams.
this required simultaneously improving productivity in agriculture
in which case there would have been Arthur Lewis type labor surplus. Agricultural involution was preferable so preserve rural vote-banks. The Dynasty had its own pocket boroughs for this reason.
and creating urban jobs. Higher agricultural productivity would move people out of agriculture with a reduction in farm output,
he means 'without'.
and urban jobs would help people build new lives. Japan was the country that had achieved this transition in the previous hundred years.
As had every industrial nation.
And tantalizingly, India seemed inclined to pursue that path.
Nehru's pal, the American Ambassador (whose son actually attended an Indian school) kept telling him to do land redistribution as had happened in Japan and Taiwan and South Korea. Sadly America didn't follow this strategy- though it was suggested by Irma Adelman- in South Vietnam.
Anyway, Land was a State subject. Kerala and Kashmir did do quite good land reform. Elsewhere Vinobha Bhave's 'bhoodan' muddied the waters and 'benami' holdings flourished. But this also meant that the State was disintermediated by goons who enforced control rights.
Ensuring success on that path needed
sensible mechanism design
public goods, especially education and cities, both of which the Japanese had actively promoted.
Japan, quite sensibly, first set up industries and then privatized them. However, urban planning was a nightmare. Arthur Koestler complained that there were no street numbers or, very often, even street names. You had a long description of the following sort- go to such and such temple then walk down the street which smells of fish. If a black cat crosses your path turn back and start again.
But India never seriously tried to get on to the Japanese path.
Which consisted of militarizing society and winning wars so as to get reparations and go on the gold standard. After Hiroshima, this changed to just sucking up to Uncle Sam and turning samurai into business executives. However, the key to Japanese success was 'Duality'- i.e. condemning the majority to low pay in the traditional and ancillary sector, while sending the smartest graduates into better paid Corporate Trenches where they worked their asses off while their wives kept their dinner warm.
Because of that early failure, India never caught up with providing its citizens with adequate jobs.
Just say 'export pessimism' and you have explained India's failure to do export led growth. It was too poor for anything else.
Nehru's dangerous gamble
There was no gamble. Nehru did what was required to concentrate power in his own hands. People were cool with that because they feared utter anarchy if the 'last Englishman to rule India' (the guy looked and sounded like a shorter version of Alaistair Sims) ran away to run a boarding school for delinquent girls in the Home Counties.
Instead of taking the Japanese economic path,
which was not an available option because Indians with liberal educations are lazy, stupid, and don't like doing anything productive.
Nehru embarked on his "temples strategy" of economic development. These were high-visibility projects that had few social and political moving parts. The most important examples were multi-purpose dams and heavy industries.
Nothing wrong with having some big turn-key projects. The problem was 'export pessimism'. This meant that India would limp from one budget crisis to the next. Had exports been allowed to boom there would have been enough tax revenue to do other things.
These did not require social consensus
Nothing requires social consensus.
and could proceed with minimal administrative support.
Nonsense! All such projects generated huge amounts of red tape.
Both these features—limited social consensus and administrative needs—fit in with Nehru's personality of being a thinker rather than a doer.
I suppose what this cunt means is that Nehru's Cabinet colleagues were useless sycophants who didn't dare do anything for fear of a tongue lashing.
The result was a development strategy that created few jobs. The strategy failed quickly because it generated a very heavy demand for foreign exchange, which India did not have. But the ideology underlying the strategy lived on in a false rhetoric of "socialism," when in fact it did little to serve the true goals of socialism: equal opportunity for all.
This is foolish. 'Socialism' means that the business man has to crawl to the politician and the bureaucrat. That's what Indian politicians wanted and that's what they got. There was no 'dangerous gamble' here. Nehru & Co wanted to entrench themselves and destroy any source of opposition. Nehru also weakened the army for the same reason.
Nehru doubles his bet
With the foreign exchange crisis of 1957,
The British sterling balance, built up during the War, had been exhausted
it was obvious that India's heavy industrialization strategy was not working, and India needed to change course.
By moving to the Left. That's what 'Socialists' do when the shit hits the fan. The produce much more shit and spread it around with dignity, integrity and public accountability in a democratic manner such that social justice is sucked off by homosexual norms.
But it was a moment of fortuitous geopolitical constellation. The Soviets seemed to be asserting a lead over the United States in science and technology. The Americans were worried that countries such as India might be attracted to the Soviet Union, which could lead to the spread of communism in Asia. John F. Kennedy, first as a senator from Massachusetts and then as U.S. president, pushed hard to provide India with the funding needed to complete its second Five-Year Plan and the even more ambitious third Five-Year Plan.
Ambassador Kaul called this 'free money'. But it was inflationary and had a crowding out effect.
Hence, instead of changing course, India continued on a path that did not create sufficient jobs.
This is the Cato Institute's version of history. Stupid Democrats paid for India to turn Red.
Tagore's unheard song
Which one? The one about how the Muslims would slit Hindu throats if they didn't unite and fight back?
The neglect of primary education is a striking feature of the Nehru years,
But education was a State subject. Kerala wanted primary education but only got it because initially the Ruling Family would pay poorer parents to send their kids to school. The thing was only made compulsory once attendance was pretty high. Baroda's King made school attendance compulsory but didn't provide schools or pay parents to send them there. Naturally, his officials reported that all kids were in school. True some dwarfs had invaded the kingdom and you could see them laboring all over the place. But they were adults. Had they been kids they would have been in school.
In 1937, Congress administrations discovered that there were all sorts of difficulties- some to do with caste and creed- associated with trying to have universal primary education. Gandhi's own 'Basic Education' scheme was, as Zakir Hussain, said 'a fraud.' The biggest problem was that only illiterate pederasts would show up to teach. Ved Mehta has a story about the Principle of the School for the Blind which he attended. It turned out that the fellow had been given the job because he couldn't read or write. That's why he liked having the kids read out from their braille text books to him.
