While on the topic of why India didn't liberalize sooner, an article posted to the SM's News column points at one important factor. In his "Letter from India" column in the NYT, Akash Kapur reflects on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall the impact it had on India -
Most of the media coverage has, quite understandably, focused on Europe. But the tremors from Communism's collapse were felt far beyond the immediate battlegrounds of the Cold War. The breakup of the Soviet Union had a profound impact on India. In many ways, it paved the way for a reinvention of the country
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Akash Kapur |
It's tough to remember now, BUT, prior to the fall of the wall, there were many serious scholars who seriously argued that not only would communist / socialist systems deliver greater equality than capitalism but also greater wealth . Their economic promise went a l'il sumthin like this - under capitalism the steel industry, for ex., might currently consist of 10 small, competing companies which are constantly hunting for cheaper labor to exploit, can't all run their plants at max efficiency b/c of inter-firm supply/demand flux, and ignore other, more important social goals.
"I remember, from my childhood, the Soviet engineers and scientists who filled the bars in Pondicherry, seeking respite from the rigors of the power plant they were building up the road. I remember the dusty bookstores that stocked cheap Russian classics and the bottles of sparkling Russian wine my father used to buy from visiting sailors."Instead, why not gather some scholars & start with a top-down, national plan for how much steel "we" need? Then, build 1 big steel factory, have some PhDs calc how to run it at maximum efficient scale, eliminate "wasteful" expenditures like marketing budgets, commissions for sales forces and particularly those evil profits & exec-bonuses. And "we" can achieve important Social Ends like hitting female/minority employment targets, insulating employees from the vagaries of the employment market, sourcing coal from underserved regions of the country and making sure no one makes more than 2x the lowest paid employee's salary. Lather, rinse, repeat for all other parts of the economy and poof! we'd all theoretically be better off.*
Of course, the fact that we (well, most of us) now get a hardy laugh out of the idea that the Soviet system could somehow lead to greater wealth is indicative of the degree to which History, in Fukuyama's dialectical sense, has ended. We instead generally accept that the troika of Liberalism, Democracy, and Capitalism (LD & C) are the right big picture features of a socio-politico-economic system and most debate is instead about comparatively fine grained variations of the theme. Simply put, workers in the first and developing worlds aren't quite circling the capitol in tractors with raised pitchforks like they did back in the day.
Meanwhile, in India, Nehru/Gandhi did OK on L+D but were pretty actively opposed to C...Kapur's piece provides some great examples - big & small - of how, despite official pronouncements of non-alignment, India truly was on the wrong side of this History -
India was never a Communist country. But it was far closer to the Soviet Union than to the United States throughout the Cold War, buying weapons on concessional terms, doing barter trade with the Eastern Bloc and receiving financial and technical aid for industrial and infrastructure projects.
I remember, from my childhood, the Soviet engineers and scientists who filled the bars in Pondicherry, seeking respite from the rigors of the power plant they were building up the road. I remember the dusty bookstores that stocked cheap Russian classics and the bottles of sparkling Russian wine my father used to buy from visiting sailors.
There were many reasons for the closeness between India and the Soviet Union, not least of which was a U.S. foreign policy that tilted decisively toward Pakistan. But the closeness was born, too, of genuine ideological affinity.
It Brought Down Mental Walls Too...
At about the same time the balance of payments crisis was prompting India's 1991 economic reforms, the Soviet Union was collapsing. While many of the reforms were arguably inevitable (the Indian state was truly running out of other people's money), the fall of the Wall provided the important intellectual "cover" for enthusiastically pursuing reforms -
It's possible that all of this would have happened anyway, with or without the dissolution of the Soviet Union...Most important, the death of Communism had a psychological and intellectual impact that paved the way for India's transformation. As the economist T.N. Srinivasan (among others) has argued, it provided an opening for would-be reformers, who had already recognized the need for some form of liberalization but who had run up against ideological resistance.
The collapse of the Soviet Union wasn't just the collapse of a political and military behemoth. It was the collapse of an idea, too, and with the discrediting of Communist ideology, Indian socialism, long the guiding philosophy of statecraft and economic policy making, confronted a crisis of confidence. Ideas that had until then been anathema to the nation's governing class -- ideas about markets, about profits, about entrepreneurship -- suddenly seemed, amidst the detritus of Communism, to be incontestable.
It's hard to remember now, after the spectacular market failures of the last few years, but policy makers in 1991 were operating at "the end of history." Capitalism wasn't just a superior model; it was the only viable one.
And so, perhaps the biggest reason India couldn't have liberalized sooner was plain old ideological inertia. Unfortunately, the cost of waiting to abandon those socialist ideas now appears to be 14M infant deaths, 260M literate individuals, and 100M folks who missed the opportunity to rise above poverty.....
*alas, the same sort of "the top-down plan = efficiency, lower costs + cut out middleman profits = we're all better off" thinking underlies many of the proposals in the US healthcare reform debate... so I suppose there's still a lot of room to debate just how closed the verdict is on History....
