India

Continuity and Change in the Twenty-First Century

John Harriss,Craig Jeffrey,Trent Brown

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509539727
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

India has been catapulted to the centre of world attention. Its rapidly growing economy, new geo-political confidence, and global cultural influence have ensured that people across the world recognise India as one of the main sites of social dynamism in the early twenty-first century. In this book, research leaders John Harriss, Craig Jeffrey and Trent Brown explore in depth the economic, social, and political changes occurring in India today, and their implications for the people of India and the world. Each of the book's fourteen chapters seeks to answer a key question: Is India's democracy under threat? Can India's Growth be sustained? How are youth changing India? Drawing on a wealth of scholarly and popular material as well as their own experience researching the country during this period of major transformation, the authors draw the reader into key debates about economic growth, poverty, environmental justice, the character of Indian democracy, rights and social movements, gender, caste, education, and foreign policy. India, they conclude, has undergone some extraordinary and positive changes since the early 1990s but deeply worrying threats remain: increasing authoritarianism, growing inequality, entrenched poverty, and environmental vulnerability. How India responds to these crucial challenges will shape the world's largest democracy for years to come.

1
Making Sense of Twenty-First-Century India

1.1 Introduction

Early in 2019, the London Financial Times announced, ‘The Asian Century is set to begin’ (Romei and Reed 2019). The grounds on which this pronouncement was based were that whereas in 2000 the Asian economies, all combined, accounted for just one-third of world output, according to calculations based on purchasing power parity (PPP – the method of comparing the currencies of different countries that takes account of differences in standards of living), it was projected that by 2020 they would account for more than half of world output. Among Asian countries, by 2017 China had by far the biggest economy, the biggest in the world according to PPP comparisons, or second to the United States measured in terms of exchange values. According to the first set of calculations (PPP), by 2017 India had the third largest economy in the world, though that of China was two-and-a-half times as big; in terms of the ranking of the gross national income of countries at exchange values, India had only the seventh largest economy in the world and it was only one-fifth as big as that of China, though it was only a little smaller than the economies of the UK and of France – and set to overtake both of them (see tables 1.1 and 1.2).

Looked at historically, however, the world in the twenty-first century is returning to the way it was before the ‘great divergence’ that took place from the later eighteenth century. From about that time, or rather before according to some calculations, the Western European economies that had until then lagged behind the major Asian economies, took off, and their peoples became, on average, very much wealthier than people elsewhere in the world. In the eighteenth century the Indian share of the world economy is reckoned to have been as big as Europe’s. With China, India accounted for a very large share of the world’s manufactured products. But in the nineteenth century, thanks to European imperialism, ‘Asia was transformed from the world’s manufacturing centre into classic underdeveloped economies exporting agricultural commodities’, in the words of the economic historian, R. C. Allen (cited by Romei and Reed 2019).

Table 1.1 Gross National Income (current US$) of Leading Countries, 2017

SOURCE: World Bank, World Development Indicators

Country	GNI (US$ billions)
United States	18,980.3
China	12,042.9
Japan	4,888.1
Germany	3,596.6
United Kingdom	2,675.9
France	2,548.3
India	2,405.7
Brazil	1,800.6
Russia	1,355.6

Table 1.2 Gross National Income (PPP$) of Leading Countries, 2017

SOURCE: World Bank, World Development Indicators

Country	GNI (US$ billions)
China	23,241.5
United States	19,607.6
India	9,448.7
Japan	5,686.3
Germany	4,274.0
Russia	3,721.6
Brazil	3,173.4
France	2,939.3
United Kingdom	2,810.0

India was for long seen as perhaps the archetypal poor developing country, of very little account in the global economy. Latterly, even if it has not experienced quite such a dramatic economic transformation as has China in the last decade or so of the twentieth century and the first twenty years of the present one, India clearly has become a major economic power. According to the World Development Indicators of the World Bank, the average annual growth of GDP in China between 2000 and 2017 was 9.7 per cent, and that of India was 7.5 per cent – both rates much higher than those of comparator countries such as Brazil (2.9 per cent) or Indonesia (5.5 per cent). The average annual growth of GDP in the United States over this period, according to the same data set, was 1.7 per cent, that of the UK 1.5 per cent. In a delicious twist of history, an Indian company, Tata, has become the biggest employer of manufacturing workers in Britain, the former colonial power that ruled over the country for a century and a half. The Forbes magazine annual listing of billionaires across the world showed that in 2018 India had 131 of them, the third largest number, behind only the United States and China. There is no doubt that India, with China, will be at the heart of the Asian century.