If the return on education is low, you can have schools and some illiterate teachers and some delinquent students but you won't actually get any fucking education. This is not something the PM can do anything about. What he should concentrate on is letting businessmen exploit the fuck out of the poor and needy and then taking a share of their profits. In the process, education and training suddenly starts to yield a return and people get it for themselves and their kids.
despite Nehru's many statements that recognized the crucial importance of mass education. Striking also was the forceful case for education made by Rabindranath Tagore, a towering Indian poet and mentor to Nehru.
He was no such thing. Nehru sent his daughter to Shantiniketan but only because he thought she was as stupid as shit. Tagore hated machinery. Nehru couldn't get enough of the stuff.
Tagore had studied the administration and quality of school education in a number of countries.
No he hadn't. His daddy- the head of a Religious sect- had forced him to set up a religious school in Shantiniketan. Once he himself became the head of daddy's sect, he developed Shantiketan to be more artsy-fartsy. He succeeded because he genuinely had artistic talent. But the place was a money-pit.
Tagore made the case that education was the cure for all of India's problems.
But crazy shit is not education.
Education was, for him, the best—possibly the only—way to overcome the handicaps of India's caste system.
Tagore's sect was very casteist. Apparently Tagore relaxed the restrictions on non-Brahmins somewhat. But, by then you had plenty of Kayastha and Baidya Swamys
But the Nehru government persisted in dedicating insufficient funds to primary education and spending those scarce education funds on higher education.
This cretin doesn't get that primary Education is a state subject. Research Universities and Institutes can be on the 'concurrent' list.
Thus, India acquired a lopsided education system that did not serve the people
Kerala had high literacy but was still as poor as shit precisely because an educated worker is a Bolshie worker. Thus Kerala exported people and became a remittance economy.
and created the incentives among students for acquiring degree certificates rather than acquiring education.
Which is why it is important to keep out the riff raff.
Corruption infiltrated the administration, especially, of colleges and universities.
Fuck corruption. The big problem was students knifing each other when they weren't trying to kill the Vice Chancellor.
Democracy's first betrayal-
Nehru believed in the norms of equality, tolerance, and shared progress,
But, like the Mahatma, he also believed that Indians were a shitty people incapable of achieving anything whatsoever.
and he nurtured India's democratic institutions.
No. India's democratic institutions kept him employed because the alternative to him was worse.
But Nehru's administrative and political skills fell well short of his idealism.
But nobody else in the public arena showed much of either quality. JP was stupider than Nehru. Lohia more virulent than JP. It was Lohia who opened the door to RSS participation in mass politics in the cow belt. JP doubled down on this.
The fundamentally flawed heavy industrialization strategy made a mockery of his ideal of shared progress.
It was irrelevant. The country should simply have encouraged exports so as to have more tax revenue. That's how budgeting works. Spend a bit on stuff that brings in revenue. Stop spending on useless shit. But if heavy industrialization represents 'free money' or reparations for the fact that you are poor, starving, brown monkey, then there is no necessary crowding out effect. On the other hand subsidizing loss making enterprises is a mistake. But there was no real reason why any PSU should have been loss making.
Dire poverty persisted through his years as prime minister.
Which tells us that democracies can tolerate famine and dire poverty and women being beaten incessantly.
And while he contained the rise of Hindu nationalism,
because what was rising faster was Communism
the forces of Hindu nationalism lurked just below the political surface and occasionally burst out in episodic communal riots.
Congress itself had done plenty of ethnic cleansing. Nehru had threatened to send planes to bomb Bihar because Congressmen were slaughtering Muslims. But neither Nehru nor Gandhi expelled or prosecuted any such person.
The spreading tentacles of corruption steadily undermined the norms and institutions of democracy.
No. Democracy started off corrupt and stayed that way. What changed was that Nehru & Co could extort donations rather than having to rely on the public spirit of the plutocrat.
Nehru's tragedy was that he
was as stupid as shit. The comedy was that he looked and sounded like Alaistair Sim.
meant well for India, but he could not deliver. India fell behind on every metric of progress that Nehru had hoped for.
Nehru and Gandhi and Tagore and so forth believed Indians were a shitty people. It was very wrong of the Brits to show that Indian soldiers could fight courageously in Europe and MENA etc. Also some Indians started doing well in Maths and Science and other such stuff. This was just wrong. Indians should crawl into a corner and starve to death while muttering either 'Ahimsa, Ahimsa!' or else 'Boo to Capitalism!'
Shastri Makes a Brave Transition
India's uselessness, as demonstrated by the 1962 war, had concentrated minds in Britain, the USSR and Washington. Shastri is unusual in that the Brits, the Soviets and the Yanks all turned up in Delhi to hand out money to get Shastri elected. This was because Krishna Menon was hated by everybody whereas Morarji was only hated by those who had met him.
One of Nehru's last acts was to endorse the Kamaraj plan which gutted the Congress organization and concentrated all power in the PMO. But Shastri- a little sparrow of a man- didn't look like he could wield power. Still, he was wily. He'd got Indira into the Cabinet by threatening to bring in her Aunt, Vijaylaxmi, if she refused.
With Nehru's death in May 1964, a new chapter of modern Indian history began. Nehru's death coincided with a severe drought. International financial aid donors were demanding greater attention to improving agricultural productivity and devaluation of the rupee.
B.R Sen, as head of F.A.O had organized a big Food Conference in 1963. The Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation were keen to get behind what would come to be known as the Green Revolution. Shastri was prepared to approve this because people had mocked him when he had suggested the Gandhian alternative of everybody skipping meals.