Good Point
Well, China's got the Capitalism, but not the Liberalism or the Democracy, and they seem to be doing better than most places (economically--not that I'd want to live there).
what is past is gone. i'd be keen on your and others' extrapolation on the above thought. why 'alas'? are you suggesting the move in the united states is towards the same nehruvian / socialist vision? can you please elaborate the parallels, the pitfalls and/or the checks and balances that have been instituted?
>Unfortunately, the cost of waiting to abandon those socialist ideas now appears to be 14M infant deaths, 260M literate individuals, and 100M folks who missed the opportunity to rise above poverty.....
...and mountains of trash, pollution, loss of ground water, rising crime rates....read the Malayalam papers to see where liberalisation is going to take us. As canny EMS famously said, Kerala is India's laboratory -- what is happening there now will happen all over India tomorrow.
do you know what the situation was in 1950? What was the attitude of western powers such as Britain and others towards india and its industrial potential?
Are you aware of any real history, other than some regurgitated gibberish from Mr. Fukuyama?
Its unfortunate that this important topic is being debated by illiterate people like Vinod and this silly NYTimes Gupta. I guess if you are born in the US you dont need no history, nor geography.
I encourage others to actually read about the hostility and open racism that accompanied the creation of independent india, how the western powers assumed it would collapse and be destroyed within a few years. Or how they believed that indians capacity for intellectual work and engineering was equal to that of monkeys. Ramachandra Guha's India after Gandhi would be a good starting point.
#5,
Thats a cheap, childish personal attack on the blogger. Make arguments if you disagree, why personal attacks ??
How does that even matter? The gora thinks we smell and wouldn't know democracy if it bit us in our ass, so we're supposed to disintegrate?! Gayatri Spivak could write another dense, unreadable book on this new twist to the post-colonial complex...
not that I'd want to live there
kind of a who, whom question, right? the *median* indian has way fewer options than the *median* chinese. the top 10% of indians probably has more options than the top 10% of chinese because these groups are they're further up maslow's hierarchy and look to more than bread & water (though one could argue that china's near-term economic upside is so impressive that that india's more diverse quality of life portfolio which includes more political and personal rights is still trumped for the affluent).
I kind of think people find it neat and tidy to equate communism and/or socialism with the USSR or Maoist China and then discuss how it failed and it sucked and hence communism and socialism are a failed experiment and wrap it all up in a tidy package and send it down the river.
But really, if you study ideology regarding either communism or socialism... there is not hint that it should be run by dictators who ruin people's lives while living lavish lifestyles, and repressing everybody. I mean please, someone point out a state that truly followed the theories and system set up for either communism or socialism and show me how it failed. I don't think there is a good example. The USSR, China, and Cuba are examples of how dictators can take over and run a state under the guise of socialism or communism.
Calling something socialism or communism doesn't make it so. I can call myself an elephant, but last I checked, I'm just a human. alas.
>the biggest reason India couldn't have liberalized sooner was plain old ideological inertia
This is not true, it is a lot more complex than that. An analogy would be the use of waste plastic to make roads, a proven technology developed by a Bangalore-based company, among others. But it is not resisted by the Indian roads department, because the award of road contracts is a big source of bribes, and the chain goes all the way down to bitumen procuring, which would be affected by the plastic technology, as less bitumen would be needed.
Liberalisation could not happen because of a similar nesting of interests within the establishment, which understood the inefficiencies of the command economy, but could do nothing about it, because it would've upset many apple carts, including their own, as they benefited handsomely from the licence-raj.
So there was was inertia, yes, but there was nothing ideological about it.
I think of capitalism as one element that "could" contribute to better living conditions, it is not the only solution, and it is certainly not always the best, as the plastic road example shows. My ideal economy, and country, is Sweden. Going about their business quietly and efficiently, with no ideological hangups, and helping others, and the planet, as much as they can.
BTW, your enthusiasm for capitalism reminds me of that famous line from Breakfast at Tiffany's: "The quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there." Of course, now we know that that is not true.
(I should also say that sometimes I get the sense that this blog is run by a bunch of Holly Golightlys, who think of America the way she did Tiffany's.)
Sorry, I meant to say "resisted by the Indian roads department".
Under the Britisn empire, 'capitalism' was every bit as brutal as gulag-Stalinism - check out Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts! So Gandhi and Nehru had every reason to be suspicious.
Yes intertia had a lot to do with resistance to reforms - Manmohan, Bhagwati and others had been making the case for reforms since the seventies. But it was more the resistance of an entrenched bureacracy not willing to devolve their powers - the scholarly literature doesn't really dicuss the shadow-of-communism angle. This latter argument doesn't make much sense given the continued influence of communism and Maoism in India even after the fall of the Wall and the level of influence of the CPI (M) at the centre in the previous government coalition.
