Redwood, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023. xii, 511 pp. (Graphs, illustrations.) US$35.00, cloth. ISBN 9781503630055.
In this impressive, sweeping narrative of India’s economic and political history, Ashoka Mody makes three observations. First, India’s increasing unemployment and underemployment and its multidimensional poverty can be traced back to the policy choices made by the first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Second, every successive government has failed to deliver public goods by not investing in human development, most significantly in primary education and girls’ education. Third, politicians’ desire to capture political power through elections has led to the erosion of democratic norms, increasing religious intolerance, the rise of the “Angry Hindu” (267), poor governance, and the nexus between criminals, business, and politicians. Who is to be blamed for this? The answer for the author lies with the past and present charismatic leadership, starting with Nehru and ending with Modi. The book is very readable—a coherent and useful compendium of major events, policies, and scandals covering India’s complex economic and political history from 1947 to the present.
While describing Nehru as both civil and idealistic, Mody is critical of Nehru’s policy of the development of capital-intensive heavy industry—the “temple strategy”—prioritizing the erection of “temples of worship” (54) such as the Bhakra Nangal Dam or the development of new cities like Chandigarh, over investing in small and medium entrepreneurs and farmers or the development of existing cities which “needed multiple forms of infrastructure, including housing and local community amenities” (60). The author is equally critical of Nehru’s preference for the establishment of elite research and technical educational institutions, thus sidelining the necessity for much needed mass education. For Mody, Nehru’s major error was to ignore Japan’s economic performance resulting from its export-oriented model and its investment in primary education, particularly of girls (increasing their participation in labour-intensive small and mid-sized industries). This Japanese model was emulated by Taiwan and South Korea, leaving India lagging behind its East Asian competitors. Mody, however, does not address the full costs of these developmental strategies where the government and elite bureaucracy—while intimately involved in the formulation and implementation of industrial policies—put democracy on the back burner.
While Mody imputes Nehru’s failures to personality flaws, e.g., his elitist attitude plus his inability to pay attention to details, Mody attributes the dismantling of democracy to Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay through the aggrandizement of their personal power. Indira de-institutionalized the Congress Party, introduced draconian security/policing policies, and pursued populist policies such as the Nationalization of Banks, the abolition of privy purses of Princes, garibi hatao (removal of poverty), and imposed a national emergency in 1975. Her flirtation with religious groups would usher in a never-ending caste, identity-based, and angry Hindu politics, to be pursued by each successive government. Despite being a political outsider and labeled Mr. Clean, Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded his mother, was “unable to halt the country’s moral freefall” (227) and by playing “politics with Hindi-Muslim divisions,” he “helped unleash virulent Hindu nationalism” (246). Finally, Modi, unashamedly implementing the Hindutva agenda, has continued the corrupt business-politics liaison. His policies (notably demonetization, Kashmir, the Citizenship Amendment Act, and COVID-19 lockdowns) have “inflicted the maximum pain on India’s most vulnerable citizens” (351).
It is no doubt an extremely challenging undertaking to write such a detailed and in-depth book covering the complex political and economic history of modern India. However, there are some themes which require further elaboration. For example, the chapters covering the Nehru era pay limited attention to Nehru’s agricultural policies, sidestepping the attempts made during the late 1950s to increase agricultural productivity following the Chinese model of collective farming but with an Indian democratic twist. In 1959, India’s Congress party passed a unanimous resolution establishing joint cooperative farming (JCF), accompanied by land reforms and land ceilings. Mody’s argument for the failure of the Nehru era’s industrial policy would have been strengthened by reviewing the lack of implementation of JCF.
Similarly, Kennedy’s and Galbraith’s failed attempts to provide aid to India to build the Bokaro Steel Plant in 1963 (the US Congress voted not to support a socialist economy to build a public sector project) pushed India closer to the Soviet Union and resulted in the 1971 India-Soviet Union Friendship Treaty, hardening its position regarding the heavy-industrial policy strategy. The Bokaro Steel Mill was conceived in 1959 as a swadeshi (indigenous) plant using the services of the Indian private sector company Dasturco, with minimal participation of foreigners yet relying on the American aid for its import requirements. Had the American aid come through, we might have seen a change, though a gradual one, towards a public-private sector collaboration. In Mody’s otherwise thorough description of the Indian policy framework, the aspect of policy learning—so important in the eventual loosening up the socialist economic policy structure—is under-emphasized. The author correctly gives credit to Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri (1964–1966) for bringing about reforms to the agricultural sector, the initiation of the Green Revolution in agriculture, and the push for agricultural self-sufficiency (to be further expanded by Indira Gandhi). Indeed, these reforms, an example of policy learning, were the by-product of the failure of the Nehruvian agricultural policy.
However, sometimes policy innovations resulting from policy learning can have severe unintended consequences. The consequences of the green revolution were two-fold: as Mody observes, an increasing of the gap between rich and poor and the further immiseration of the population, and separating the Nehruvian goals of growth and equity within a democratic framework. To this day, growth and poverty are considered two distinct issues to be pursued through distinct means. Since Indira’s regime, populist policies have become the dominant framework for pursuing the equity goals by formulating pro-poor policies, with an insignificant impact upon the perennial problems of unemployment, underemployment, and multidimensional poverty. This pro-poor populism backed by symbolic polices amidst widespread corruption, as Mody points out, has betrayed Indian citizens over and over under the leaderships of varying ideological stripes.
Reeta C. Tremblay
University of Victoria, Victoria