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How India is booming by “shaking off its statist shackles”

Much is being made, rightly, of China’s growing economic importance in the world, following China’s recent and very newsworthy space mission.

But now here’s a really interesting and encouraging New York Times article about the rapid and highly visible economic progress now being made in India. The most encouraging thing about the piece for me is that not only is this progress described, it is also explained:

This is no longer the India of Gandhi, among history’s most famous ascetics.

The change in values, habits and options in India – not just from his day, but from a mere decade ago – is undeniable, and so is the sense of optimism about India’s economic prospects.

Much of India is still mired in poverty, but just over a decade after the Indian economy began shaking off its statist shackles and opening to the outside world, it is booming. The surge is based on strong industry and agriculture, rising Indian and foreign investment and American-style consumer spending by a growing middle class, including the people under age 25 who now make up half the country’s population.

The lesson – and being taught in the New York Times, please note, rather than merely in some free market Think Tank think piece – is that if you want rapid economic progress and a sense of optimism, you have to shake off your “statist shackles” and open up to the outside world.

The use of the word “statist” I find especially interesting. I could be wrong, but I don’t believe that’s a very common usage over here, and for that matter how common is it in the USA’s mainstream media? It makes the point perfectly that the important divide now is not between different factions wanting to use state power to do this or alternatively that, but rather between all of those who want their country or state to be or to remain bound by statist shackles, and all those who want those statist shackles shaken off. (You may need to slow down a bit when you try to say things like this out loud.)

For the sake of the entire world, I hope that the Indians themselves draw this same lesson from their own emerging success, and then teach that lesson to the rest of the world. Combine them doing that with the Chinese having so visibly retreated from their own far more horrific statist mania unleashed by the lunatic Mao-Tse-Tung and as a result also emerging into economic superpower status, and the twenty first century could end up being a very good one. It already looks like being a very prosperous one.

46 comments to How India is booming by “shaking off its statist shackles”

  • Verity

    Like the anglo-saxon (uncapped, intentionally) countries of the Anglosphere, Indians are highly individualistic, which seems to be a helpful characteristic in the creation of wealth. They’re full of opinions and plans and they’re confrontational. From the first time I visited India, I felt if they could just throw of this self-righteous, rigid, backward Gandhi rubbish, they could surge forward – and so it is proving.

    Nehru was also a curse because he was the start of the communist Gandhi (no relation) dynasty – so-called non-aligned but in fact best pals with the USSR. Thankfully all those mental shackles have now been thrown off and a brilliant people is set to become wealthy through prodigious energy and intelligence.

    It does seem to me that individualistic races are the best entrpreneurs. Does anyone know whether there are many entrepreneurs in Japan, or is it primarily the huge banking and manufacturing sectors that have created their wealth? If there is a big entrepreneurial sector, that kills off my theory.

  • Raj

    My Parents came from India & most of my Uncles worked either for the government or were in Large traditional Industries (e.g. Sugar). Their children are either working in New multinationals or are entrepeneurs.

    When I speak to them it is amazing how many of them are now becomming businessmen. Especially as in India there is a great deal of following in family footsteps pressure. This means that you can often assume from someone’s surname that they are in a certain business.

    Another reason for this vogue for becomming a businessman as opposed to an employee is tax. Employees have to pay tax on their earnings and this is hard to evade. A vast amount of the Indian economy however, is cash based (or “black”) and this is basically untaxed.

  • Raj

    A vast amount of the Indian economy however, is cash based (or “black”) and this is basically untaxed.

    Sorry for the poorly constructed comment above. What I meant is that people do not pay tax (illegally) on cash transactions or income & therefore it’s possible for someone in business to have a large amount of income that is untaxed.

  • I have not read the word “statist” used in a mainstream newspaper or magazine before in the US.

  • Kelli

    Interesting contrast between assessments by Verity (Indians are an individualistic race) and Raj (Indians are pressured to follow dictates of family/caste). Who is right?

    Historically, Indians HAVE had little truck with individualism (sorry, Verity), but I think Raj points out a key feature of the new tech-heavy economy–families have little choice but to cede control to their children, who need to be nimble and (yes) entrepreneurial to take advantage of post-statist conditions.

