India Unbound: A review

This blog hasn’t been updated for ages and I was really feeling guilty for not being able to update as frequently as I’d like to. To me, it almost felt as if I’m hoarding precious web space! So this post is more of an outcome of guilt pangs than anything else.
Recently read Gurucharan Das’ ‘India Unbound’ to help a friend in distress with his presentation.
After I was finished I told myself, I really don’t agree with the dude’s out and out capitalistic ideas but as a story teller, that too of a non-fiction tale, this guy is just brilliant.
So here is the review (sort of!)
In ‘Midnight’s Children’, Rushdie wove the story of his main character Salim Sinai with the fortune of the Indian sub-continent and presented a fascinating picture of the region with the help of ‘magical’ characters. Gurcharan Das scales down his canvas and sticks to India but by weaving his biography with the ‘growth story’ of India, Das makes ‘India Unbound’ a great tale of personal memoirs coupled with economic analysis and political scrutiny of a nation.
It’s an honest guide for those who don’t know India and for those who do, Das’s analysis tries to answer the countless dinner table/coffee house debates and arguments they might have had with their peers or family. Why the phenomenon called India never took off? Why we were rich then (before the Europeans came calling), but poor now? Das provides an insight into India’s many successes and its innumerable failures. This is the tale of a self confessed capitalist, a crusader for free markets and anyone who tends to veer towards the left might find this to be ‘pro-America’.
Gurcharan dismisses the economic policies of Government of India before the liberalization of 1991 as some sort of ‘Nehruvian socialism’ which slowed down the ‘Indian elephant’ and helped practices such as licence raj and militant trade unionism thrive. He might be sympathetic to Nehru for sticking on to socialism just after independence but is scathingly critical of Indira, firstly for undoing the farmer reforms brought on by Lal Bahadur Shastri and later for her ‘nationalisation’ drive that covered mines, banks etc.
But he stops shot of being over critical. Das points out that despite being badly governed, India has done well to reach where it is today and for that a host of factors have clicked in India’s favour and that’s where he celebrates India. Political leaders like Lalu Prasad Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav are subject of ridicule of most of the Indian bourgeoisie, but Gurcharan points out that it was their ‘caste based polity’ that gave confidence to the ‘backward castes’ to move ahead in the 21st century with the rest of India. He also points out their secular credentials, as to how Lalu never allowed the post-Babri riots, which burned down rest of the country, to spread into Bihar. This however does not vindicate the leaders from the charges of mis-governance, corruption and fallible industrial policies. (Since this book came before Lalu turned around the Railways, it pretty much damns him, and rightly so, for what he has done to Bihar.)
For Gurcharan Das, the opening up of Indian markets in 1991 by the then Finance Minister, now PM, Dr Manmohan Singh is nothing short of an epiphanic moment. The new policies included opening for international trade and investment, deregulation, initiation of privatization, tax reforms, and inflation-controlling measures. The sporadic cases of rags to riches story were expected to become the norm. Stories of Zee Telefilms, Jet Airways, Dr Reddy’s Lab, Ranbaxy are of incredible success, but every success story there is a boom-to-bust story of R Subramanium of Maxforth Orchards infamy, whose entrepreneurial spirit ‘thrilled’ Das when the former’s salesman asked him to invest in the venture (which Das did not!) but whose over-ambitious plans couldn’t withstand the liquidity crunch of the late nineties.
But in India’s context we can claim that more things change, more they remain the same. Despite Gurcharan Das’s optimism that ‘economic liberalisation’ is the solution that will sort out everything that is pulling us back may not be entirely correct. Take for example our literacy levels. Even if we go by the absurd definition followed by the government (ability to sign your name), India’s literacy rate is hovering around the 65% mark [UNICEF data updated till 2007] and which, effectively means that more than three fourths of the country’s male population and above half of the female population is literate. Rest can’t even sign their names.
It’s been 18 years since India ‘opened’ up its markets, and as Das mentions in the updated afterword, between 2002 and 2006 India’s economy grew at an astonishing 8% and he projects that by the year 2025, India’s world product will rise from 6% to 13%making India world’s third largest economy.
But despite so much promise and Das’ lofty projections can we be sure that the growth will be ‘inclusive’. Can we say in that by the year 2025 there will be no more starvation deaths in Orissa’s Kalahandi or anywhere else in India. Das desists from saying so. He says poverty will be reduced to ‘manageable proportions’ and concedes that our weak ‘middle step’ of ‘industrialisation’ while jumping from agrarian economy to a services based one might be a cause of concern.
But despite all that the book is a about celebration of what India was, what is became during era of ‘socialist policies and licence raj regime’ and how it has changed since the liberalisation kicked in. Das informs us [the Generation X/Y, whatever!] that annual revenue of Aurangzeb was “more than ten times” that of his contemporary in France, Louis XIV. He quotes economic historian Angus Maddison to say that, riding on the might of its handloom textile and handicrafts market, India had 22.6% share in World’s GDP and 25% share in global trade in textiles.
In the near future, Das predicts that the ‘Indian elephant’ and the Chinese dragon will dominate global economic in a manner quite similar to how it was before the imperial age. But for that India’s first concern should be to concentrate on basic infrastructure like building highways and setting up local health centre and schools at the grassroots. India cannot fulfil its potential and promise if these basic necessities are neglected. For history to repeat itself a collective effort is required. We cannot break into a sprint with a weak ‘middle step’.