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And not in a good way.
Pankaj Mishra
December 21, 2012
CHINA IS shakily authoritarian while India is a stable democracyindeed, the worlds largest. So goes the cliché, and it is true, up to a point. But there is a growing resemblance between the two countries. A decade after we were told that China and India were flattening the world, expediting a historically inevitable shift of power from West to East, their political institutions and original nation-building ideologies face a profound crisis of legitimacy. Both countries, encumbered with dynastic elites and crony capitalists, are struggling to persuasively reaffirm their founding commitments to mass welfare. Protests against corruption and widening inequality rage across their vast territories, while their economies slow dramatically.
If anything, public anger against Indias political class appears more intense, and disaffection there assumes more militant forms, as in the civil war in the center of the country, where indigenous, Maoist militants in commodities-rich forests are battling security forces. India, where political dynasties have been the rule for decades, also has many more princelings than Chinanearly 30 percent of the members of parliament come from political families. As the country intensifies its crackdown on intellectual dissent and falls behind on global health goals, it is mimicking Chinas authoritarian tendencies and corruption without making comparable strides in relieving the hardships faced by its citizens. The New India risks becoming an ersatz China.
TO THOSE IN THE WEST who reflexively counterpose India to China, or yoke them together, equally tritely, as rising powers, the solutions to their internal crises seem very clear: Democratic India needs more economic reformsin other words, greater openness to foreign capital. Meanwhile, authoritarian China, now endowed with a cyber-empowered and increasingly assertive middle class, must expose its anachronistic political system to the fresh air of democracy.
Such abundant commonplaces draw upon the Whiggish assumption shared by most Western commentary: that middle and other aspiring classes created by industrial capitalism bring about accountable government. This was the main axiom of Modernization Theory, first proposed by American cold warriors as a gradualist alternative to communist-style revolution. The theory always had its critics, most notably Samuel Huntington, who questioned whether social and economic transformation in developing societies is always benign or leads to democracy. Certainly, Modernization Theory never took into account the possibility that certain forms of raw capitalism violate the basic principles of democracy in a country like India.
It is often forgotten that the ruling elites of both India and China once presented themselves as socioeconomic engineers working hard to release their desperate masses from the curses of poverty, ill health, and illiteracy. Despite investments in institutions of higher learningwhich would later help provide highly skilled labor to Western banks and tech companiesIndia was always a straggler in public health, left behind not just by China but also by Sri Lanka (and now Bangladesh). This was largely due to what Amartya Sen, writing in 1982, called an astonishingly conservative approach to social services. The limits of Indian democracy had been outlined early by the co-author of Indias constitution, B.R. Ambedkar, who famously lamented in 1950 that democracy in India is only a top dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic. Thirty years later, Sen was still warning that it was important to understand the elitist nature of India to make sense of Indias policies.
Notwithstanding regular elections, a small minority, consisting largely of men from the upper and middle Hindu castes, set national priorities, the most important of which was the entrenchment of their own power. (Sen was heard lamenting earlier this year, Whenever something is thought of to help poor, hungry people, some bring out the fiscal hat and say, My God, this is irresponsible.) Some women and low-caste Hindus were brought into the elite, but their compatriots remained exposed to violence and discrimination, often perpetrated by the upper-caste-dominated state itself.
The contrast with the fanatically, even violently, anti-elitist nature of Chinas revolution was stark. The communists had empowered Chinese women, brutally cracking down on the various social evils of feudalism. Despite Mao Zedongs calamitous blunders, which caused the premature deaths of tens of millions of people, communist China took an early lead over India in all the important indices of human development.
Nevertheless, Indias own advantages over China were substantial. But far from taking pride in its press freedoms or expanding its constitutional liberties, many in the small middle class created by the countrys early investments in higher education were exasperated with manifestations of mass democracyespecially the flexing of electoral muscle by low-caste groups in the 1980s, which caused a middle-class exodus to the upper-caste Hindu nationalists. Chafing at Indias protectionist policies, these Indians regarded the Singaporean strongman Lee Kuan Yew as their hero and his squeaky-clean authoritarian state a more suitable political model for India than Westminster democracy.
Ironically, it was post-Mao China that in the late 70s embraced the Singapore model: technocrat-supervised national development by a one-party state. The countrys world-class infrastructure airports, highways, high-speed railroadswould have been inconceivable without an efficient state that ruthlessly appropriated land from peasants while providing financial assistance and the best scientific and technical expertise. Shelving its mass ideological campaigns in the 80s, the Chinese Communist Party has since then promised to deliver prosperity through capitalism (albeit with Chinese characteristics) while periodically upholding its own and the states role as the mitigator of inequality and provider of welfare.