The problem with the caricature-posing-as-analysis posting by Vinod and the vacuous output of NYT's Kapur is its ignorance of history and the many different challenges faced by india post-1947. Modern Indian history is not the adjunct of european history or some kind of supporting minor role in US history, it has its own logic, successes and weaknesses.
1) Basic capacity building - creation of the educated technical class - creation of an autonomous economy - are all successes of the nehru period. And, please, when comparing with China lets also factor in the "great leap forward" with its 10 million dead. It is always strange to me that the same folk who are always lecturing us on the inadequacies of the indian state are OK with the continuing violence and mass murder perpetuated silently and secretly within closed societies.
2) Indian economy did not take advantage of this increased capacity because of lack of reforms especially creation of a more open economic system in the 70s. Some of the more nuanced discussion above does reference this - I have also pointed out the impact of cold war rivalry during the 70s. This also has to do with increasingly entrenched and abusive control by the govt of the economy as some interactors have pointed out.
Besides IITs did not result into any meaningful engineering innovation within India that had any meaningful impact on the society.
Socialists are supposed to invest in Human capital. That clearly did not occur in India. China on the other hand did invest in Human capital and also jettisoned failed economic policy and embraced liberalization early and now has upwards of 90% literacy rate and 3 times per capita GDP than India.
India's policy until 1990 was a disaster and I completely agree with Vinod's observation that it may be partly due to ideological inertia.
RC
No surprises, again the admiration for China - and do you include the 10 million dead from the great leap forward as part of your admiration? Do you admire that as well - would you or your family have enjoyed being part of this great leap!!
Do you have any idea of the level of violence and trauma inflicted by the chinese state on its people? Till recently, the chinese were officially executing over 10,000 of their own citizens every year ! We have almost no information on these matters, almost complete ignorance.
The whole thing is reminiscent of the fascination for "efficient" nazi germany in the 30s or the romanticization of the progress made by stalinist USSR. So this kind of blindness and worship of violent but poorly understood societies has a long history....
Nobody is praising the Chinese experiment in social engineering (aka the Great Leap Forward), instead that's what is being criticized as the unrealistic and top-down approach to re-engineer whole societies on some fanciful notions of equality and progress (Nehru's vision of progress was similar, borne out by his fascination with the Chinese, which was later cruelly shattered by the war with the Chinese in 1962). These are the very hallmarks of socialist/communist systems that Deng realized as inimical to the development of his society and which started the process of slow liberalization in the 70s in China. The main contention of us, the anti-1950-thru-70s economic policy folk, is that we did not realize this for almost a whole generation which resulted in the figures as deduced by Aiyar, and expounded by Vinod above, of the losses in human life and increase in misery that could have been somewhat prevented if we weren't so blinkered with ideology and enthralled by the small section of the ruling elite of the time.
RC, no doubt the debate on what India needs to do to drastically improve its malnourishment rate needs to be discussed and the Indian state should be criticized. But don't misstate facts:
India has worse malnourishment rate in children under the age of 3 than anywhere in the world
Umm no; you take stats and get the wrong conclusion:
Here's the 2003 for undernourishment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Percentage_population_undernourished_world_map.PNG
There's more recent stats and no India isn't the worst. It's horrible what ranking we have and something needs to be done about it, but don't use facts to support your false assertion. China is second in number of people in malnourishment, it is much better in rate of malnourishment, but China is no example - not just in the Great Leap but other parts of their plan(s), within the cultural revolution, etc where millions upon millions died. Let's look to another model beside China, which is a country that is no leader in anything imo.
Oh yes, and I'm sure you realize that in ur assertion that you cite, that India is the worst, that India (1 country) is being compared to a region (SubSaharan AFrica). Country by country India's stats are horrible but it is removed from the bottom. Countries like Ethiopia not only have a higher malnourishment rate, but many of these "failed states" and please look up the definition of a failed state - also skip the malnourishment/undernourshment part and just have famines where people die.
I hold the hope that someday, Congress will hire multiple LEAN Six Sigma master black belts, actually review current policy and its impact on health care cost via a project using cause and effect diagrams, review constraints, and understand how waste can be avoided through the use of various LSS tools.. .MAYBE then we actually get a set of solutions (for private industry, federal, and state) in a comprehensive strategy to guide public health in the 21st century.
Decision by consensus and putting forth immediate solutions because everyone and their mothers see exactly what is wrong can lead to the wrong tools being used on the incorrect portions of a value stream (as complicated as this one is), along with setting incentives for behaviors driven by the wrong metrics people decided were important.
So, what I would like to see:
1) What is the comprehensive strategy to guide public health in the 21st century. I'm not talking a set of solutions, or even some set of ideals. Not having a strategy/charter is a big blunder. Think of the Iraq campaign - no real strategy associated with occupation resulted in a 3 year setback.
2) In line with said strategy, what are short, medium, and long term goals to improve cost, quality, and availability of health services.
