MCLC: how India is turning into China

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Costas Kouremenos <enaskitis at gmail.com>
Subject: how India is turning into China
***********************************************************

Source: The New Republic (12/21/12):
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/111367/how-india-turning-china

How India is Turning Into China (and not in a good way)
by Pankaj Mishra

CHINA IS shakily authoritarian while India is a stable democracy—indeed,
the world’s 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 India’s 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 China—nearly 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 China’s 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
reforms—in 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 learning—which
would later help provide highly skilled labor to Western banks and tech
companies—India 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 India’s 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 India’s 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
China’s revolution was stark. The communists had empowered Chinese women,
brutally cracking down on the various social “evils” of feudalism. Despite
Mao Zedong’s 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, India’s 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 country’s early
investments in higher education were exasperated with manifestations of
mass democracy—especially 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 India’s 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 country’s world-class infrastructure— airports, highways,
high-speed railroads—would 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 state’s role as the mitigator of inequality and provider of
welfare.

As in China, a generation of technocratic politicians spearheaded India’s
liberalization and modernization program. But, embedded with the country’s
biggest capitalists, they were much less willing or able to enhance the
state’s 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 shower—through the great trickle-down
miracle—prosperity on all, and also empower low-caste Hindus and women by
unleashing entrepreneurial energies. India’s structural weaknesses—the
poor quality of its education and governance, for instance—were
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 India’s much-ballyhooed information-technology and
business-processing offices employed less than six million of the
country’s 400 million–strong workforce or that the large majority of
poorly educated Indians gained little from the booming sectors of mining
and real estate speculation. India’s 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 programs—such as the rural employment scheme
that helped reelect the Congress Party in 2009—made possible by increased
revenue. Since then, however, India’s 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
American–style oligarchies. But what is more disturbing, and little
discussed, is the budding likeness to China—the 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 powers—the
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 conscience—India’s own Liu Xiaobos—have
languished in Indian prisons: These include Kashmir’s Shabir Shah, who
spent two decades in jail, and, more recently, the reputed doctor Binayak
Sen. (India’s great advantage over China is still its large number of
courageous activists and dissenters, such as Irom Sharmila, the world’s
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 government’s 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.

China’s 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 didn’t prevent his landslide
reelection—or 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
significant—and worrisome—signs 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 India’s best-known figures in politics,
sports, and entertainment of Bal Thackeray, Mumbai’s infamous demagogue
(and Hitler enthusiast).

Neither India’s elected nor China’s unelected rulers, however, have run
out of ways to woo their citizens. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s scheme
of cash transfers to the poorest Indians may secure enough votes for his
besieged government in the 2014 elections. China’s new leaders may yet
again follow the example of Singapore, a cannily adaptive one-party state,
and deploy their country’s 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 democracy—and a
lot of chaos.

Pankaj Mishra’s most recent book is From the Ruins of Empire: The
Intellectuals who Remade Asia. This article appeared in the December 31,
2012 issue of the magazine under the headline “Cheap Knockoff.”