    The statist and familial “shackles” of yesteryear are increasingly replaced by silken cords of nostalgic (but powerful) ties to place and culture of origin. It’s a positive trend for India, to be sure. However, it may not yet represent a real cultural “revolution.”

  • Kelli

    One more note: regarding the use of “statist” here. I rather doubt the NYT means this in the entirely negative way it is so often used on this site. There is no other word they could have used, as India was not a totalitarian or communist regime; bureacratic doesn’t quite capture it, and “license raj” is a phrase Americans are unfamiliar with.

  • R. C. Dean

    Words cannot describe my shock at seeing “statist” used in the NYT! Kelli may be right that, to the mandarins at the NYT, the term is not entirely pejorative, but if they think that it has any positive connotations outside of their Upper West Side liberal elite coffee klatsch, they are sadly mistaken.

    The meme marches on!

  • Verity

    Kelli – Yes, as with all agrarian societies, there was pressure from time immemorial for the children to stick with the parents and any little family enterprise they had going. But children are moving away to the cities, or going overseas – and indeed, Indians have been great emigrants for a long time, and they always do well wherever they settle.

    Although I did mean individualistic when I wrote it, I take your point. Perhaps I should change the word to ‘confrontational’, which means they have the will, the ability and the energy to make things happen. But they are also individualistic in that they think for themselves, they question everything and will argue their point with great commitment and imagination. (That is why they make such effective barristers!)

  • Guy Herbert

    Verity,

    Entrepreneurs in Japan are not by any means unknown. (Matsushita [Panasonic], for example, was built by a man who started with a bicycle repair shop.) As with the overseas Chinese there are lots of business dynasties. Whether it’s culture or business conditions or both is hard to sort out. There are oddballs and driven characters (maybe in different proportions) everywhere. If you look closely at a Western entrepreneurs, you often find family wealth and/or business tradition there too.

    My impression is that going from dependent poverty or plodding stability to riches is rare everywhere.

  • Kevin L. Connors

    I would hate to use the term “Indians” so freely, as if they were a single, monolithic society. We should kep in mind that India is a polyglot of princely states, each with it’s own unique take on things. This largely explains the “pocketization” of economic expansion.

  • Theodopoulos Pherecydes

    Verity – I lived in Tokyo for three years and worked intimately with Japanese from about 1965 to 1985. I didn’t detect anything like an entrepreneurial class although small businesses do, of course exist: barber shops, restaurants, e.g.

    After WWII the U.S. occupation dissolved the Zai-Batsu (Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Mitsui, C. Itoh, Marubeni-Iida, Nisho-Iwai, etc.) who had fueled the war machine, but they all continued to meet informally and soon emerged again. All the parts of the different Zai-Batsu groups have interlocking boards of directors and interlocking ownership.

    Japanese success is more a social than business phenomenon in my opinion. Never having gone through a social revolution, elements of feudalism still dominate the society and this is especially true with business and the relationship between employer and employee. The overlord (company) provides life-time work, pay, benefits, intermural baseball, etc. and the serfs (employees) provide labor and loyalty.

    Much that was traditional is changing in Japan however, so I may be sadly out-of-date.

  • Chris Goodman

    The reason why the State EXCITES those that feel they know best how others should live is the element of COMPULSION. It is in the nature of the State that what it does has to be compulsory. You cannot raise money for defence on the basis of “pay what you feel like” The State is then EXPANDED to include every aspect of life. Putting aside the issue of rent seeking, it is the MORAL notion that society ought to be run in a way in which they approve that appeals. The left so far has produced the biggest heap of corpses in human history – over 100 million – it has reduced the living standards of the poor, increased the power of the elite, and impoverished the life of the soul; have they noticed? Of course not, it is and never will be about reality it is about a utopia – a utopia in which everybody acts in a way in which they approve. Talk of increases in the standard of living in India and China will cut no ice with such people. They know better how people ought to live – and their moral passion is animated by hatred of the world.

  • Verity

    Theodopoulos and Guy Herbert, thank you for those interesting comments. So wealth can be created by monoliths, as well. But it’s more fluid when created by driven individuals.

