2020 was the year India was supposed to become a superpower. Instead, it got left behind
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2020 was the year India was supposed to become a superpower. Instead, it got left behind
To make matters worse, the government has failed to acknowledge the enormity of the crisis.
Shoaib DaniyalDec 31, 2020 · 06:30 am
A migrant worker in Ahmedabad on May 19. | Amit Dave/Reuters
In 1998, APJ Abdul Kalam, a scientist and administrator associated with India’s missile programme as well as the Pokhran-II nuclear tests, co-authored a booktitled India 2020: A Vision for the New Millennium.
It had a simple message: India would be a superpower within the next two decades. As predictions go, this was extremely bold. In 1998, India was a poor country, unable to reach even average global standards of human development. How would it suddenly leapfrog to superpower status? However, instead of being greeting with scepticism, Kalam’s extreme optimism was met largely with adulation.
“Seldom does one, in these troubled times, see such a lucid marshaling of facts and figures to bolster the thesis that India is mere two decades away from super-power status,” wrote The Times of India.
The book supercharged Kalam’s popularity, already riding high after the 1998 nuclear tests. He was even elected president. Even today, homilies delivered by Kalam – or sometimes falsely attributed to him – float around as motivational Whatsapp forwards.
By a mile
The only problem in this is that Kalam was completely off the mark. India is not a superpower in 2020. Far from it, in fact. When it comes to the quality of life it provides to its citizens, India still languishes somewhere at the bottom. And, as if to really underline just how inaccurate this prediction was, the year 2020 itself has been a disaster for India.
In fact, the year dawned with India on shaky ground. In the final three months of 2019, India’s economy had grown by only 4.7% year-on-year – part of the economic sluggishness sparked off by such ill-advised policies such as demonetisation and the new Goods and Services Tax.
Socio-politically, things were even worse. India was seeing its largest ever protest movement, with demonstrations all over the country against a new law that, for the first time, introduced religion as a factor in Indian citizenship.
Disaster struck early in the year. February saw horrific communal rioting in Delhi, even as United States President Donald Trump, on a much publicised trip to India, was just a few kilometres away from the bedlam. With 53 dead and hundreds injured in the federal capital itself, the riots were a stark reminder of just how shaky India’s social fabric as well as law and order system was.
A Delhi resident look at burnt-out and damaged residential premises and shops. Credit: Prakash Singh/AFPEconomic recession
Mass violence in a country’s federal capital is an unlikely look for a potential superpower. Even more was to come next month as India woke up to the Covid-19 virus at the end of March and abruptly announced the world’s harshest lockdown. Every country suffered due to the containment measures required for the pandemic but it would be fair to say that no other nation saw chaos like India.
With all transport links snapped and minimal state support, India witnessed the horrific sight of millions of migrants heading home on foot in an astonishing mass migration.
And this was just the start. India’s strict lockdown saw the country’s GDP contract more than any major economy’s. In the April-June quarter, it shrunkby an unprecedented 23.9%. The International Monetary Fund, in October, predicted that the Indian economy would contract by more than 10% in 2020. The seback is so severe that even assuming strong post-Covid growth, India could take decades to get back on the pre-Covid growth path.
If any Indian had expected superpower-levels of prosperity, 2020 would therefore come as a shock. Thanks to this economic carnage, the International Monetary Fund predicted that Indians would slip below Bangladeshis in average income. Note that Indians weren’t very rich even before the pandemic hit, being ranked as a lower middle income country (alongside Bangladesh and Pakistan). Ironically, it was Sri Lanka in 2019 – without any superpower pretensions – that managed to enter the upper middle income group.
Haunted by hunger
To add to this gloom were a series of reports and studies that illustrated that far from being a member of a developed country, Indians experienced some of the worst human development indicators in the world.
In October, the Global Hunger Index ranked India 94 out of 107 countries. Indians on average experienced more hunger and malnutrition than Nepalis, Bangladeshi or Pakistanis.
In fact, India seems to be regressing when it comes to human development. Using data from the Sample Registration System, economists Jean Drèze, Aashish Gupta, Sai Ankit Parashar and Kanika Sharma found evidence of “slowdown, pauses, and reversals in infant mortality decline in large parts of India in 2017 and 2018”.
In December, the first data release of the fifth National Family Health Survey – which covered 17 states and five Union territories canvassed in 2019 – showed a worrying increase in child malnutrition, reversing decades of progress. At around the same time, India dropped two spots in the United Nations Human Development Index, now ranking 131 out of 189.
