If you are lucky it is only me who are behind in information but I am afraid that the reality is not quite so.

I didn’t deny that India is moving and improving but again the question is whose “India” is we talking about? Yes, some people has got mobile phones and concrete houses but generally they belong to those part of India who already is on the move (at least relatively speaking).

Generally, the structural foundation of Indian society are strongly
asymmetrical and “disfigurated” from a developmental point of view. Half of the country is still living under cultural, social and economic condictions which essentially belong to an “archaic” age. Any modern up-to-date statistic data will show you this if you take a careful look. India is still a country with roughly 60 percent of its population living of farming and that number was been quite stable over a long time. Most of the people who have got a mobile phone do not live in these areas. What is worse, India’s future demographic development will exactly happen i those areas, which are least able to support such a development. Therefore, those area, there is most poor in India will experience an explosion in its population in the next decade or three.

Who do you think get the children in India? Is it the rich and well educated with a nice suburbian house and who can afford to have children who get the children or is it the illiterate or semi-illiterate, low-skilled people living in some remote, poor, and infrastructural deprived region who really can’t afford to get children? Who gets the children? Take a qualified guess!

The other problem, which relates to the socio-demographic problem is that the success-stories in India is strangely
“perverted” from the point of the labor-market. This mean that there is really no qualified jobs for the huge numbers of lower-skilled workers, which in part has something to do with the fact that the Indian industry has a kind of “hole in the middle,” that is, India is to a large extent lacking the middle size industry, which is the backbone of development in most other countries.

Also at least compared with China, the Indian higher educational system has fallen behind and the elementary school-system is still too weak and insufficient. All this is not a tale from 1992 but the sad realities of India today.

There is much more to the story but let us leave it here.

Best regards,

Jens Kaalhauge Nielsen

I see lot of improvement in the education level at primary level in rural areas as well at higher level. We have atleast 20 times more engineers passing out every year today compared to 1990 and most of them gets employed. Their average salary is n times higher. Entertainment industries is considerably big and in remittance from overseas we crossed chinese in few years.

So I although I agree with some part of your analysis but I feel you are still 10-15 years behind in knowledge about India ( You are not alone..). I am just 32 and have come from a remote village in the most backward state in India to new York. I am sure you have much more exposure than I have so far but I wish you are alive for 20 more years and you will realise 20 years later what I am writing here !!!!

Thanks for the contribution. Yes, I think it is a rather sensitive qoute you have found there. India is naturally united by more factors than poverty alone but in the context it is written it is still a meaningfull statement. The point is that India has a very different history and culture than China and Russia, so it would naturally have to move into modernity by a different path. It think tne term “Representative Republics” is unfortunate at least in regard to China, which never until this day have seen the shadow of a true republic or anything which can be deemed a “representative” system. To call the current Communist system in China for “representative” would be a cruel joke. In the same way, the warlord system that followed after 1911 in China was not a “republic” by any normal sense of the term. Whatever one can say about Chaing Kai-shek, he was certainly not a democrat. And the leader who at least talked about democracy (in a Chinese kind of way), Sun Yat-sen, was comparatively unsuccessful as a politicans, since nothing what he talked about saw the day of light. Russia has only extremely late (1991) become a representative republic but as you well know many observers certainly doubt how “representative” it is. What is correct, however, is that China and Russia although in very different ways have been absolutistic states and both have been able to entertain an unified Empire (at least, at certain points of their history). Today, Russia might be on a different path but nothing has really change politically in China in this regard. At best you now have high-tech absolutism in China but it is rarely an improvement in a moral sense. In contrast India has been fragmentarized and ruled by foreign conquers in most of its history — in this sense India is primarily a socio-cultural system, which first in the twenty centrury became an united, sovereign system in a real political sense. In a strange way, it was the British who “created” India as a coherent political unit. Yet, because the political system in India in a sense have been “imported,” (or was a creation by the Anglofied elites around Nehru) the institutional link between the civic-political system and the traditional socio-cultural system is very weak and various cultural institutions such as the caste system, the religious system and many other factors have been able to restrain and slow down the integrative mechanism between the civic-political system and the traditional socio-cultural system to a very high degree. The outcome has been a society still ruled by archaic factors of tradition to a degree, which perhaps is extraordinary unique in the world. This kind of Hindu traditionalism, however, have also its strenght since if it wasn’t so embeeded and “stubborn” all of India would most likely be Muslim today; so the strenght and weaknesses of “stubborn archaic traditions” is a complex issue and not a simple one. Yet, the same archaic stubbornness that might be good for certain things is naturally a real headache when it come to the issue of modernization. The problem is not that India doesn’t make progress because many things are moving in the right direction, the problem is that of “integration,” that is, of the problem of the extremely asymmetrical pattern by which progress occur. The danger in India is that the nation breaks into two, and indeed this division has already occured but it might get even worse for all the reasons I have spelled out in my little essay. Naturally, the government should focus on the people, but the Indian government is also a “captive” of Indian culture and its people. The Indian question is not simply the question of “a bad government” but rather an issue of changing many views within the life of the people itself.