3) Where can the maximum ROI be generated by Federal, State, and Private industry in the various value streams to achieve the above goals. We're still a "shotgun" blast culture, but each group brings advantages and disadvantages to the table. Strengths and weaknesses need to be indentified to ensure risk can be mitigated appropriately.
The above being laid out in legislation that is not 2000 pages long should also be necessary. As someone that has to enforce federal requirements on a daily basis, for every "Shall" or requirement in the legislation, it will need to be enforced consistently. With the scope of the current legislation, it will require a massive federal workforce, along with fraud/waste/abuse auditors, legal staff, watching the processes and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Like any good organization, the top levels need to define these requirements clearly and consistently, allowing for lower echelons in the power structure some tolerance in interpreting those requirements to ensure needs of a diverse population are met.
Rate of undernourshment by country in 2003:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentage_of_population_suffering_from_undernourishment
in 2003 we have Eritrea first at 73%,...Tajikistan 61%....Yemen is some 33% undernourished....N korea....Cambodia 33%...., Mongolia, Sudan....Pakistan, Bolivia, after Thailand at 21% comes India at 20%.I'm not sure what 2008 stats show but I remember seeing them and India hadn't all of a sudden fallen to Eritrea's level.
PS @#18,
Way to split hairs. The data you point out is from 2003 and based on that you are extrapolating to prove my assertion wrong.
From the reuters articleI linked
As the above says, the situation since the data you point to has gotten worse in one case and marginally better in another. So technically my statement could be wrong but the purpose of my comment was to point to the horrific nature of the problem and not make some kind of new sensational claim.
BTW, There is only 1 country in the world that India can be compared to that is China. Micronesia is a country too, yet one cant compare it to India !!! There has to be an apples to apples comparison.
Another valid comparison is Europe (In fact that is more closer than China as far comparisons go)
PS,
I hope you know the difference between data provided by REUTERs and UNICEF v/s "data" seen on Wikipedia.
What do we mean by economic liberalization? If I make shoes and want to sell it down the street, should I be "allowed" to? If I make transmission belts for vehicles and want to sell it to companies should I be "allowed" to? Should we as a society allow people to work however they fancy. How could this possibly lead to a better life for all.
I'm with Linzi, please before telling me communism is bad first show me a country where people were not allowed to work on what they wanted without being forced into not being allowed, and then tell me its bad.
I hate it when people quote from either newspapers or wikipedia when the actual source data is readily available and not subject to the usual (mis)interpretation.
http://www.who.int/nutgrowthdb/database/countries/ind/en/
Razib being a stat junkie would probably get a kick out of this if he isn't already familiar with it.
The primary indicators of note are in the first four columns after the sample size column, listing the percentage of children greater than 3 and greater than 2 standard deviations below median weights and heights. Under a gaussian distribution which hold true for the developed world where almost all children have equal access to a baseline nutritional standard conducive to child development the percentage of children less than three standard deviations should be only 0.1% and less than two standard deviations 2.1%.
Based on the largest sample size taken in the 2005-2006 year of children under the age of 5 (49233 individuals), one can see that 17.4% of children in India are 3 standard deviations below the mean in weight (remember it should be 0.1%) and 43.5% are at least 2 standard deviations below the mean (should be 2.1%). Quite significant. Also interesting is the data broken down by individual Indian states which reveals which regions have been doing better or worse relatively for India. The best performing Indian states in this measure are Manipur, Kerala, Mizoram, Goa, and Sikkim. The worst are Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, and Meghalaya which appears to be some kind of hell hole at least where hungry children are concerned. Some of the sample sizes for the individual states are admittedly a bit small, but if the sample were carefully selected, it wouldn't be too much of an issue.
Oh and before anyone asks or mentions it. I believe the medians in the WHO data are already calibrated for their respective sample populations. I cross referenced the data for Japan which is nearly 30 years old but pretty much right before they reached fully industrialized status and their respective figures for populations below 3 and below 2 standard deviations are 0.2% and 3.7%. My pet theory for Indian malnutrition is that unsanitary conditions and bad water are causing a lot of nutrients to be not fully absorbed. It doesn't matter how good you eat if you have regular Delhi Belly. I worked a few years in the water management industry mainly with pumps involved in municipal projects and it never ceases to amaze me just how few people realize how critical water treatment and processing are. You will likely never see a huge 2+ meter diameter pump that you can walk through, but they are the arteries and veins of cities and critical. People in America just take it for granted that they can go to their bathrooms and kitchens and flip a switch to get a never ending stream of clean water and never really appreciate just how much of a miracle that is.
Oh by the way people, stop flushing rocks and metal objects down your toilets. Cavitation is bad enough without people adding more objects that abrade the impellers.
thanks for the statistical data Koschei. Interesting, but sad...
@akash: " horrible malnutrition rates are not applicable to the elite
Malnutrition is very unique in Indian context. All malnourished kids need not be poor, I guess the predominant vegetarian diet is also one of the cause for malnourishment (with not much emphasis on proteins). Most of my cousins(kids) in India are so skinny even though they are in upper middle class."