Illiberal turn
If this regression in the social and economic sphere weren’t enough, India also saw its political image take a hit. While India has been a poor country since Independence, its democracy has often been seen as a model for other developing nations. That however was damaged too, as the Bharatiya Janata Party doubled down on its Hindu nationalist positioning.
In addition to the citizenship law passed in late 2019, in 2020 the BJP in Uttar Pradesh also passed a draconian law that severely restricts marriage between a Muslim man and Hindu woman as well as bars mass conversions, long used by Dalits as an emancipatory tool to break free from the caste system.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath. Credit: BJP Delhi/Twitter.
Not surprisingly, research by the Sweden-based Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute showed that India’s ruling party, the BJP scored highly on its “party illiberalism index” – so much so that it is “close to the typical governing party in autocracies in terms of illiberalism”.
More bad news: in the Cato Institute’s Human Freedom Index, India plungedby 17 spots to rank at 111 out of 162 countries as per data published in December. In October, a report by democracy watchdog Freedom Houseshowed that internet freedom in India declined for a third straight year in 2019-’20, with India experiencing more internet shutdowns than any other country in the world.
The Global Economic Freedom Index 2020 released in September showed India drop 26 spots from 79 to 105. The World Press Freedom Index, which was released in April, saw India slip two places, ranking in at 142 out of 180 countries.
Naturally, the image of India has taken a beating as it takes a dangerously illiberal turn. In November, for example, the Economist ran a headline which read, “Narendra Modi threatens to turn India into a one-party state.” Last week, Le Monde, a major French newspaper, ran a two-page spread with the headline “Uttar Pradesh, laboratory of Hindu extremism”, describing Chief Minister Adityanth as an “extremist monk”.
Increasing authoritarianism means Indians feel the need to protest to make their voice heard by the state rather than simply go through electoral channels. While 2020 began with the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, it is is ending with tens of thousands of farmers camped on the borders of Delhi in order to register their protest at three acts that seek to provide a much bigger role to large corporations in agriculture. In spite of the massive changes these acts seek to bring, they were passed in a hurried manner, with MPs in Parliament even being denied a chance to vote on them.
To add to this avalanche of social, economic and political bad news is the fact that India has also been at the receiving end of military aggression from China. Military maneuvers in May saw the Chinese Army occupy nearly 1,000 square kilometres of the Indian Union Territory of Ladakh, reported the Hindu. The act illustrated the weak position India was in at the moment, military expert Sushant Singh wrote in Foreign Affairs.
Credit: Adnan Abidi/ReutersHead in sand
Unfortunately, the Union government does not seem to understand the gravity of the crisis. In October, for example, Prime Minister Modi repeated that his government’s aim to create a $5 trillion economy by 2024 was still intact – which would mean India would have to clock double digit GDP growth for the next four years.
If this could be interpreted as an effort to put on a brave face due to political exigencies, even more troubling is the fact that the Modi government has done little on the ground to halt the Indian economy’s downward spiral. Not only has the government not provided a stimulus, ignoring expert opinion, Union government expenditure has actually fallen.
Twenty twenty has been a terrible year for India. Far from becoming a superpower, there is now a real fear that India is lagging behind even compared to its smaller neighbours. The Modi government needs to realise that acknowledging the problem is the first step to any potential recovery.
Support our journalism by contributing to Scroll Ground Reporting Fund. We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.
‘Super Poor’ India Dreams of Becoming ‘SuperPower’
19 February 2020
“Superpower 2020”?
Indians entered the current decade with bated breath, having been indoctrinated since shortly before the turn of the century with the completely false expectation that their country would finally become a “superpower” by 2020. They didn’t know exactly what this would mean in practice, but it sounded prestigious enough and was a welcome distraction from the abject poverty that marks many of their lives.
After all, Prime Minister Modi told them last March that they were now a “space superpower” after successfully conducting an anti-satellite missile test. He then declared less than a month later ahead of the parliamentary elections in May of that year that only he could fulfill India’s “superpower” dreams.
Then-BJP President Amit Shah seconded this statement shortly thereafter prior to it being reiterated by Modi’s Minister of State in September when he promised his people that India is on the “verge of being a superpower”. Once again, nobody ever really explained what being a “superpower” entailed, but the hyper-nationalist population wanted so desperately for the rest of the world to recognize them as one anyhow.
An Epic Disappointment Decades In The Making
That was why it was a disappointment of epic proportions for them that India entered 2020 without becoming the envy of the world like they falsely expected. The popular Indian online news site Scroll.in published a powerful piece at the time titled “India Superpower 2020: Tracing the brief history of a spectacularly incorrect prediction”, which touched upon the 1998 origin of the “superpower 2020” prediction and then explained its viral evolution across the proceeding years to the point where it basically became the country’s unofficial slogan over the last decade.