As in China, a generation of technocratic politicians spearheaded Indias liberalization and modernization program. But, embedded with the countrys biggest capitalists, they were much less willing or able to enhance the states role in national development. As GDP growth rates accelerated in the early 2000s, the market in India began to seem like yet another Hindu deity, one that would eventually showerthrough the great trickle-down miracleprosperity on all, and also empower low-caste Hindus and women by unleashing entrepreneurial energies. Indias structural weaknessesthe poor quality of its education and governance, for instancewere temporarily obscured as credit-fueled consumption transformed large parts of Indian cities. Davos-anointed businessmen and day-tripping foreign journalists hailed the New India of software parks and shopping malls.
Never mind that Indias much-ballyhooed information-technology and business-processing offices employed less than six million of the countrys 400 millionstrong workforce or that the large majority of poorly educated Indians gained little from the booming sectors of mining and real estate speculation. Indias service-oriented economy could not create enough jobs for the swelling ranks of the young unemployed in India. Elections provided legitimacy to politicians who, as is only now becoming public, built up enormous personal fortunes. Improvising fast, they could achieve the necessary electoral appeasement of the poor majority through populist programssuch as the rural employment scheme that helped reelect the Congress Party in 2009made possible by increased revenue. Since then, however, Indias rulers, beset by a slowing economy, inflation, and a cheapening rupee, have struggled to achieve the golden mean between economic growth and political stability. Having affirmed India as what Foreign Affairs called a roaring capitalist success story in 2006, Anglo-American periodicals such as The Economist and the Financial Times now worry that the country is breeding Russian- and Latin Americanstyle oligarchies. But what is more disturbing, and little discussed, is the budding likeness to Chinathe onset, in particular, of an informal authoritarianism in the hollow shell of a formal democracy.
The police and army have long enjoyed a range of arbitrary powersthe infamous Armed Forces Special Powers Act allows soldiers to kill Indian citizens with impunity. Last year, 2,730 bodies were found dumped in unmarked graves in Kashmir, and human rights groups reported nearly 800 extrajudicial killings between 2007 and 2010 in the northeastern state of Manipur. Innumerable prisoners of conscienceIndias own Liu Xiaoboshave languished in Indian prisons: These include Kashmirs Shabir Shah, who spent two decades in jail, and, more recently, the reputed doctor Binayak Sen. (Indias great advantage over China is still its large number of courageous activists and dissenters, such as Irom Sharmila, the worlds longest hunger-striker.) In recent years, the Chinese regime has, alarmingly, enhanced its ability to police the Internet and to crack down on dissent. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to the Indian governments schemes to censor websites and access phone records; the federal Communications and Information Technology minister recently made the absurd demand that social media sites prescreen content.
Chinas integration into the global economy has created a bellicosely nationalistic, rich minority. In India, similarly, big industrialists such as the Tatas and Ambanis, together with the emerging middle class, grow fonder of such business-friendly politicians as Narendra Modi, the Hindu-nationalist chief minister of Gujarat, whose complicity in the murder of over 2,000 Muslims in 2002 didnt prevent his landslide reelectionor dampen his ambition to become prime minister. In expropriating public resources for private industrial and infrastructural projects and suppressing his critics, Modi is the primary Indian exponent of capitalism with Chinese characteristics. There are equally significantand worrisomesigns of a creeping populist authoritarianism in the middle-class cult of Adolf Hitler, the popularity of Mein Kampf, or the recent mourning by some of Indias best-known figures in politics, sports, and entertainment of Bal Thackeray, Mumbais infamous demagogue (and Hitler enthusiast).
Neither Indias elected nor Chinas unelected rulers, however, have run out of ways to woo their citizens. Prime Minister Manmohan Singhs scheme of cash transfers to the poorest Indians may secure enough votes for his besieged government in the 2014 elections. Chinas new leaders may yet again follow the example of Singapore, a cannily adaptive one-party state, and deploy their countrys fresh elite of economists, corporate managers, and lawyers to shore up their centralized political authority and prestige. They may also draw upon the evidently inexhaustible resources of Chinese nationalism. Nevertheless, uneven development and rising inequalities will create ever-bigger problems of governance. What follows in both countries may turn out to be less rather than more democracyand a lot of chaos.
