Whither India?

It seems now that India’s economic rise, foretold for some time, is virtually certain. While India may have miles to go before it can reach the dizzying (by developing standards) per capita GDP of China, it has finally scaled the first mountain of at least reaching its rate of growth.

It is predicted by those in the know that India will be the fastest growing major economy in the coming years. Part of the future, then, is foreseeable. Countless millions will be lifted out of poverty. India will also join the ranks of the countries with the greatest number of billionaires. This is inevitable and, eventually, it will not even necessarily be seen as a mark of shame because while stark contrasts in living standards will remain, absolute poverty may even be eliminated.

This achievement is humongous. It may have taken somewhat longer to achieve this dream of our founding fathers than some would have liked, but at least they had that dream, and at least it is at hand, finally. So, my question, with so much predicted and predictable, and leaving aside just what flavour the growth will be tinged with (be it through manufacturing or services, fancy finance or microchips, and indeed, accompanied by environmental degradation and waste), what next for India?

Having thrown off the yoke of ‘Un-British’ colonialism and witnessing for the first time the end of extreme poverty, Dadabhai Naoroji’s dreams as envisaged in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India seem to have been realised. It is also probably just a coincidence that when the relevance of the founding father’s masterpiece of the Indian National Congress has finally seemed to fade away into the annals of history, so too, seemingly, has the party.

It is at this time, when the country sees the first prime minister born after Independence, the first non-Congress PM with an absolute majority, that I seek to ask, whither India? How is India to re-imagine itself, and is Prime Minister Narendra Modi an embodiment of a new India and a forefather of an as yet undiscovered destiny in the same vein that Naoroji was? Or shall India become a drifter in world affairs groping in vain for a new identity as it sheds its old ones of, in sequence, colonised, independent, under-developed, developing and finally, emerging.

At the risk of being perceived as facetious let me ask, what exactly does a Congress-mukt India stand for and how will India’s (future) history look like without a true Indian National Congress driving it towards its destiny as it has done till the demise of UPA II?

Implicit in this question is the assumption that the BJP victory and the Congress decimation in the Lok Sabha election marks a key turning point in Indian history – but how much continuity will there be, and how much change, and more to the point, what is the vision of the BJP government in heralding such a change as there may be?

Lack of vision
There seems to be a lot of talk, a lot of bluster from this new, historic government. From Swacch Bharat, to SMART cities, from bullet trains to Make in India, slogans are surely not in short supply. However, what seems to be lacking in even greater volumes than the relative lack of vision is the lack of theory going around. I believe the old adage “That’s all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory” holds true at this point in Indian history more than ever.

Yes, practically it makes eminent sense to improve our manufacturing base such that farmer’s sons and daughters get jobs of higher productivity that they are skilled for and that the country’s economic base and future growth is not too heavily reliant on Bangalore. But how do you do it? What do you need to do it? How will it work in theory? More concretely, what is the underpinning ideology of the new BJP government – which text, analogous to Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, will guide its policy decisions?

Will cutting fuel subsidies really light the fire, not just of the Make in India campaign but also of the diyas at the opening puja of factories across the lands? Or will the driver of growth come from having a rubber stamp in the Ministry of Environment and Forests ready to clear forests at virtually any environmental cost? So far, it seems that the only policy this government has proposed that is likely to spur growth is forcible land acquisition. Is this an implicit admission that the development philosophy of the nation and the impetus for the next wave of growth is going to be robber-baron capitalism, cowboy style?

It appears that the government is likely to announce big-ticket reforms in Saturday’s budget. However, the policy of the government seems to have been to announce a slogan, create hype and postpone the grunt-work of implementation until after a scheme is announced with loose and high-flying rhetoric. There is no doubt that the economy has performed in the first year of the NDA – however, it is eminently clear that it is primarily down to the good-fortune of the government that oil prices crashed, inflation fell, and Governor Raghuram Rajan is doing an excellent job over at the Reserve Bank of India.

The government cannot take any credit for these developments. A government cannot bank on the stars being in its favour forever any more than the economy can be a gamble on the monsoon. Given, then, that the stars have aligned for India, it is imperative that the government sets out a detailed, thought-through strategy to implement an equally thought through vision for India’s future and the future of the teeming millions of young people desirous of good jobs and opportunities.