    Now that India is rid of Gandhi-esque statism and five year plans, I see it zooming ahead. Anyone who has visited India however briefly will have been struck by the enormous amount of energy they put into the task at hand. I mean, it’s 100%. Even if it’s only delivering tiffin boxes in central Dellhi, that man is going to move heaven and earth to get his tiffin boxes delivered come hell or high water or traffic conditions. They have the ability to focus totally on the task/goal at hand, which is an essential for wealth creation.

    Guy, the Chinese are indeed entrepreneurial, commercially driven and very astute. I’m full of admiration for them.

    As Brian Micklethwait wrote, with the powering ahead of India and China, the 21st Century promises to a prosperous one. Where this leaves the moribund, unentrepreneurial, complacent, statist EU I don’t know, but a long way behind would be my guess. How soon before they start passing laws to restrict trade, do you think?

  • Six years ago some very clever,very rich, very chic, Kensington dwelling and New Labour supporting freinds of mine went on an extended trip to India and were taken aback by the extreme poverty and squalor they saw there. They sent me a postcard saying that since independence India had gone down the route of socialist planning and state intervention and said that, on their examination of the country, it had ‘failed utterly’. Seeing the horrors of socialistic statism with their own eyes did much to cure them of many of their previous misconceptions – much more than all of my theoretical arguments with them in the several preceeding years when I lived with them.

    I am glad to hear that the Indians themselves are finally seeing the light.

  • “Where this leaves the moribund, unentrepreneurial, complacent, statist EU I don’t know, but a long way behind would be my guess. How soon before they start passing laws to restrict trade, do you think?”

    No, Verity. Judging on past performance the EUnuchs will:

    1. Denounce India and China for threatening the EU with ‘unfair competition’

    2. Try to hobble their economies by saddling them with entirely ludicrous regulatory shackles (e.g. Kyoto Plus)

  • Julian Morrison

    That last isn’t far off the mark. It’s a constant whine of greenies how much the “developing world” gets away with special exemptions at treaties like Kyoto.

  • Verity

    Well, David, good luck to their puny efforts. Job exporting’s well underway. British Rail, or whatever it’s called this month, has already exported its information call centre to India, and HSBC is moving – I believe it’s three, or two now and one later – call centres to India and Malaysia. Bangalore’s a mini Silicone Valley, with highly Indians going over to Germany to work in software writing compannies for three months at a time, then returning home to be replaced by a compatriot for the ensuing three months and so on. All the red tape and additional taxes in EUtopia have made it too expensive to hire Europeans. Du-uh.

    But you’re quite right. How long before we hear the “unfair competition” mantra?

  • Joe

    A thought just struck me… is there any information anywhere about how many entrepreneurs per head of population the worlds different country’s/society’s produce?

    Is it possible that the Chinese entrepreneurial streak that we see so often is just a product of sheer weight of numbers… we see more Chinese entrepreneurs because there are more Chinese than any other population in the world, and their entrepreneurial ones stick out head and shoulders above this mass of humanity?

  • A_t

    ” All the red tape and additional taxes in EUtopia have made it too expensive to hire Europeans. Du-uh.”

    Oh yeah, so true. Until the EU came along, Germans, Brits & Spanish people were happy to work for Indian wages which would maybe buy them a loaf of bread every 2 days. Well known fact, that.

    I’m not saying you’re wrong in suggesting they’re stealing quite a march on us eurofolk, in terms of enterprising capitalism etc., but don’t pretend relocating call centres is any different from making cheap toys in china, only employing slightly more skilled people.

    I note also that (unless i’ve grossly misread the general atmosphere & you people are all minimum-wage call centre employees) everyone’s very happy to see jobs they don’t do move abroad. Wait ’til they start employing Indians to do whatever you currently do, at £10/day… we’ll see how happy you are then. I guess you could say it’s harsh medicine to induce reform tho’… in which case, provided you’re willing to face the possibility that you’ll be one of those who illustrate the problem, fair enough!

  • Dave O'Neill

    Well, the IT software industry is the obvious choice and one which has the normally highly libertarian silicon valley software types demanding regulartory action.