How India Is Turning Into China | The New Republic
Pankaj Mishra
December 21, 2012
CHINA IS shakily authoritarian while India is a stable democracyindeed, the worlds largest. So goes the cliché, and it is true, up to a point. But there is a growing resemblance between the two countries. A decade after we were told that China and India were flattening the world, expediting a historically inevitable shift of power from West to East, their political institutions and original nation-building ideologies face a profound crisis of legitimacy. Both countries, encumbered with dynastic elites and crony capitalists, are struggling to persuasively reaffirm their founding commitments to mass welfare. Protests against corruption and widening inequality rage across their vast territories, while their economies slow dramatically.
If anything, public anger against Indias political class appears more intense, and disaffection there assumes more militant forms, as in the civil war in the center of the country, where indigenous, Maoist militants in commodities-rich forests are battling security forces. India, where political dynasties have been the rule for decades, also has many more princelings than Chinanearly 30 percent of the members of parliament come from political families. As the country intensifies its crackdown on intellectual dissent and falls behind on global health goals, it is mimicking Chinas authoritarian tendencies and corruption without making comparable strides in relieving the hardships faced by its citizens. The New India risks becoming an ersatz China.
TO THOSE IN THE WEST who reflexively counterpose India to China, or yoke them together, equally tritely, as rising powers, the solutions to their internal crises seem very clear: Democratic India needs more economic reformsin other words, greater openness to foreign capital. Meanwhile, authoritarian China, now endowed with a cyber-empowered and increasingly assertive middle class, must expose its anachronistic political system to the fresh air of democracy.
Such abundant commonplaces draw upon the Whiggish assumption shared by most Western commentary: that middle and other aspiring classes created by industrial capitalism bring about accountable government. This was the main axiom of Modernization Theory, first proposed by American cold warriors as a gradualist alternative to communist-style revolution. The theory always had its critics, most notably Samuel Huntington, who questioned whether social and economic transformation in developing societies is always benign or leads to democracy. Certainly, Modernization Theory never took into account the possibility that certain forms of raw capitalism violate the basic principles of democracy in a country like India.
It is often forgotten that the ruling elites of both India and China once presented themselves as socioeconomic engineers working hard to release their desperate masses from the curses of poverty, ill health, and illiteracy. Despite investments in institutions of higher learningwhich would later help provide highly skilled labor to Western banks and tech companiesIndia was always a straggler in public health, left behind not just by China but also by Sri Lanka (and now Bangladesh). This was largely due to what Amartya Sen, writing in 1982, called an astonishingly conservative approach to social services. The limits of Indian democracy had been outlined early by the co-author of Indias constitution, B.R. Ambedkar, who famously lamented in 1950 that democracy in India is only a top dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic. Thirty years later, Sen was still warning that it was important to understand the elitist nature of India to make sense of Indias policies.
Notwithstanding regular elections, a small minority, consisting largely of men from the upper and middle Hindu castes, set national priorities, the most important of which was the entrenchment of their own power. (Sen was heard lamenting earlier this year, Whenever something is thought of to help poor, hungry people, some bring out the fiscal hat and say, My God, this is irresponsible.) Some women and low-caste Hindus were brought into the elite, but their compatriots remained exposed to violence and discrimination, often perpetrated by the upper-caste-dominated state itself.
The contrast with the fanatically, even violently, anti-elitist nature of Chinas revolution was stark. The communists had empowered Chinese women, brutally cracking down on the various social evils of feudalism. Despite Mao Zedongs calamitous blunders, which caused the premature deaths of tens of millions of people, communist China took an early lead over India in all the important indices of human development.
Nevertheless, Indias own advantages over China were substantial. But far from taking pride in its press freedoms or expanding its constitutional liberties, many in the small middle class created by the countrys early investments in higher education were exasperated with manifestations of mass democracyespecially the flexing of electoral muscle by low-caste groups in the 1980s, which caused a middle-class exodus to the upper-caste Hindu nationalists. Chafing at Indias protectionist policies, these Indians regarded the Singaporean strongman Lee Kuan Yew as their hero and his squeaky-clean authoritarian state a more suitable political model for India than Westminster democracy.
Ironically, it was post-Mao China that in the late 70s embraced the Singapore model: technocrat-supervised national development by a one-party state. The countrys world-class infrastructure airports, highways, high-speed railroadswould have been inconceivable without an efficient state that ruthlessly appropriated land from peasants while providing financial assistance and the best scientific and technical expertise. Shelving its mass ideological campaigns in the 80s, the Chinese Communist Party has since then promised to deliver prosperity through capitalism (albeit with Chinese characteristics) while periodically upholding its own and the states role as the mitigator of inequality and provider of welfare.