The new prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, also inherited an increasingly fractious Congress Party and a rise in Hindu nationalist sentiment, both within the Congress and outside.
Getting beaten by China had made the entire nation restive. If Pakistan too defeated India there would have been ethnic cleansing.
Tensions were on the rise in southern India, especially in Tamil Nadu, at the prospect of Hindi being declared the national language.
Mrs Gandhi was the only Congress leader to plead the cause of the Tamils. Kamaraj and Bhaktatsalam were utterly useless. Thus Congress lost T.N permanently.
Despite these political headwinds, Shastri began navigating a course correction on economic policy, giving more emphasis to agriculture and less to heavy industry.
There is no point setting up heavy industries in a country which might soon be overrun by invaders or insurgents.
He set in place a new agricultural policy, which has remained India's agricultural policy ever since.
Not quite but let it pass.
But he died an early death with his task barely begun.
The Pakistani invasion had changed the picture. The Army could no longer be neglected. It is one thing to let China take down your pants. It was another thing entirely for a much smaller, ethnically identical, country, like Pakistan, do it to you. What would come next? Ceylon annexing the South? Bhutan invading Bihar?
9 A Savior for India's Ferment
Indira Gandhi became India's third prime minister in January 1966. Mrs. Gandhi inherited the post-Nehru problems of a poorly functioning agricultural sector, poor job creation in urban areas, and inflation, which a second consecutive drought aggravated. Student and worker unrest were on the rise. Two aggressive movements emerged as a challenge to the state: Shiv Sena in Bombay
which wasn't really a challenge at all. Indeed, the thing looked quite useful if it came to killing Commies. But the same was true of the RSS.
and the Naxalites in Bengal.
But Jyoti Basu was prepared to call in the Army to kill them. The problem was that his party ran with the hares and hunted with the hounds. They succeeded in driving a lot of industry out of West Bengal.
Mrs. Gandhi's immediate economic task was devaluation of the rupee. The devaluation was too timid and did not have the stimulative effect that a large devaluation would likely have had. That lack of a beneficial effect encouraged the naysayers. Mrs. Gandhi quickly turned away from economic policy tasks and devoted herself increasingly to building her image as a national savior.
In other words she started prating about social justice and entitlements. Still, it must be said that years of corrupt 'license permit Raj' together with very steep marginal tax rates on Income had created a political economy of stagnation. Still, going after 'Managing Agencies' was a bad idea. One result was 'pyramiding' by 'promoters' such that they had little skin in the game. The downside was taken by the LIC and the newly nationalized Banks. Socialism was paying for Capitalists to stick around- or appear to do so. The suspicion is that their own money was invested in the West.
She also used draconian state powers to crush the Naxalite movement.
Naxalites killed policemen. They were permitted to take a very thorough revenge. A lot of students were Naxals. Everybody enjoys torturing and killing students.
With that, the coercive power of the state became an essential tool of Indian governance.
Because British Viceroy used to rule India with cuddles and kisses. The fact is the Indian state had shown it could crush Commies or Rezakars or whatever and keep them crushed in the early Fifties.
10 India Has an Empress
Lacking any ambition in economic policymaking, Mrs. Gandhi continued from where she had left off in 1967 to test the guardrails of democracy.
No. Indira genuinely thought that some of the guys with Cambridge PhDs understood what they were doing. She was capable of course correction. Minhas resigned from the Planning Commission when the Govt tried to take over the grain trade. He was proved right and Indira asked him to come back. He refused because the Emergency was in full swing. Rajiv and Sanjay- like other young Indians- had nothing but contempt for Indian economists. They prefer virtue signaling to doing boring stuff like mechanism design.
She was on her way to becoming India's empress. As she ascended to her throne, democratic norms and accountability fell victim to intensifying political corruption.
I suppose this cunt thinks a daughter being offered her Daddy's job as Prime Miniser is a 'democratic norm'. As for 'accountability'- the thing didn't exist. True, some stupid judge tried to unseat the PM on a trifling matter. She made the Bench crawl to her. Nehru had been less successful in bullying judges because his position was weaker. The Princes might still have a lot of support. But Indira showed she could pack the Bench. The one sanction the Judiciary had was to threaten to resign en masse. But Indira would have simply replaced the whole bunch of them with her own illiterate stooges.
Mrs. Gandhi's plans for maintaining her hold on power now included her son Sanjay, the prince-in-the-making.
Sanjay was an unemployable cunt. Clearly the only job he could hold down was Prime Minister.
India looked less and less like a democracy.
But Indira showed that India was not, as the Myrdals averred, a 'soft state'. It was well hard. Ted Heath declared an Emergency but was beaten by the Trade Unions. Indira broke the railway strike and beat the fuck out out of JP. Then she jailed the entire opposition. Indira knew that Congress had lost the struggle for Independence because beating and jailing people is very very fucking effective. Sadly, she had to call elections in 1977 because otherwise Sanju's pals would have had her killed. Autocracy tends to get tempered by assassination and parricide had been a feature of Delhi's Mughal dynasty.
Neglect of economic policymaking had a cost: India fell further behind East Asian economies. In December 1975, The Economist crowned Mrs. Gandhi the "empress of India."
Because the Economist has shit for brains.
11 Anger Meets Repression
Rolling economic crises ratcheted up the struggle Indians faced to find work and pay for life's necessities.
They were welcome to crawl into a corner and starve while muttering 'Ahimsa! Ahimsa!' or 'Boo to Hindutva!' or whatever.
And the simmering clash between angry Indians and Mrs. Gandhi's repressive power boiled over.