    A huge amount of software development is moving to Indian.

  • fnyser

    Re: Statist

    Larry Elder is probably the only person in the media I can think of who uses the term on a regular basis. Once in a while a caller on radio talk will use it – usually obvious Mises/Rand/Hayek devotees – but in print and in the NYT is exceptional. I hope this does not lead to the leftist usurpation and redefining of the word as with “liberal.”
    *********
    The article made me think of Dinesh D’Souza’s aritcle in NRO a while back about the benefits of open markets, the high standards of living enjoyed by the “poor” in the America, a real “social equity”, etc… etc…

    ….I asked him, “Why are you so eager to come to America?” He replied, “I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.”….

    Hey, if they get wealthy we might not get anymore D’Souzas.

  • Verity

    A_t – Who said it was any different from making toys cheaper in China? So what? I certainly didn’t make that distinction. And the Indians working in IT in Germany make considerably more than £10 a day – although not as much as a German would make, given the social security and annual vacation requirements.

    Joe – Singapore – pop 4 1/2 million and Hong Kong, population around 5 million, who knows? – are jam packed with enterprising Chinese who have become millionaires. I don’t know the figures, but both these governments (I think China has kept its word not to interfere in capitalistic Hong Kong) encourage capitalism with free markets and low taxes. The people in the adjacent province to Hong Kong, Guandong, are now also sassin’ around with million dollar bank accounts. For high density millionaires, Hong Kong, Singapore, Guandong and Shanghai would be hard to beat anywhere in the world. And think of the flight capital that left Hong Kong for London, Vancouver and Australia before the Chinese take-over! My own conclusion is that the Chinese are naturally entrepreneurial, commercially energetic and very shrewd. (This goes for Chinese women as well, by the way. They are formidable.) There’s a blogsite called Gweilo something out of Hong Kong, and if he’s reading this, he may have something to add.

  • Guy Herbert

    In answer to Joe’s thoughts, I doubt it’s going to be readily quantifiable.

    Apart from the fuzziness of the concept round the edges–what might be the criteria for a person “being an entrepreneur”?–the core entrepreneurial activity as usually understood is creating exploiting new opportunities. A new opportunity will a fortiori not be one which statisticians have classified.

  • John P

    Hey, this doesn’t always work one way;

    I’m an IT mainframe specialist in the UK, and my job departs these shores in March… for the USA.

    Having got that off my chest, where are all the leftie shouts of “hooray, real, productive private sector jobs for poorer countries that will make the population of India more prosperous”?

    Change is constant. Sometime next year, I’ll be starting a new career. It will be my fourth. Who knows what the future holds in the industrial midlands.

    The only thing that government can do is inervene to make things worse, by slowing down incremental change and holding it back like a dam. It will always break through.

  • fnyser

    off topic but somewhat appropriate bit on fascism linked off of Volokh

  • I have been listening to last week’s internet broadcast from financialsense.com. The interviewee told about his wife’s recent visit to a hospital in Irvine, California. Her X-ray was immediately digitised, e-mailed to a highly qualified radiologist in India who did his stuff and sent his analysis right back to the US. A $200,000 American professional had been replaced by an Indian getting about $40,000. The broadcasters thought that this would lead to a great expansion of entrepreneurialism in the US as employees sought alternative sources of income.

  • fnyser

    well I guess you’ve got it covered

  • Kevin L. Connors

    A_t has an interesting point of view. He (she?) seems to think that jobs appear like manna from heaven and all the eople must compete for them. A_t, there is another class of eople, of which I am one, that realizes jobs are created as the result of human endeavor. Those which I create, I would be far more inclined to give to hard working Indians for ten Pounds a day than someone sharing your attitude.

  • fnyser

    Kevin – yes A_T does have a very interesting view. I am sure he’d love to pay 50 bucks per call to compaq to find out why his POS PC isn’t working, as long as none of it ends up as profits or in the hands of some job stealing 3rd worlder. I am sure that he would love to pay an extra couple hundred dollars for a product to maintain a “living wage” for phone techs.

