Tolga Akmen—AFP
Despite mounting concerns over the state of minority rights, India’s economic progress since 1947—far better than Pakistan—has made it a success story to the outside observer. However, this is not the sole measure of a state’s prosperity. Ashoka Mody, an Indian-born economist who has worked at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and now teaches at Princeton University, has looked at India’s latest political turn in his book, India Is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today. In it, he notes that for 75 years, successive Indian governments have failed to deliver what matters most for life in any country: a decent standard of living made possible by the availability of good jobs. As a result, fully 60 percent of India’s 1.4 billion people live either in abject poverty or on the brink of it.
Mody credits Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s prime minister from 1947-1964, as being a humane nationalist who believed in the norms of equality, tolerance, and shared progress. For him, the practice of these norms meant more democracy, secularism, and socialism, properly understood as equality of opportunity. Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi, however, serving as prime minister from 1966-1977 and again from 1980-1984, departed from democratic practices by imposing authoritarian rule for 21 months from 1975-1977, a period known as “the Emergency.” She also opened the way to the corruption that pervades India’s public life today, which includes an unhealthy penetration of organized crime into the government throughout the country.
Following the secularism of the Nehrus, the Hindutva-inspired BJP won the elections and its prime minister, Narendra Modi, abandoned any pretense for equal rights but—at least initially—heralded an economic revival through reforms. Nehru had adopted a strategy for growth that emphasized large industrial projects within India’s borders while rejecting an export-oriented approach that yielded benefits for Japan and China after World War II. The BJP, meanwhile, opted for the reverse, while showing little regard for some of the basic tenets of democratic governance. Its Hindutva ideology has led to discrimination, and worse, against India’s 80 million Muslims, to say nothing of the now-prostrate national press. It has harassed independent journalists and recently managed to have the leader of the Congress Party, Rahul Gandhi, sentenced to prison on trumped-up charges.
India may have done well economically under BJP – some say a few have done well while the masses still live in poverty – but by democratic standards non-Hindus have suffered treatment rarely reported from the rest of the world. As Mody concludes: “In providing a decent life for the masses of its people, the country lags behind not only the West, Japan, and China but also, increasingly, behind countries historically poorer than India such as Vietnam and Bangladesh. For any Indian government in the years ahead, addressing that failure will loom as its most urgent challenge.”