No it didn't. Repressive power won hands down. Shooting people causes them to die. That puts an end to any simmering anger.
The clash between protestors and the India's police and army spilled over into the political arena as opposition leader Jayaprakash Narayan contested Mrs. Gandhi's authority.
Fuck off! JP was beaten on the head by policemen a couple of days after he turned down Indira's offer to dismiss the Bihar Government. It was at that moment that people realized that Gandhian politics had run out of steam. If Indira didn't mind JP getting his head kicked in then 'Ahimsa' was useless. Either the RSS would spearhead opposition to Indira or there would be no opposition. In the event, the RSS would have done a deal with Indira as would almost everybody else except Morarji, JP and Fernandes and one or two others. She played her had cleverly and pretended that the RSS alone had displayed the cloven hoof. This suited others in the Janata parivar. But it lead to collapse of that administration on the 'dual membership' issue. Indira and Sanjay laughed all the way to the vote bank.
I should mention that the only danger Indira faced was a rebellion by the police and armed forces. But - like the PAC rebellion in UP which had been spearheaded by stupid students in 1973 was easily crushed by the Army- 30 constables were shot- and so the men in khaki got the message. Kill students before they fill your head with shit. The Army would stay loyal because Indira delivered victory in 1971.
In that inflammable mix, a high-level court,
a High Court judge who was quickly overruled by the Supreme Court
judging that Mrs. Gandhi had engaged in corrupt practices during her campaign in the 1971 election, voided her election. Mrs. Gandhi responded by imposing a state of internal emergency in June 1975, which gave her dictatorial powers.
She needn't have bothered to declare anything. She already had Emergency powers. But Siddhartha Shankar Ray liked the word 'Emergency'. Anyway, if Bangladesh had one, India should get one too. What was different about Indira's Emergency was that it was hugely successful- unlike that of Ted Heath.
12 An Autocratic Gamble Fails
With near-absolute power over India, Mrs. Gandhi and her son Sanjay showed little interest in education, health, and social welfare.
But the macro-economic picture was improving. Trade Unions were cowed. Business Confidence could easily have revived.
Instead, Sanjay's plan for India's job crisis was to forcibly sterilize men,
No. That was his plan for the population problem. He didn't have a plan for the 'job crisis'. Clearly, if you are unemployable, Mummy should ensure you get to be Prime Minister.
and his plan for urban revival was to throw slum dwellers out of their homes. Not surprisingly, given his history and sense of grandeur,
what history? He'd had a good enough education- he was even sent to some fancy Swiss school. He was ambitious but in a dingy sort of way.
violence was his trademark.
Not really. A Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto could have his Foreign Secretary thrashed and sodomized. The Dynasty, whatever else you might say about them, simply aren't that nasty. Sanju may have curbed Haksar's influence. He didn't force him to rape his own daughter. He didn't even forcibly sterilize him. Sad.
Mrs. Gandhi's promise that the Emergency would improve people's lives proved a cruel illusion.
People who live in fear that their goolies will be cut off don't bother with 'cruel illusions'.
When she called for new elections in January 1977, believing she would win,
She didn't. She believed the Youth Congress would do badly and thus they'd see they needed her. She didn't anticipate the scale of her defeat in the North. But she was right that nobody else could command a stable majority.
the people decided that they had had enough of her. A motley group of politicians under the newly formed Janata Party came into power in March 1977.
JP and Kripalani chose Morarji- who was older than either- to be PM. This doomed Janata.
13 Democracy Betrays Again, Deindustrialization Begins
The Janata Party quickly restored the checks and balances of democracy that Mrs. Gandhi had undone.
Nonsense! They abolished the fundamental right to property. Their mistake was not to arrest Indira & Co under MISA and get them sentenced before dispensing with those powers. True, Indira would have got bail sooner or later, but why not later rather than sooner? Janata's inability to punish Indira reflected its utter uselessness.
But the party's leaders soon trapped themselves in petty squabbles with one another. The absence of a sense of personal morality and civic consciousness in the Janata Party's leadership
this is unfair. Many of those guys were very high toned. Nanaji Deshmukh even refused a Cabinet seat. What these guys were lacking was political competence though Vajpayee was quite a good Foreign Minister. On the other hand you had the crazy Raj Narain who helped bring Janata down.
meant another wasted economic opportunity.
Personal morality and civic consciousness and spiritual enlightenment are irrelevant when it comes to making good economic decisions. Why does this economic professor not understand this?
The squabbles finally brought the government down in August 1979.
Charan Singh was supposed to have an economic policy different from Nehru's. He even got a book of his on the Harvard Econ reading list. His government lasted only 23 days before Indira pulled the plug.
Voters reelected Mrs. Gandhi as the least bad alternative.
Because that is how choices are made. You minimize opportunity cost.
Sanjay's star rose, but he died when attempting a foolhardy maneuver while piloting a plane over Delhi. Mrs. Gandhi's corruption grew. And a painful textile workers' strike in Bombay ended in crushing the workers while shifting business incentives from manufacturing to property and construction investments.
But manufacturing industry was in a parlous state all over the country. The regulatory burden was too high. Also you had to keep hiring the idiot sons and cretinous daughters of the IT commissioner and the Factory Inspector and so forth.
14 When the Violence Came Home
Jawaharlal Nehru left his daughter Mrs. Gandhi a poor national inheritance.
He left her nothing. Sastri offered her the PM post but she refused. After he died, she took it because she had seen with her own eyes how utterly useless and stupid Congress Ministers were.
She responded to the troubled economic and social conditions by making a corrupt and unabashed play for power, imbuing Indian politics with pervasive violence.