  • Doug Collins

    I read an interesting story last year, (in a Saul Friedman column on a friend’s computer so I can’t link it -sorry)

    The gist of it was that the rather sudden and relatively quiet ending of the budding India-Pakistan nuclear war resulted from a few calls that General Electric and others made to the Indian data processing firms that did their nightly back office processing.

    The message was blunt. GE couldn’t have their cash flows disrupted by a nuclear war. If the problem couldn’t be resolved – immediately – they would have to find new data processors.

    Apparently a few other urgent calls were made to the appropriate government officials and the war never happened.

    A_T might be interested to know about one of the non-economic benefits of global trade.

  • Raj

    Sorry to return to this so late.

    Couple of points I want to make.
    1) Indian’s are individualistic. However they take there committments to family seriously & expect to have to look after wider family rather than the state. I have had numerous conversations with people who were brought up in the forties & fifties in India and were put through university & school by uncles as their parents were unable.

    2) There is no doubt that a trip to India , especially if you previously visited during the late 70’s early 80’s will convince you of the benefits of privatisation & lack of state control. India’s asset seems to be the fact that the education system is ferociouisly competitive which produces teenagers who, whilst they want to enjoy themselves know they have to work hard to achieve. There is also a greater degree of respect for engineers than in the UK, i.e no one calls someone studying hard in computing a nerd. Instead they think theyt are likely to make it big in a dot.com or it’s future equivalent.

  • A_t

    wow.. presumptious bunch, aren’t you?

    To all you “he doesn’t get it” critics, I understand the mechanics of job creation & all that; I don’t believe jobs are manna from heaven, & I’m very conscious that i’ve been benefitting from cheap 3rd world labour for ages; my shoes, computer, walkman etc. etc. all bear witness to this. I also welcome the rise of India as an economic & technological power; good on them; it’s nice to see people doing well.

    BUT because of this rise, I fear for my own future; I’m in IT, & currently command quite a decent wage. A similarly qualified Indian would be able & willing to survive on a lot less than I make, so potentially at some point in the next 5 years, bang goes my job. Similarly for most of my friends in this industry. Now, I’m not decrying this as unfair, or even saying we can or should do much to stop it, but I’m just wondering why everyone’s crowing over this when it basically means many friends of yours will lose their jobs & have to spend time & money finding new ones, or accept a downgrade to indian-level wages, which will definitely *not* pay rent/mortgage in London.

    Overall, I’m in favour of all this globalization business; I think it’s fair to give everyone an equal chance at things, & I buy the line that it’ll lead to greater prosperity for all of us in the long term, but I think many of you don’t realise what the short-term consequences may be for many of us in the West who have effectively been protected for years by dubious protectionist trade rules. This is why, personally I’m somewhat nervous about the consequences, & was wondering why everyone else seemed so pleased; do you know something I don’t? Are you super-confident in your abilities to find good work, regardless of the circumstances? Or do you have jobs that you’re confident will not emigrate to cheaper climes…

  • A_t

    just to summarise/follow on,…..

    I’m mainly surprised, since it seems that most of you are advocating & celebrating a change which will almost certainly work to your disadvantage, at least in the short term (& short term in this case could mean ‘the rest of your lifetime’). This unselfish attitude seems like an unusual type of reasoning round here.

    Interestingly, George Monbiot tackles this stuff in the Guardian today. If you can bring yourself to read the antichrist’s words in satan’s own socialist mouthpiece, here’s the link.

  • Verity

    Well, A_t, you certainly do have a point and it certainly does illuminate the other side of the coin: How are people in affected professions in the West to survive?

    Speaking as someone who is unaffected, so clearly hasn’t lain awake dwelling on it, as you probably have, as it’s inevitable, it might not be a bad idea to ride the wave. In other words, find a way to get in on it.

  • Verity

    And I did go to the link and read the Monbiot article, while making the sign of the cross. It wasn’t bad.

  • Dave O'Neill

    Verity, people find it easy to cope with vanishing jobs when they aren’t affected.

    I would be interested to see if the out sourcing wave does to IT industry and the low level IT jobs what the de-industrialisation of the 80’s did to the manufacturing sector.