“India is a badly fractured society, divided in so many ways and only really united by common poverty. When you start to move Indian society with development, it is like the movement of a previously quiescent but fractured landscape, in short – massive earthquakes.

India is not the first large and populous country to grasp this nettle, China and Russia have been down this road last century. Both began as largely feudal, mediaeval states that were eager to enter the modern world. Both China and Russia began as traditional Empires which were then rapidly overthrown and replaced by Representative Republics. These Republics proved totally unable to contain the stresses and schisms of development and themselves succumbed to Revolution and Civil War which produced Totalitarian governments that were able to enforce its will sufficiently to purge outmoded notions and to lay the foundations for real modernisation and development.

India has never been forced to confront itself in this manner and retains many social and cultural characteristics that are the antithesis of development and which will never allow the psychology required for the modernism to take hold and flourish. Making these changes are some of the hardest and most deep seated problems any nation will ever encounter, but India will undertake to tackle them with a form of Government that is always unable to take the really hard decisions and enforce policy. “

I don’t really think that we disagree. Nothing I have written should be read as an argument against democracy. My argument was a case against those who might have a too optimistic view regarding India’s growth capacities in the short and middle-long run. Indeed, India is a democracy but it is also a troubled democracy reflecting all kind of contradictions within Indian society itself, including India’s failed eudcational system; yet, despite its shortfalls I believe that it actually facilitate India with various institutional feedback mechanisms you will not find in China. Democracy in India is troubled because India’s political system is to an important extent strained, corrupted and (relative) dysfunctional but it is only half the story because it is also true that democracy actually works in India on many complex levels of institutionalization. So it is a complex picture and certainly not an argument against democracy. Actually, the lower classes in India have a higher voting rate than in most other countries; it is a healthy sign even if its outcome somethings might appear at little “odd.”

I do think that India in the long run have a triumph-card in its democratic institutions over China but as long as India has half the educational rates than China, then the balance will remain in China’s favour until the day India is able to move out of the abyss.

But thanks for you good observations,

Jens

Your opinions seem quite skewed, i.e. you conveniently point out the polarities of Indian society to make a case against it; without doubt, at present, China is faring much better than India on most developmental indices, however, others could conveniently argue that it is a system which incorporates the worst of Capitalism and Communism (I am not making such a suggestion, but I am sure it would make a colorful debate). Both these countries have major issues to tackle and India is at least 10 years behind China with regards to any developmental statistic. However, by the same token, suggesting that China is where it is today would have been preposterous if you were comparing China’s developmental potential to another “sub-Saharan” country in the 70’s… my point is, India is trudging along on the right track, and it would undoubtedly take a longer time to arrive as compared to China, thanks in part to its democratic set up, however, suggesting that a country is doomed forever because it is democratic and uneducated or because there aren’t enough expressways is equally shortsighted. Finally, my personal viewpoint is that the debate about China vs. India shouldn’t be viewed as a zero sum game – both India and China will arrive… albeit, India might be 20 years late, I favor a democratic arrival.

Regards,

Richin