Meaningless gibberish. Indira believed the Leftist theory- articulated by people like Paul Brass- that Sikhism is a casteist religion whereby Jats and Khattris pull the wool over the eyes of the Ramgharias and Mazhabis. Zail Singh was Ramgharia. Buta Singh was Mazhabi. Indira let them promote Bhrindinwale to split the Jat vote. I suppose she thought Pakistan and the CIA (or at least Jesse Helms) were behind the Khalistanis.
Still, getting killed by Sikhs helped her son. Had some Hindu guy whose goolies had been chopped off knifed her, there would have been no 'sympathy wave'.
In turn, she met the force of violence from Sikh terrorism, spearheaded by Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. Sikh youth with poor job prospects became Bhindranwale's foot soldiers.
Those who got visas to Canada or asylum in Europe did very well. Sikh politics may be difficult to understand but Sikhs are smart and industrious people. Also there is no caste or gender based discrimination in that religion. Indira should have known better. But, perhaps, her mind had been clouded with grief.
The stand-off could not end well. Mrs. Gandhi's Sikh bodyguards assassinated her on October 31, 1980. That evening, her 40-year-old son Rajiv was sworn in as India's prime minister. Indian democracy seemed to be drifting into dynastic rule.
No. The INC was already openly dynastic. Nobody wrote books titled 'After Indira, who?'
15 A Pilot Flies into Political Headwinds
Although not democratically elected,
He was elected to Parliament from his brother's old seat in 1981.
Rajiv Gandhi inspired goodwill. Indians were desperate for change. Rajiv planted the seed for the Indian information technology industry. He won international kudos for lowering tax rates in the manner U.S. president Ronald Reagan had recently done.
Rajiv had the lowest possible opinion of the Planning Commission. Sadly, what he didn't understand was budgets.
And he authorized his finance minister V. P. Singh to identify and prosecute tax dodgers and thereby begin rooting out corruption.
No. That was the reason he shunted VP to Defense where that fellow could get the low down on Bofors.
But these early efforts ran into political headwinds.
Not really. Rajiv had a huge majority. Unfortunately VP and Arun and so forth were unreliable and capable of turning on him. Indira's paranoia had served her well. Rajiv lacked the killer instinct.
While the information technology industry continued to prosper, established Indian industrialists pushed back against the effort to attract foreign capital. And not surprisingly, Indian industry also pushed back against efforts to rein in their tax dodging. Rajiv gave into these pressures, allowing corruption to reestablish itself.
Rajiv understood that Indian industrialists, more often than not, were dependent on finance from the LIC etc. But he also knew that large scale f.d.i would endanger India's special relationship with the Soviet Union because the investors would try to buy influence by buying up the media and politicians.
On the economy, the Rajiv-run government spent well beyond its means, endangering domestic public finances and placing India at risk of an international financial crisis.
India was doing stupid shit like subsidizing exports of consumer goods. I recall visiting North Block in '84 or '85. A senior official pounced on me. He demanded to know where I had bought my suit. I said 'England. Marks and Spencer. It is an English suit.' He was mollified. He explained that it was an Indian suit which the Indian tax payer had very kindly supplied England at a subsidized price. He had been afraid that I was some dehati who had crookedly got his hands on an 'for export only' quality garment.
16 Rajiv Unleashes the Gale Force of Hindu Nationalism
Rajiv looked like Lord Ram as depicted on the wildly popular TV serial. Indira's death and the subsequent slaughter of Sikhs had consolidated Hindu support for the dynasty. The next step was to throw the Ram Janmabhoomi open to Hindu worship and then for Rajiv to build a temple there. Incidentally, his Mum had spent good money fighting a court case proving her sons were Hindus. His own marriage was Hindu as was Indira's and Priyanka's. His Aunty had married a Muslim but the Mahatma persuaded her to give that up. The Mahatma's Secretary, a Brahmin, provided a suitable Brahmin boy for Vijaylaxmi.
Hindu nationalism—Hindutva—had been a powerful but latent political force since the early years of the twentieth century.
Motilal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi were present at the foundation of the Hindu Mahasabha.
Veer Savarkar, who wrote the text Hindutva in 1923, established the political ideology as a battle between Hindus and non-Hindu enemies.
Tagore and Bipin Chandra Pal and, a little later, Lala Rajpat Rai and many others were saying pretty much the same thing around this time. Once the Congress-Khilafat combine collapsed. Hindus and Muslims were on opposite trajectories.
In 1925, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar founded the militant Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which became the principal organizational driver of Hindutva.
But he was a Congress member who was simply imitating the Seva Dal set up by his pal Dr. Hardikar. Both had joined Anushilan committees as medical students in Calcutta.
But first Gandhi and then Nehru kept Hindutva at bay by the force of the commanding political presence.
No. Gandhi and Nehru promised to give Hindus hegemony over the entire subcontinent by hoodwinking the Muslims.
Hindutva began emerging after Nehru's death
The Jan Sangh emerged when Shyama Prasad Mookherjee broke away from the Hindu Mahasabha. The RSS provided able young men like Vajpayee and Advani.
but made only modest headway until Mrs. Gandhi's waning years.
Because Socialism was supposed to have magical powers even superior to Gandhian Ahimsa.
It drew its foot soldiers from the pool of young Indian males with poor economic prospects, much as Bhindranwale had drawn his troops.
Whereas in other countries, only very rich men enlist as foot soldiers- right?
Rajiv did not comprehend Hindutva's historical potential; in an effort to make electoral gains by pandering to both Muslim and Hindu activists, he unleashed the Hindutva force in its modern form.