    However, this will affect the South East more than the North. My suspicion is people would demand action.

  • “However, this will affect the South East more than the North. My suspicion is people would demand action.”

    You may well prove correct, Dave, and one of the actions they should demand is that HMG desist from killing off the home-grown industry with rapacious and iniquitous regulations like IR35.

  • A_t

    Verity… For your information, i haven’t specially lain awake at night worrying about this; i’ve got more interesting things to do, & as you say, there’s not much i can do about it anyway. I tend to file it away in the “i’ll deal with it when it happens” drawer.

    as for
    “it might not be a bad idea to ride the wave. In other words, find a way to get in on it.”

    … umm… I’d love to, but how? By becoming a mediator in technology labour outsourcing? Or by moving to Mumbai & working for near-to-nowt? The first solution doesn’t really suit my skills, & the second’s distinctly unappealing. I’m not in a position to set up my own company & use some of this cheap labour to my own advantage, so without being defeatist, I can’t currently see many personal benefits coming my way from this wave of change.

    The only other way to ride the wave really is to find some profession which inherently can’t be shifted abroad. I’m hard-pressed to think of many, apart from client-facing work, or work which requires contact with local people/things. Just out of curiosity, would you be willing to reveal what you do for a living; I’m curious to know why you’re so confident you’ll be unaffected.

  • Dave O'Neill

    You may well prove correct, Dave, and one of the actions they should demand is that HMG desist from killing off the home-grown industry with rapacious and iniquitous regulations like IR35.

    That would help, although one of the problems with the pre-IR35 world was that every temp was becoming a “contractor” regardless of whether or not they were. The lunacy was not so much the concept behind IR35 but the insane application and the down right medieval rules on expenses which came with it.

    That said, I’m not sure it would help. I work in a rather specialist area of IT professional services and, thus far, we’re pretty safe and should, like most niches, remain so. However, when I was in general IT recruiting in 1999 you’d get any idiot and his dog calling themselves a contractor, charging £40+ an hour and coining it in.

    If anything we’re seeing an over reaction to a lot of fools who claimed to do things they could not.

    I can see this being hardest on the individual IT consultant, but there also needs to be a lot more education and creativity from IT companies when selling solutions.

    Price isn’t everything when it comes to buying an IT system and some of the stories I’ve heard about outsourcing are frightening.

  • As an Indian (still living in India!), I find Gandhi bashing a bit overdone. Yes, he did have his faults and the fawning Congressmen who put him on a pedestal did him the greatest disservice.

    But he was not anti-business. He counted amongst his close supporters the Birla and Bajaj business families, and was murdered in the garden of Birla House in Delhi.

  • Verity

    A-t – Well, yes, not knowing you or your skills and also not knowing anything about the IT industry I suppose I was thinking of a liaison role. Middle men can make a lot of money. I don’t mean to sound facile but you said you were nervous about the inevitable changes.

    Yazad – I’m sure the Birlas and Bajajs favoured Gandhi the way Rose Kennedy made a pet of certain priests. They indulged him, talking of how much money it cost to keep him in poverty. Ha ha ha. I am not saying this diminished Gandhi or priests in the West who have found their way into the hearts of the rich and famous throughout history in any way, but it certainly took them out of their normal role and divorced them, to some extent, from the concerns of everyday people who were struggling to stay alive. The Birlas and the Bajajs and their rich friends would have laughed indulgently when he modestly declined a second helping, “Oh, such a great spirit!”

    Gandhi’s rigid, self-righteous, backward-directed thinking held an entire nation back for 50 years. This business of weaving a little square of kadi every day, instead of encouraging people to think beyond hand spinning infuriates me. It was the middle of the 20th Century and he was encouraging everyone to look to the past for India’s salvation.

    I’m sorry, Yazad, but I think he was very bad for India and he infused Nehru, who was a clever, glamourous figure, with his deadbeat thinking. And Indira Gandhi picked up on it and became another preachy, communist, backward thinker. Sanjay was another one.