Read more: Modi’s calls to “Do or Die” to end poverty
Those who had earlier expressed their reservations about this unrealistic expectation were viciously attacked for being so-called “anti-nationals”, and if they weren’t Indian, then they were usually accused of “Hinduphobia”, but those defamatory abuses are no longer relevant after the influential Shiv Sena Hindu nationalist party publicly acknowledged that India isn’t even a “developed nation”, let alone anywhere near becoming a “superpower”.
The US Calls India’s “Superpower” Bluff
This was very important development because the organization contributes to framing the national narrative, meaning that Indians might never talk about being a “superpower” again, as if what Scroll.in described in their article as the nation’s “collective delusion” over the past two decades never happened at all.
Shiv Sena didn’t suddenly switch their narrative from one of impending “superpower” status to that of India simply being yet another “super poor” “Global South” country no different from dozens of others just for sake of factual accuracy but because the nation stands to lose several billion dollars a year if it sticks to that debunked script.
The US recently reclassified India as a “developed economy” ahead of Trump’s visit to the country later this month where he’s expected to sign major military and trade deals with America’s new strategic partner.
Asia Times reported that this decision was made for technical reasons since India’s share of world trade was above the 0.5% threshold qualifying it for “developing economy” status, hence why nearly 2000 of its products are no longer eligible for the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) regime that had previously given $5.7 billion in imports to the US duty-free status in 2017, thus making it the largest beneficiary of this program.
$5 Billion In Economic Restrictions Got Shiv Sena To Switch Their Narrative
Shiv Sena, forgetting all about everything that it had said in the previous years about India’s supposedly imminent “superpower” status, furiously lashed out at the US last week by describing its move as “a big blow to our economy…a big crisis for India.”
Walking back its entire narrative of India’s “miraculous growth” which had hitherto won it millions of devoted followers all across the country, the Hindu nationalist party repeated the same observations that the nation’s critics at home and abroad have been saying for years already, namely that “India is miles away from the status of developed countries on parameters like education, health, employment, cleanliness and poverty alleviation.”
Read more: India’s flawed taxation system
Evidently, speaking incessantly about India’s supposedly impending “superpower” status is useful for winning votes but becomes economically counterproductive the moment that the US acts like it believes that false narrative and then makes moves to eliminate the country’s preferential market access as a result. With $5.7 billion on the line, Shiv Sena had no choice but to tacitly admit that it and everyone else who had been celebrating India’s rise as a “superpower” were simply lying this whole time.
It’s No Longer “Hinduphobic” To Share Facts About India
There are some crucial lessons that other countries can learn from India’s humiliating experience, the most obvious of which is for political leaders to be more responsible when talking to the public about their country’s future status.
Giving the largely impoverished masses unrealistically high expectations of global prestige using a never-defined slogan such as “superpower” is deceptive to the extreme and strongly suggests that they were deliberately manipulating their people for political purposes, likely to distract them from their dire economic situation with delusions of international grandeur.
Read more: India’s focus should shift from going to Mars to making Toilets
It’s all fun and games until the deadline for “superpower status” finally passed with a whimper and then the US took India at its word by restricting duty-free market access for $5.7 billion worth of its exports, thus dealing a heavy blow to some of its companies which were dependent on that regime in order to remain competitive.
Shiv Sena is right, “India is miles away from the status of developed countries on parameters like education, health, employment, cleanliness and poverty alleviation”, but they were wrong for lying about that all this time, though at least those who repeat the party’s new rhetoric can finally speak freely without fear of being attacked as “anti-national” or “Hinduphobic”.
Andrew Korybko is a political analyst, radio host, and regular contributor to several online outlets. He specializes in Russian affairs and geopolitics, specifically the US strategy in Eurasia. His other areas of focus include tactics of regime change, color revolutions and unconventional warfare used across the world. His book, “Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change”, extensively analyzes the situations in Syria and Ukraine and claims to prove that they represent a new model of strategic warfare being waged by the US.
This article first appeared on “One world: Global Think Tank” and has been republished with the author’s permission. The views in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Global Village Space.
STOP spreading FAKE news otherwise you WILL be reported. india has been a superpower since 1990.
At least the quality on PDF is improving exponentially since the indians have gone.
But it's no fun abusing them without any fight back.
PAKISTANFOREVER
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I personally believe it's marvellous. At least now we can discuss ALL things Pakistani without the gangus openly defecating all over PDF.
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