I think this is also something true to point out...
I don't know if it has to do with the vegetarian diet, but many of my Indian friends, most of whom are University or Post grad educated either think caring about a balanced diet is boring/unimportant or they just assume that as long as they eat normal Indian food then they are getting a balanced diet. Yet many of my friends don't really eat any fruit at all, and eat a lot of food cooked in heavy oil. Many also don't know what has protein in it and what doesn't...
Now one thing I think many middle and upper-class Indians are got at is eating a variety of vegetables, something I should take example from! (And of course, the fact that so many more Indians buy fresh vegetables and make the food themselves rather than eating prepared food or eating out, something Americans in general should take example from.)
But overall, I find middle class people's attitudes about eating a balanced diet is that they don't really care/and or they trust in just eating "Indian food". Also, vitamins are seen as "medicine" rather than something to help you keep a balanced diet, so many people I know have told me they don't need to take 'medicine'.. they aren't sick. Honestly though, a guy I know who is middle-class is most likely considered malnourished. Yet his doctor in India told him he just has a "skinny constitution". (He is 5'7" and weighs about 100 lbs)
From my experience there, I think this attitude and lack of interest also goes hand in hand with the culture of lack of preventative medicine... It is nearly impossible to convince my friends there that regular dental cleanings, etc are better in the long run--- even my friends with free health care on their university campus!
@23 Akash
Thanks for noting that the malnutrition isn't necessarily tied up with the economic status. Vegetarians in the West are also warned about the problems with anemia, and B12 deficiency.
Violet in the Twilight:"@23 Akash
Thanks for noting that the malnutrition isn't necessarily tied up with the economic status. Vegetarians in the West are also warned about the problems with anemia, and B12 deficiency. "
That's true... vegetarians really need to make sure they are getting a balanced diet, and it is much easier for vegetarians to become malnourished.. I was a vegetarian for 16 years and I recently started eating chicken... not because I wanted to, but because I was having all sorts of crazy problems with my stomach that I couldn't find any other solution to... so I tried eating chicken and felt better right away... I wasn't technically malnourished (as far as I know, re: b 12 or iron) but I don't think my body was very happy with my diet.
I would hazard a guess though that since so many Indians have been vegetarians for so many generations, that their bodies might be better adapted to a vegetarian diet... anyone? IS this totally wrong? I bet someone has studied this out there.. (Just a random thought, since the many Indian vegetarians I know don't seem to have the same problems I did.. i.e. feeling starving all the time, body not processing the food correctly, getting hypoglycemic regularly, etc
But still people really need to watch what they eat and I don't think most vegetarians get enough protein in their diet either.. It's too bad for me, I would really prefer to be a vegetarian but when it is causing problems for you everyday, I guess it is better to listen to my body.
If this was the reason communism collapsed, then we are in serious trouble. Our banks, oil companies, car manufacturers, phone companies, insurance companies... pretty much every business larger than a few hundred, rely heavily on top-down plans to deliver ahem... efficiency and low costs. That is what the business schools teach their students, and that is what shareholders want their corporations to do. That is what we pay our CEOs billions of dollars to do.
Imho, communism failed because giving few individuals a lot of power makes your system susceptible to mistakes. Bad decisions get taken, and in the absence of Liberalism and Democracy, are not pointed out or corrected, i.e. no checks and balances.
Capitalism has the big advantage that several approaches get tried in parallel, making the system more error-resistant. But left to its own devices, Capitalism results in Enron, S&Ls, Blackwaters, huge meltdowns, and people being denied insurance coverage when they fall sick. Some people in the society consider it unacceptable that we live in a society that spends the most on healthcare in the world, and we still have poor healthcare quality, and 2 million people going bankrupt every year because they fell sick. Some find it strange that a significant fraction of our health care spending goes into the overhead of weeding out people and denying coverage. We need checks and balances here as well. I think regulation is what we call those.
Opponents of these regulations are quick to proclaim them socialism, since it is the government doing something. It is regrettable that people as intelligent as you fall for such propoganda.
I believe what is being proposed here is something like the following: we collect data on how effective a treatment statistically is and make it available to the doctors. The doctor and the patient can decide which treatment is best for them, but now have the added benefit of this data. I fail to see what exactly is socialistic about this "top-down planning".
And if the America-centered thinking of some of us would permit it, one could look at systems in other capitalistic countries, or even at systems such as Veterans medical care and medicare, which are much more top-down and "socialistic" than anything in the healthcare bill. Of course that would construe looking at evidence, which goes against the moral fiber of the ideology-driven crowd.
@25, 26, Koschei,
The median is obtained from an aggregate of US, Norway, Ghana, Oman, and India. Perhaps the low-performance of Meghalaya (or any North-Eastern states) is due to natural genetic variation?
All I can gather from the link is that ~43% are 2SD below the median established from the aggregate growth charts. Not necessarily "calibrated" to India. If that is the case, then by definition, only ~0.1% will be below 3SD from the median of the Indian data.