So, Rajiv should not have pandered to Muslims. He should have doubled down on right wing policies interspersed with building lots of Temples all over the place. Had he lived, perhaps that's exactly what he would have done. The fact is the Saur revolution in Afghanistan followed by the Soviet Union was driving the Muslims of the sub-continent further and further away from the pipe-dream of Socialism. Thus, there was no alternative to Hindutva more particularly after VP Singh played the Mandal card (i.e. reservations for backward castes).
17 An All-Too-Brief Moment of Sanity
Rajiv lost the 1989 national election, and a series of coalition governments pushed India closer to the brink of an international financial crisis. The government under Prime Minister V.P. Singh also introduced reservations of government jobs for new claimants: other backward castes. The coalitions did not last,
because VP Singh took a tough stand against the BJP/RSS campaign to build the Ram Temple.
and a Sri Lankan suicide bomber assassinated Rajiv while he was campaigning for a fresh election in 1991. On the verge of a crisis, the new government under P. V. Narasimha Rao and his finance minister Manmohan Singh sought a massive IMF loan and dismantled the controls on imports and production introduced by Nehru to prevent the outflow of foreign exchange. This long-overdue reform brought new hope for economic progress, although contemporary economic analysis made it clear that sustained long-run growth required investment in human capital.
Kerala had invested in human capital. Why didn't it take off economically? The truth is human capital doesn't matter. You can bring it in from outside and then let ambitious indigenous people take over once they make that investment for themselves. Otherwise you can have, as India did, lots of engineers but no factories for them to work in. They had to go in for coding, unless, like Kejriwal, they joined the Income Tax department.
China, armed with such investment, was beginning to establish itself as a global export powerhouse.
Because it invested in actually building factories and ports so as to export. There is no point preparing people for jobs which don't exist. But if jobs exist, though they may initially be filled by outsiders, the locals quickly look for ways to get the requisite skills.
18 The Promise Has a Dark Underbelly
To Indian policymakers, the path ahead seemed clear: more reforms to work the magic of the market.
No. Edwin Lim reports that Indian policymakers discovered that the fucking activists could get more money and kudos by fucking over the economy. Anyway, labor and land and agricultural reform would trigger mass protests involving millions of people.
However, menacing threats to democratic institutions
mass movements are a threat to democratic institutions- that is true enough. If a million take to the streets, even if the country has a billion people, democratic legislatures back down.
and long-term economic growth worked against that promise. In public and private life, moral and social norms were badly tarnished.
Which doesn't matter in the slightest. South Korea had some very corrupt politicians. So what?
Trust and cooperation were victims of the rush to personal gratification.
Which had existed previously
A dark Indian underbelly nurtured surging Hindutva,
Rising Islamic militancy across the globe nurtured similar movements elsewhere.
a deepening relationship between criminals and politicians, and a corrosive misogyny.
Japan had all these things. The Yakuza had been used by successive governments to handle the Reds. Indian women could rise by merit. Not so, Japanese women.
The question in the mid-1990s was whether the recently revealed promise would defeat the forces of darkness.
Dynasticism is a force of darkness. Hindutva alone could be said to combat it.
Or would the dark underbelly drag down the Indian promise?
What fucking promise? The Dynasty had been content to preside over stagnation. Assassinations and national bankruptcy had forced it to up its game a little. But the UPA period was a sad story of corruption, incompetence and increasing administrative paralysis.
Although Indian GDP growth picked up, employment generation remained weak and both reality and perception of corruption were widespread. Despite the reform efforts, the Narasimha Rao–led Congress Party lost the 1996 election.
By then Sonia had turned against Rao just as, later on, her minions turned against Manmohan. Rahul, of course, turns against everybody and anybody in his party so as to make it unelectable.
19 No, India Does Not Shine
After more coalition governments, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, with Atal Behari Vajpayee as prime minister, finally came to power in 1998.
But it wasn't very nationalistic or, indeed, particularly Hindu. Vajpayee was senile. Brajesh Mishra was running things. The one bright spot was Modi's performance as CM of Gujarat. But this was not self-evident till about 2007.
India's GDP growth rates accelerated, the Indian information technology industry prospered, and India's global "soft power" grew. GDP growth, however, did not provide a firm footing: the boost from the reforms could be expected to fade, the rapid growth in world trade—which lifted all boats—could not last, and the growing finance-construction bubble would surely deflate.
How come India escaped the 1997 Asian financial crisis? Why did the NASDAQ bubble not hurt it more? How come US sanctions after the nuclear test didn't have any effect? Mody isn't asking the right questions. But then he has no answers.
More deep-rooted problems lay in agriculture, where the green revolution could no longer drive growth
How come Gujarat's farmers under Modi had something like 10 per cent annual growth? What was wrong with creating new industries- e.g. diamond polishing for the surplus labor in the countryside? Mody doesn't ask because he doesn't know.
and subdivision of property with successive generations was making farming uneconomical and risky. A jobs crisis was brewing.
This nutter has told us there was a job crisis in 1950, in 1960, in 1970, in 1980, in 1990, in 2000 etc, etc. The thing was well and truly brewed long ago!
Yet, bewitched by superficial success, the Vajpayee government fought the 2004 election on the "India is shining" slogan.
Why not 'India is shitty'? Must be because of lack of democratic norms and civic consciousness- right?
India was not shining, though, for too many Indians.
This cretin doesn't get that Sonia and her kids looked smarter and more alive than the senile Vajpayee.
20 As the Two Indias Drift Apart, Democracy Creaks
In the run-up to the April-May 2004 elections, India faced its long-standing problems of insufficient employment, poor education systems, and creaking cities. Added to this list by then were problems of severe air and water pollution. Many Indian rivers were dying. The Congress Party–led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) came to power in May 2004 on the promise to balance material progress with social justice.