As in China, a generation of technocratic politicians spearheaded Indias liberalization and modernization program. But, embedded with the countrys biggest capitalists, they were much less willing or able to enhance the states role in national development. As GDP growth rates accelerated in the early 2000s, the market in India began to seem like yet another Hindu deity, one that would eventually showerthrough the great trickle-down miracleprosperity on all, and also empower low-caste Hindus and women by unleashing entrepreneurial energies. Indias structural weaknessesthe poor quality of its education and governance, for instancewere temporarily obscured as credit-fueled consumption transformed large parts of Indian cities. Davos-anointed businessmen and day-tripping foreign journalists hailed the New India of software parks and shopping malls.
Never mind that Indias much-ballyhooed information-technology and business-processing offices employed less than six million of the countrys 400 millionstrong workforce or that the large majority of poorly educated Indians gained little from the booming sectors of mining and real estate speculation. Indias service-oriented economy could not create enough jobs for the swelling ranks of the young unemployed in India. Elections provided legitimacy to politicians who, as is only now becoming public, built up enormous personal fortunes. Improvising fast, they could achieve the necessary electoral appeasement of the poor majority through populist programssuch as the rural employment scheme that helped reelect the Congress Party in 2009made possible by increased revenue. Since then, however, Indias rulers, beset by a slowing economy, inflation, and a cheapening rupee, have struggled to achieve the golden mean between economic growth and political stability. Having affirmed India as what Foreign Affairs called a roaring capitalist success story in 2006, Anglo-American periodicals such as The Economist and the Financial Times now worry that the country is breeding Russian- and Latin Americanstyle oligarchies. But what is more disturbing, and little discussed, is the budding likeness to Chinathe onset, in particular, of an informal authoritarianism in the hollow shell of a formal democracy.
The police and army have long enjoyed a range of arbitrary powersthe infamous Armed Forces Special Powers Act allows soldiers to kill Indian citizens with impunity. Last year, 2,730 bodies were found dumped in unmarked graves in Kashmir, and human rights groups reported nearly 800 extrajudicial killings between 2007 and 2010 in the northeastern state of Manipur. Innumerable prisoners of conscienceIndias own Liu Xiaoboshave languished in Indian prisons: These include Kashmirs Shabir Shah, who spent two decades in jail, and, more recently, the reputed doctor Binayak Sen. (Indias great advantage over China is still its large number of courageous activists and dissenters, such as Irom Sharmila, the worlds longest hunger-striker.) In recent years, the Chinese regime has, alarmingly, enhanced its ability to police the Internet and to crack down on dissent. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to the Indian governments schemes to censor websites and access phone records; the federal Communications and Information Technology minister recently made the absurd demand that social media sites prescreen content.
Chinas integration into the global economy has created a bellicosely nationalistic, rich minority. In India, similarly, big industrialists such as the Tatas and Ambanis, together with the emerging middle class, grow fonder of such business-friendly politicians as Narendra Modi, the Hindu-nationalist chief minister of Gujarat, whose complicity in the murder of over 2,000 Muslims in 2002 didnt prevent his landslide reelectionor dampen his ambition to become prime minister. In expropriating public resources for private industrial and infrastructural projects and suppressing his critics, Modi is the primary Indian exponent of capitalism with Chinese characteristics. There are equally significantand worrisomesigns of a creeping populist authoritarianism in the middle-class cult of Adolf Hitler, the popularity of Mein Kampf, or the recent mourning by some of Indias best-known figures in politics, sports, and entertainment of Bal Thackeray, Mumbais infamous demagogue (and Hitler enthusiast).
Neither Indias elected nor Chinas unelected rulers, however, have run out of ways to woo their citizens. Prime Minister Manmohan Singhs scheme of cash transfers to the poorest Indians may secure enough votes for his besieged government in the 2014 elections. Chinas new leaders may yet again follow the example of Singapore, a cannily adaptive one-party state, and deploy their countrys fresh elite of economists, corporate managers, and lawyers to shore up their centralized political authority and prestige. They may also draw upon the evidently inexhaustible resources of Chinese nationalism. Nevertheless, uneven development and rising inequalities will create ever-bigger problems of governance. What follows in both countries may turn out to be less rather than more democracyand a lot of chaos.
How India Is Turning Into China | The New Republic
does this mean India will become "deeper than ocean friend" to Pakistan? will India and Pak build a fighter plane together