In other ways, too, a country that was for a long time more or less a backwater in international affairs has thrust itself upon the world’s attention, as a state with nuclear weapons, and a very big spender on military equipment. In March 2019 Reuters reported, ‘Modi hails India as military space power after anti-satellite missile test’ (27 March 2019). The country had entered what was called ‘an elite space club’, with the United States, Russia and China, having successfully blown up a satellite in Low Earth Orbit. The Reuters headline reflected, as well, that India’s prime minister since 2014, Narendra Modi, had won global recognition, far surpassing the leaders of most other countries. But at the same time some other aspects of contemporary India were being recognized in the international media. On those dollar billionaires, an analysis produced by the NGO Oxfam showed, ‘Wealth of 9 richest Indians equivalent to bottom 50% of the country’ (NDTV, 21 January 2019). Aljazeera reported, ‘Seven of the world’s worst polluted cities are in India, a new study has revealed’ (5 March 2019). The Washington Post had the headline, ‘India’s railroads had 63,000 job openings. 19 million people applied’ (4 January 2019). An article in the New York Times, about an attack by upper-caste men on a Dalit (the name referring to India’s lowest castes, those who used to be called ‘untouchable’) was titled, ‘“Tell everyone we scalped you!” How caste still rules in India’ (17 November 2018). In July 2018 BBC News reported on, ‘How WhatsApp helped turn an Indian village into a lynch mob’ (19 July 2018), and a day later The Guardian carried an article, ‘Mobs are killing Muslims in India. Why is no one stopping them?’ On the other hand, a writer for the highly respected Christian Science Monitor wrote an article, ‘Global decline in democracy? The lesson from India may be “Not so fast’” (16 March 2018).

These headlines from some of the leading international news media reflect different aspects of India today. India has changed, quite dramatically, since 2000. It is, in many ways, a very different country. Yet there are also significant elements of continuity, as the New York Times story about caste violence suggests. This book is framed around important questions about continuity and change in twenty-first-century India. We draw upon the rich recent scholarship by Indian writers and others to analyse how and why India has changed, and with what consequences, drawing as well upon comparisons with other countries. Why, for example, is Narendra Modi often compared with Recep Erdoğan in Turkey, and even with Donald Trump in the United States? All three leaders are often described as ‘populists’. Why? What does it mean? Another comparative question: is it fruitful to make comparisons between race in the United States and the treatment of the lowest castes, the Dalits, or ‘untouchables’, in India? How has the pursuit of neoliberal economic policy affected India by comparison with other countries, and how effective, in a comparative context, has resistance to it been? In addressing these and other such questions, we will turn to the wider social science literature, and to scholars who study India among other countries, not restricting ourselves only to writing that is focused more or less exclusively on India. For quite some time a great deal of writing about India took little account of work on other countries, treating the country as exceptional, because of its particular complexity – a tendency that led one student of politics, James Manor, to write an article with the title ‘What do they know of India who only India know?’ (Manor 2010a). Even though this book is about contemporary India, we aim always to refer to experience in other parts of the world, and to comparative research.

1.2 Past and Present

The purpose of this chapter, however, is to address the question of how India in the twenty-first century came to be this India. History matters, of course, and there is a great deal of contemporary scholarship that refers to so-called ‘historical path dependency’. Events, or actions, or decisions taken at one moment have repercussions that influence the next. Among economists, for example, as we discuss in the next chapter, there is a body of opinion that the pattern of economic development in all countries is subject to circular and cumulative causation. This means that no country or significant region has had a course of development that is exactly the same as that of another. As Marx once said, in a statement that has been so often quoted that it seems to be a truism, though it is actually profound: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please’. ‘They do not make it’, he goes on to say, ‘under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’ (Marx 1852). Though, as a great contemporary historian, C. A. Bayly – certainly not a ‘Marxist’ – once wrote, Marx developed the closest that we have to ‘a theory of history’ (in the author’s autobiographical note in Bayly 1998), Marx is quite clear that there are no ‘iron laws’. This is because human agency matters, and people can ‘make their own history’ (‘change the course of history’, in a conventional phrase) – or, in other words, shift the trajectory of historical path dependency. But then the structures in the context of which they act – ‘circumstances transmitted from the past’ – greatly influence the possibilities of change at any particular moment. The way that some economic historians perceive historical change is in terms of multiple equilibria. There are historical ‘moments’ of movement from one equilibrium state to another (Nunn 2009: 75ff). The course of human history is perhaps not so different from the history of life itself, as this was described by Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary theorist, as ‘a series of stable states punctuated at rare intervals by major events that occur with great rapidity...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Map
• Abbreviations
• About the Authors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Making Sense of Twenty-First-Century India
• Part One: Economy and Environment
• Part Two: Politics
• Part Three: Society
• Afterword
• Glossary
• References
• Index