Author: Jay Bhattacharjee
Publication: Indiafoundation.in
Date: April 16, 2024
URL:   https://indiafoundation.in/articles-and-commentaries/resurgent-india-a-visible-change-in-mindset-and-psyche/

For quite some time, at least since the decolonisation of the world commenced in earnest in the late 1940s onwards, sociologists, historians, economists, and all other variants of scholars in the wide world of social sciences have studied the entire gamut of issues that were involved in the churning. The world saw not only numerous countries that were decolonised but entire continents.

In India’s case as well, this academic churning happened. Understandably, in the first two decades or so, we saw a lot of euphoria and froth among our academics and foreign scholars. One should not be too critical about this, because we were in the good company of many other countries and societies that had gone through the process of decolonisation and liberation from alien rule.

In India, the entire evolution of research and scholarship on our independence movement and freedom struggle was a complicated and complex process. The residual influence of our departed colonial masters was overwhelming in many ways. The British did not necessarily leave behind many of their tribe to run the post-colonial Indian administration. What they bequeathed to us were innumerable Indians whose mind-sets had been effectively transformed by the Sahibs over more than two centuries. The Kala Sahibs were more royal than the erstwhile battalions from Whitehall and the British oligarchy. This was true both for the world of academics as well as the corridors of government departments.

India’s bumpy ride as an independent country (which soon became a republic and, thereby, concluded its sovereignty odyssey) was a process that was far from optimal, or even satisfactory in a meaningful sense. For many decades, our country thrived more by posturing itself as a one-off model of a former colony that had “peacefully” earned its independence from a rampaging imperial power. The Gandhi-Nehru successor regime pulled off one of history’s biggest marketing deceptions, based on voodoo sociology and ersatz economics. Throughout the 1950s and well into the 1970s, the country’s rulers (who had mutated to a Gandhi-Nehru-Gandhi oligarchy) sold their Alice-in-Wonderland ideology to its domestic electorate and to an international audience, that was admittedly becoming progressively more sceptical about the Indian junta. Well into the late 1970s, the Indian economy under different appellations (“mixed economy,” “democratic socialism,” “socialist planning,” “state control over commanding heights,” and other grandiose terms) blundered along. The term “Hindu rate of growth” (around 2 percent per annum) became an accepted term in economic theory.

Admittedly, there were some encouraging developments in the midst of the doom-gloom scene. Higher technical and scientific education and research (in the IITs, Indian Institute of Science, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bose Institute, Indian Agricultural Research Institute, and others) matched international standards. It must be emphasised that these islands of excellence owe their survival and progress to a handful of savants and scholars. The agricultural marvel of high-yielding crops that took place was because international know-how was suitably transferred to India. A wide-scale famine was largely avoided.

Low-cost American assistance in the form of the PL480 programme was also very important for the young Indian state during droughts and floods. However, the principal factor that impeded India’s growth and development was the ham-handed “Control Raj” policy apparatus of the Union Government (GOI) and their junior partners, the state governments.
A perceptive, frank, and exhaustive study by the Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, of the Government of India, published earlier in 2024, summed up the performance of the Indian economy in the last 65 odd years and identified the key factors that affected and defined our economic trajectory. Admittedly, this study was done when the current dispensation of the BJP and its allies is in power. Yet, the study satisfies the tests of academic and intellectual rigour. A second study, of the same calibre, was done in 2019 by another reliable agency of the Indian government and came to the same conclusions.

More importantly, neutral organisations like The Economist, not known for their empathy for the NaMo regime, also published reports that were quite complimentary about the economic performance of India under the BJP-NDA dispensation (1). The white sahibs and memsahibs in London’s West End, whose condescension towards the lesser mortals in the former colonies is blatant most of the time, admitted grudgingly that India had done quite well under the saffron rulers.

Among domestic observers, The Economic Times (ET) is reasonably objective and scientific on most occasions when it has to study sensitive and complicated issues. In a recent study (2), it summarised what the BJP-led Union Government had managed to do in the last ten years. The ET referred to the reform measures initiated by the current government that have laid the foundations for solid economic growth in the coming decades. It quoted a study by the well-regarded Jefferies Equity Research agency, which said that India would become the third largest world economy by 2027 and is expected to achieve a capital market valuation of USD 10 trillion by 2030.

We now look, in greater detail, at how the BJP-led regime under PM Modi has performed in the last 10 years.

THE INDIAN ECONOMY’S GROWTH TRAJECTORY FROM 2014 TO 2024

THE GLOBE’S TEN LARGEST ECONOMIES: 2014 TO 2024