Are they skinny because they are vegetarian and lack protein or are they skinny because they are communist. We have to be careful about confusing causality and correlation. Many of university hippie/communists are also vegan, and skinny for instance. Perhaps there is some WHO dataset preferably linked by Wikipedia and with four columns which covers this?
If you study the ideology, its totalitarian leanings are quite obvious. Marx's "dicatorship of the proletariat" is a case in point. Now, marx may not have intended Stalin to use the concept to supress the likes of trotsky, but the concept is so inherently dangerous that any cirtical reader of marx could see it would eventually be abused.
In contrast, democratic liberal thinkers and capitalists were profoundly aware of the limits of humans, setting up barriers to tyranny like separation of powers unalienable natural rights, and free markets that prevent excessive central planning. hayek long argued that the hubristic belief that a bureaucrat can consistently know things better that the market would doom socialism. he was correct. a system that relies on a benevolent dictator, as communism does, is inherently flawed because its out of touch with human nature... as is often argued.
the lack of respect ofr classical freedoms in the ideology probably the best explains why self-identified communist societies would with almost bizarre consistency dissolve into Orwellian police states. marxist philosopher, herbert marcuse for example introduced the concept of "repressive tolerance" which means tolerance only for beliefs systems that are tolerant. the structural flaw in the argument is glaring: who decides? he may very well not have intended a communist to use the concept to suppress all dissent, but once you empower someone to censor in your name, you can't abusive yourself of responsibility because he didn't do it the way you intended. communists and socialists need to own their failure.
RC wrote:
RC wrote:
RC wrote:
RC, dude, you're starting to sound like Prema... Is everything OK?
I dont think that vegetarian diet causes people to be some how unhealthy and less nourished.
The Sardinian Diet as shown by health experts on ABC news, is pretty much bread cheese and wine with occasional meat. Doctors and dietitians are saying that Sardinian diet is causing Sardinia to have unusually high number of people living beyond the age of 100 and generally very healthy lives. Sardinian diet is also heavy on use of pulses.
So, a diet based on bread, pulses, cheese .... that sounds like a Vegetarian diet in several parts of India.
All this discussion about malnutrition makes me wonder: why hasn't the the magic wand of liberalization (waving proudly since 1991) made it disappear?
Also, Kerala has had those good nutrition (and literacy) numbers from the 70s, even as it was opposing liberalization. So the link between starving children and command economy doesn't hold up. Vinod should know this, of all people.
BTW, isn't much of sub-Saharan Africa is "liberalized"? Or are those countries run by Communist regimes?
it is sad that we have to argue stats to state that people shouldn't be chained to posts and made to work as planners see fit. Vinod might say that there is a gap in economic education, but is that not a gap in moral education?
@Manju
I was never saying that socialism or communism don't have weaknesses that would obviously have to be improved upon... but seriously, dictatorship does not equal "dictatorship of the proletariat". I mean dictatorship= one person running the show. "Dictatorship of the proletariat" = the majority of the population making choices... oh... sounds a lot like American 'democracy' (Actually, America is not a democracy, it's a republic with "democratic" leanings. The system was set up to have representatives, because the founding fathers were too afraid to allow regular people to have the actual choice in electing the President (And, they didn't want women to vote at all.). So they made a system were we vote for people, and they vote for the actual bills, president, etc. That way the common man won't mess things up) ... of course.. if you talk to any modern Marxists/socialists/communists/anarchists, they are often much more into using consensus voting rather than majority rules voting.
"In contrast, democratic liberal thinkers and capitalists were profoundly aware of the limits of humans, setting up barriers to tyranny like separation of powers unalienable natural rights, and free markets that prevent excessive central planning. hayek long argued that the hubristic belief that a bureaucrat can consistently know things better that the market would doom socialism. he was correct. a system that relies on a benevolent dictator, as communism does, is inherently flawed because its out of touch with human nature... as is often argued."
I think you are wrongly conflating "democratic liberal thinkers" with capitalists.... A democracy is a system to run a government, like a dictatorship, a republic, a monarchy, etc. Capitalism, Anarchy, Socialism, etc on the other hand, would be ideologies which are used to run the government. Hence you can have a "social democracy" like Sweden, which is both democratic, and socialist, though of course they have chosen (through democracy) exactly how they want to do that.
And if you think the capitalist system sets up barriers to tyranny, I think you are absolutely wrong... they work for the tyranny of big business... the more freedom big business has and the less regulations, the happier capitalism is...capitalism doesn't have any built in mechanism to keep big business from exploiting workers/the earth etc unless there is some other system to keep it in check.
The funniest part of the most discussion in SM nowadays is the ones to scream the loudest are the ones to have never done anything to help change the current status. There are multiple ways to make a difference than trying to one up each other by showing who screams the loudest.