    At least Rajiv was on the take, which shows he had a glimmer of how capitalism works. At least he introduced a car that would go faster than 35 miles an hour. For those who don’t know, when Mrs Gandhi was shot several times by her bodyguards, she was piled into an Ambassador (the only car available in India at that time) and they floored the gas pedal and drove hell for leather to the nearest hospital at 35 mph.

    Contrast today’s India with the India Gandhi envisaged and tell me which one provides more human hope.

    Please forgive this long post.

  • You need some prespective Verity.

    1. Nehru’s socialism is what is largely responsible for many of India’s economic ills. And MK Gandhi was not the inspiration behind that. I see many Nehruvian myths abound in your writing. Nehru was a “clever, glamourous figure” (so is Castro perhaps? charisma over policy?) — and if things went wrong, it was Gandhi’s “deadbeat thinking”. Well Gandhi died in 1948. Nehru in 1962. The intervening 16 years were Nehru’s — his policies over Gandhi’s. It would be instructive to compare the Indian government’s Economic Policy Statements in 1948 (more open to trade) and 1952 (the start of Nehruvian socialism).

    2. Khadi was more of a protest against the British monopoly of the cloth market. (Which was enforced by the Brits at times with brutality – cutting off weavers thumbs, etc)

    3. Although Gandhi was not a capitalist, he was not a socialist either. He preferred “trusteeship”, a concept which asserted the right of the rich to accumulate and maintain wealth, as long as the wealth was used to benefit society.

    4. His asceticism was largely to identify with the “common” Indian. If the average Indian at the time was middle-class, Gandhi would be more bourgeoise. As the average Indian was very poor, Gandhi’s identification with them helped the Indian freedom struggle gain credibility with Indians. He was a pragmatic, not a didactic man.

    I’m not too happy about Gandhi’s economic policies, and the concept of village self-sufficiency is close to autarky, but to blame Gandhi for India’s ills goes way too far.

  • Ooops. Nehru died in 1964.

  • Verity

    Yazad, I’m not blaming Gandhi for all India’s ills, but I think he was a large part of it because so many people thought they had to emulate him because of what a dedicated ascetic he was. No, Castro was never glamourous; he was and is an oppressor. Nehru had a certain worldliness and presence that he could have used to reverse some of Gandhi’s influence. He could have got India playing on the world stage, but he didn’t. Instead, he got deeper into isolationism and the communist “non-aligned” stew, and so did Indira. Gandhi looked backward for solutions instead of to the future and this attitude permeated government thinking for several decades. I have had government ministers say to me: “Why don’t we design a better bullock cart?” – not that I’d asked. Then, eyebrows raised at the cleverness of it all, “Because first, we would have to design a better bullock!” This was in the early Eighties. Talk about poverty of aspiration! And I maintain it stems from Gandhi’s rigid self-righteousness and low expectations.

    I don’t know what other “Nehruvian myths” I am victim to!

  • The Wobbly Guy

    Verity, I dunno. I’m Singaporean, and our government keeps telling us we aren’t good enough enterpeneurs, or that’s there’s enough of us yet.

    On one hand they’re trying to make us more independent and creative, but at the same time they’re loathe to relax their tight control over our actions(no smoking in certain areas, no spitting in public, speed cameras out the wazoo), which tends to foster a rather unentrepeneural mindset. We’re a ‘Fine’ country, after all. And the common folk tends to stay in line. Hell, people have even commented that Singaporeans have this weird tendency to automatically line up in a queue for stuff, whereas people in Hong Kong will just climb over each other!

    Or maybe I’m just complaining too much. Perhaps we already quite enterprising, but imagine if we’re well and truly unleashed!

    Also, you mentioned taxes, and it might be interesting for the folks on this site to note that the government is considering lowering and flattening income taxes and increasing consumption taxes to compensate.

  • Just a quick point. Gandhi had a set of 5 main colleagues / followers. Nehru, Patel, Rajagopalchari, Azad and Prasad.

    Patel was conservative. Rajaji was a liberal. He founded India’s only liberal party, the Swatantra Party in 1959 as a protest against Nehruvian socialism. Rajaji was just as ascetic as Gandhi. Yet that did not lead to his advocating socialism – on the contrary he fought it.