No. People had a choice between Sonia and her kids and the senile Vajpayee who was actively demotivating the RSS. The BJP lost 44 seats mainly to Congress. Attacking Sonia's foreign origin was silly. She was obviously a 'pativrata'- i.e. one devoted to her husband- who spoke simple Hindi. She said 'I am your daughter-in-law' and it was true enough. Vote for 'bahu' rather than a senile, boring, fattie. Manmohan too was quite popular as PM. He attracted votes in 2009 when Congress increased its majority at the BJP's expense. Clearly, the party had to dump the old guard- Advani, Murli Manohar, etc. But without Modi, more particularly his track-record in Gujarat, they wouldn't have won in 2014. Only after he came to power did people start asking themselves 'Why shouldn't India be run by a capable administrator who is also an inspiring speaker? Why must India's PMs be either dynastic cretins or sycophantic nonentities or crazy guys from the boondocks whose administration will only last about five minutes?'
And although the new government did advance the social justice agenda,
It is totes socially unjust that my family does not have as many billions of dollars as my rival in the Cabinet!
its economic strategy promoted a hugely unequal growth process, one that also depleted minerals, forests, and water.
Growth processes are always unequal. On the other hand if everybody starves equally to death, minerals, forests and water will only be depleted by vultures.
Economic inequality became a feature not just of the growth process but also of Indian democracy.
In 1950, there were no Maharajas and Millionaires. Suddenly in 2004, these things appeared.
The sums of money—much of it "black" money—spent in the April-May 2009 elections scaled new heights.
Till 2014 when even newer heights were scaled.
Rich businesses acquired more influence in politics, weakening the prospect of public goods provision to serve the common good.
Why? Do Rich businesses say 'kindly stop spending money on the Army. Please put out a red carpet for invaders or insurgents?' Defense is a public good. Rich businesses tend to be in favor of it.
On the other hand it is true that under UPA, some shady plutocrats bought themselves Rajya Sabha seats rather go to the trouble and expense of bribing such politicians. I'm not saying it doesn't still happen but the thing was more flagrant previously.
21 Modi Pushes the Economy off the Edge
To India's liberal and conservative elite,
Why? Surely liberal elites will favor a different candidate? My impression is that 'liberals' would have preferred Jaitley as PM. Conservatives may have liked Gadkare or some other more bovine dude.
Narendra Modi was an attractive candidate as India's next prime minister. He had spun a mystique around the so-called "Gujarat model" that he promoted as the state's chief minister.
Which is what Chief Ministers are supposed to do. They shouldn't say 'My State is a fucking shithole. Stay away from us. You might catch a nasty infection.'
The elite believed the election as prime minister would tame Modi's Hindutva agenda.
Why? If your agenda gets you elected you shouldn't tame it. You should unleash it. I suppose what this cretin means is 'Modi's first choice was to be 'vikas purush'- i.e. the guy who delivers rapid growth. Only if this was not possible would he settle for Hindu hriday samrat- i.e. the Emperor of Hindu hearts.
As prime minister, Modi perpetuated the unequal growth process.
Because, history is an unequal growth process. Modi was not able to stop Time in its tracks. He wasn't even able to get it to loop like in Groundhog day. Sad. No wonder this cunt thinks India is broken.
The rich continued to prosper.
Because 'prosperous' is a synonym for 'being rich'. Why does our American Economic Professor not favor us with more such gems of wisdom? He could say 'under Biden, the obese continued to be fat.' Or 'under Viktor Orban the beautiful continued to be good looking'. Surely, the Scandinavians would give him a Nobel Prize for such discoveries?
Modi's rash demonetization and poorly executed Goods and Services Tax severely hurt India's most vulnerable: those working in agriculture and the urban informal sector.
Because vulnerable people get hurt. If they don't it means they weren't vulnerable at all.
With global trade no longer providing a boost, Indian GDP came to rely increasingly on a finance-construction bubble. That bubble finally deflated in August 2018
I'd have said 2012
and Indian GDP growth went into a slow but steady decline.
it peaked in March 2010 at an unsustainable 13.3 percent.
While Modi hurt rather than helping promote economic growth—and, as employment, in particular, suffered—Hindutva forces made steady gains.
In UP- sure- because people were tired of Samajwadi criminals. Yogi has been re-elected. Perhaps he can replace Modi in 2029.
22 Modi Breaks India's Fractured Democracy
A fracture is defined as a break. I suppose this cunt means Indian democracy already had one or more broken limbs and then Modi turned up and broke some more of them.
A democracy works for the people when it provides public goods that help everyone enhance their own well-being.
Nonsense! A democracy works for the majority when it lets them have more of what they want and less of what they don't want. This includes better public goods like Defense and better merit goods like a clean environment but also it means better consumption goods and services like nice TVs and health care.
By that test, Indian democracy definitively betrayed its people.
Democracy has no magic power to make a people rich or secure from invasion. The people of Crimea of Donbas aren't saying 'Fuck you, democracy, you betrayed us! We cast our votes in the election but Putin's goons invaded and grabbed all our cool stuff.'
It is clear that Mody has a childish view of Political Economy. Democracy is a very nice Mummy. She says 'sweetheart, I promise you will grow up to be a smart economist'. But Democracy betrayed this cunt. He grew up to be a shitty economist. He thinks it is because of lack of civic consciousness and institutionalized misogyny and Hindutva's refusal to let him cram the Qutub Minar up his bumhole for the purpose of sexual gratification with dignity and integrity.
When Narendra Modi became prime minister, Indians suffered from poor quality education and health services, cities were chaotic, the judicial system worked only for some, and rampant environmental pollution was depleting the inheritance of India's children.
Why? It is because Indians were running things and India was as poor as shit.