@ 39 shame
How do you know who has 'done anything' to change anything or not? I'm not trying to be snarky, but honestly, I don't think most of us know much of anything about each other, let alone what people done or not done.
yes but a lot of noise here is just that noise, it is the same pattern on each thread and you can kind of sense. I will be happy to be wrong, as somehow not a lot of people here seem like the discreet kind
Violet in twilight, I doubt it is natural genetic variation. If you take a closer look at the data, you'll see that quite a number of Northeastern states are among the best performing. See Manipur, Mizoram, and Sikkim.
I also checked comparable data for China from 2002 (somewhat closer genetically speaking to the Northeast than India is). Although it's a few years older than the Indian data, it is an order of magnitude better. Only 1.5% and 6.8% are 3SD and 2SD below their age weight ratio. What's interesting is that the height age ratio is not as good as the weight issue and this may be genetic. Even comparing weight to height instead of age, Indian children still appear to be suffering from malnourishment to a considerable degree. What I found really interesting in the Chinese data is that Chinese women seem to be giving birth to chubby babies! Fat babies are considered a sign of good luck and a blessing in China. Compared to the norm, Chinese children aged from 0 to 6 months are actually significantly higher weight than their heights would imply. This trend still somewhat holds even up to the age of 5 years. I am not sure if the explanation for this is genetic or cultural.
You have it ass-backwards Vinod. The joke is on intellectually dishonest, ideologically brainwashed people like you who despite the recent global crisis brought on by neo-liberal market fundamentalism still cling to the delusion that it is triumphant! As for Democracy one only has to look at the abysmal failure that is Indian Democracy compared to non-democratic China. It says a lot about you that you still find Fukuyama's asinine conclusion that history has ended and the anglo-saxon model has triumphed, to be true beyond doubt. Clearly you do not have the ability to think for yourself.....like all fundamentalists and ideologues.
Note that when the crisis hit no one, not even conservative Republican President Bush, had any faith that the market could resolve the crisis if left alone by the governement. As Bush quaintly put it "This sucker is going down" without govt intervention. It took massive govt interventions aka socialism by America, China and the EU to prevent the world economy from going over the cliff.
The Washington Consensus is passe. The europeans and the chinese are now lecturing americans on what to do with their economy and their budget. The Beijing Consensus is looking better by comparison.
Very true. It is obscene how these brainwashed drones keep blaming nehruvian "socialism" for India's failures. The Nehruvian License Raj was a corrupt, incompetent, unaccountable, blood-sucking nexus of babus and banias. It was not socialism. India has been paying, and will continue to pay, the price for not investing in its human capital as East Asia and the West have done.
Kabir, be careful with the India China democracy comparisons. I think too many people fundamentally misunderstand the purpose and utility of democratic forms of government. Democracy is in and of itself a positive thing, as it is a tool to make governments more accountable to their constituents. It can be used to leverage the power of the people to make genuine needed reforms and to remove the incompetent and the corrupt and act as a check to rent seeking policies favored by certain elites. That said, it is only a tool and a tool is only as useful as how well it's made. Bush and Co had certainly made a massive mistake in trumpeting Democracy as the end all be all of social-civic arrangements when it is more of a continual process that needs to be maintained. Which is why we have technically democratic governments in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Pakistan that are extremely lacking in legitimacy. The case of India is not a failure of democracy persay but rather a failure of the democratic process within India. The truth I have come to realize in speaking with many English literate and educated Indians is that they fail to realize democracy doesn't magically make things better. Too many Indians do not realize the utility of a democracy and instead it seem to view it not as path to improvement but use it to rationalize one failure after another.
Court system is decrepit and riddled with delays, bribery, and farcical rulings. We have British legal system Yar! Corrupt politicians and extremely autocratic and nepotistic party system more focused on buying votes than delivering promises. We are a democracy Onlee! Anarchic civic arrangements riddled with massive socio-economic cleavages that make collective action and mutually acceptable compromise difficult if not impossible. We are Free Sahib!
I don't point this out to imply that India is incompatible with democracy, but that all too many Indians have been far too complacent and become satisfied with the existence superficial trappings of democracy (elections) and completely nonchalant as to it's actual functioning. I think this is the reason why so many of the Indian commentariat have been so in love with the Bush doctrine of the past is because Bush too did not really care about the functioning a democracy and merely it's appearance. An ideological paradigm which naturally showed India in the most positive light and gave it the Western legitimacy it so desperately craves.
I guess to use a more homely analogy is that democracy in India is like a motorcycle, but one with flat tires, broken mirrors, and a leaky gas tank. Yes it can go faster than a bicycle, but not if it is so dysfunctional that the only way to get it anywhere is to push. That said, just because the democratic system in India is suffering from systemic and fatal weaknesses doesn't mean it's ok to throw out the bay with the bath water. It simply means its time to stop pretending that everything will magically be better in the end just because some poor man can cast a vote he likely has no idea will affect and actively seek to rectify where India has gone astray.