The centrality of construction as a growth driver was contributing to corruption and the injection of criminals in politics;
But corruption and criminality was a big feature of parts of Bihar where there was no fucking construction or 'growth drivers' other than kidnapping as a heavy industry.
this was true for even progressive states such as Tamil Nadu.
Which is dynastic and thinks progress involves reverting to a period when Aryans were confined to the Central Asia.
With Modi's ascent, an intolerant Hindutva became an added impediment to democracy.
The political history of India shows that intolerance of the BJP or RSS enfeebled Indian democracy's ability to offer an alternative to the Dynasty. Why not tolerate ecumenical, anti-casteist, Hinduism? We more than tolerate the Established Church of England if we live in England and are very happy to work in a Muslim country with strict laws against drunkenness and theft and rape and so on.
Modi's initiatives to provide more toilets and gas stoves helped but made no dent in the broader lack of public goods.
I don't think this guy understands what public goods are.
The 2019 election brought election spending, legislators facing criminal charges, and Hindutva to a new crescendo, sending Indian democracy into possibly irreversible decline.
This is because Modi had a duty to stop Time or, at the least cause a Groundhog day type time-loop.
23 COVID-19 Bares the Moral Decay
COVID revealed the fragility of the Indian economy and society
No it didn't. Both bounced back quickly.
—and brought out some of the worst instincts of officialdom and ordinary people,
They failed to stop time in its tracks. Also Qutub Minar was not supplied to Mody so that he could anally pleasure himself during lockdown. Oh! The inhumanity!
A severe lockdown with virtually no notice marooned urban immigrants desperate to flee to safety of their village homes.
Then they started walking and no one stopped them. It turned out herd immunity is the way to go.
Hindutva adherents injected poisonous "fake news" to stir up hatred against Muslims.
Why bother? The real news was bad enough. Mody, of course, is a citizen of a country which waged a terrible war of revenge on innocent Muslims. 1.3 million of them were slaughtered because of 'fake news' about Saddam's imaginary WMD.
The economic shock crushed vulnerable workers, still reeling from the earlier onslaught of demonetization and the Goods and Services Tax.
In Mody's imagination vast swathes of the Indian population spend all their time reeling around like spinning tops. Admittedly, I do myself often reel around not because I drink- it is forbidden by my religion- but because of onslaughts like having to pay VAT or having to exchange my old 50 pound notes.
The government vastly underestimated the spread of infections and the number of deaths.
Which, under any scenario, would not have been 'material'. There will be no lockdown for future epidemics- at least in poor countries like India.
The more infectious second wave caused many more deaths. Almost 4 million Indians died in the two waves, ending in June 2021.
But this had no measurable economic or social impact.
The government continued its assault on democratic rights of individuals and the media.
Democracy is like the Environment. Both keep getting assaulted. Is it because they dress provocatively? Or is it because they are off their heads on drink or drugs? Another possibility is that they aren't being assaulted at all. They get paid to take it up the bum.
An international think tank concluded India had transitioned from a democracy to an "electoral autocracy."
Like Hungary. But Sweden's V-Dem Institute is staffed by shitheads.
Epilogue: A Feasible Idealism
India needs to create about 200 million jobs over the next decade to employ those who currently want jobs and those who will come on to the job market during the decade.
No. India needs people to do productive things. It needs to abolish all sorts of jobs where people do nothing productive or spend their time preventing people from doing productive things. This means firing a lot of worthless virtue signalers like this cunt.
That India created virtually no jobs in the past decade
is obviously false. A job exists even if it is in the unorganized sector. The self-employed aren't unemployed. They have jobs. Mody is an ignorant clown.
dramatically illustrates the size of the challenge that lies ahead.
No it doesn't. Why not say 'India needs to create about 200 gazillion arse scratching interventions over the next decade. Failure to rise to this challenge will result of many people having an itchy arse which is not getting properly scratched.
The same development pattern that has done so poorly in job creation has also caused
lack of arse scratching interventions- not to mention failure to sustainably insert Qutub Minar into Mody's rectum in a manner that is dignified, and replete with moral integrity and civic consciousness.
nearly irreparable damage to the country's rivers,
Which will dry up anyway once Himalayan glaciers melt. The good news is, like Pakistan, we will soon have massive rainfall based, not riverine, flooding.
further endangering lives and livelihoods.
Lots of humans dying is one way to reduce anthropogenic climate change.
And although India has been only a minor contributor to global warming,
cows farting produce methane. India has lots of cows.
the effects of global warming are an added immediate danger to lives and livelihoods.
Death is a big danger to lives and livelihoods. But if enough people die, those who remain are better off.
India is in this dismal condition because
it is a poor as shit. Productivity is very low.
the erosion of social norms
like suttee or purdah or unouchability
and public accountability
to the khap panchayat.
has prevented the design and implementation of policies that work for all.
No what has prevented the design and implementation of policies that work for all is the fact that Indian economists are too stupid and lazy to sit down and do mechanism design- which is 'reverse game theory'. Vacuous virtue signaling can be done by even cretins like Rahul Baba.
Decentralized governance, which brings power closer to the people, is essential to restore norms and accountability.
Unless the powerful who are close to people keep beating and raping them. In that case, decentralization is something you must run away from. Kerala has a lot of decentralization. It also exports a lot of people. Coincidence? Perhaps. But then again, perhaps not.
Would Asoka Mody be able to get Qutub Minar inserted into his anus if there is proper subsidiarity and decentralization under conditions of equal dignity, integrity and burgeoning civic consciousness? It is difficult to wholly rule out the possibility. However, so long as Hindutva poses a threat to basic democratic functioning in the UK- by reason of Rishi being dishy- we must reserve judgment on this vital issue facing nobody at all.
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