Whoops, that above post by Kabir was actually written by me, Koschei. Butterfingers
Kabir, I get your points about weaknesses in capitalism, but do you *really* believe that China is the answer?
I think that right there is the reason why communism hasn't worked in the past.. huge blind spots and total lack of compassion for people.
What happened in China was devastating, and the Chinese government has and continues to make serious human rights violations all over.
The problem with any ideology or political method is that you can't FORCE it on people... be in democracy, communism, you name, anything with force results in unequal balances of power and leaves power vacuums for crazy dictators to make their way into power. The only way for a country to truly make change is by its own volition. Just think about the countries in the world that changed government/ideology through uprisings of the people vs. countries where outsiders or a few people took power and forced something on the population.
China has gotten better with Human rights in the recent years, but really, do you prefer to live somewhere where you would have no freedom of speech even, not even to make this analysis about your own government in a public space like this?
If something like socialism or communism were to work, it would have to be a mass movement by the people in that direction (nonviolent would be ideal)... if you look around the world, many countries are slowly starting to adopt some socialistic ideals into their system now, with the support of those people. Nobody is talking about those places because people are making the choices and hence content.
But, as I stated earlier, I don't really see any of the countries with dictators, lack of freedom of speech, religion, etc to be true socialist or communist nations-- they are facist countries with pseudo-communist leanings... it is not "by the people for the people" it is "by the rules for the rulers".
Off the top of my head, I can think of a few simple ways to improve democratic government in India.
Introduce intra-party choice by having party members vote for their own to fill election candidacies instead of being guided by the likes of Gandhi or Advani. A more meritocratic and professional party school system which allows politicians to earn experience can serve as a minimal guarantee of competancy.
Experiment with trial by jury in India. Witness the recent fiasco where a British aid worker in India was sexually assaulted by a plumber only to have her case end in a complete farce with prosecutor, perpetrator, judge laughing at and humiliating her in court. Let them try laughing when half of the individuals sitting in judgment are Indian women.
Introduce educational reforms beginning with a simple roll call to make sure teachers actually show up! Institute an incentivized pay structure with part of a teacher's salary a base and part a performance bonus based on year end parent evaluations. India being India, something will have to be figured out to prevent Indian parents (or the teachers themselves) from demanding/offering inflated grades for their children in return for higher evaluations. But I'm sure someone can think of something.
Land reform in India needs to go much further. There are simply too many landless and tenant farmers scraping by on the thinnest of margins to effectively climb up the economic ladder.
Birth rates need to be reduced in particular states with low human index. Much has been made of India's so-called demographic advantage. This is a bold faced self-serving shit into chocolate lie if ever there was one. The big population bulges are coming from demographic sectors with the lowest human capital and prospects. India is not looking forward to a young and productive work force, it is looking at a massive near unemployable population hundreds of millions strong with absolutely no skills whatsoever. This is going to worsen the socio-economic schisms in Indian society and delay the rise of wages so critical in dragging a country into a higher economic echelon. The most effective answer to this (short of forced sterilization) is greater mandatory female education and more political and social pressure brought to bear against youth marriages. Every piece of statistical evidence points to the fact that the longer women are in school, the latter their first child birth, the fewer children they have, and the better economic prospects for both themselves and their offspring.
what marx described was not a democracy, though marxists used the word in an Orwellian way (their dictatorship was a democracy to them, because it represented the will of the people.) the dictatorship would be of a small elite, the intellectual vanguard, who represented the interests of a particular social class. again, the structural flaw is who gets to decide if the elite actually represent the interests of the working class? there are no democratic institutions set up to decide this since, fist of all, the bourgeoisie is supposed to be prevented from having access to power, and secondly, the actual working class don't have a say either, because in the marxist system they too are likely to act against their interests (false consciousness). so what you have here is a predictable recipe for tyranny, and that is why virtually every communist regime has descended into police states, despite the fact that men like lenin and Mao were clearly great intellectuals who genuinely wanted to improve society.
the idea that real communism was never tried is a ruse, partially because a true communist society is impossible-- the world doesn't work the way marx described it. so what we were left with is a consequence of marx's error. since communism can't exist we're left with a permanent transitional phase, the dictatorship, which is simply a police state (justifed by clas interests) without liberal freedoms, like free speech and economic freedom. Marxists were blind to this sometimes because they themselves became corrupt, and worked to simply maintain the power strucutre that benefited them, or because they were ideologues blinded to the facts in favor of their theory...and they were often enabled by fellow travellers like Nehru, the nation mag (which denied the Ukrainian famine), and great intellectuals like Sartre et all who pushed communist propaganda, often genuinely believing it thmselves since the system is a perfect example of a closed ideology immune to criticism.
no, the original liberal thinkers advicated the greatest amont of freedom psossible in the economic sphere. they were not ideologues about it though, as they allowed for govt intervention.
you're trying to detach cpaitalism system from liberal democracy. liberal thinks like locke and smith and jefferson contextualized mlassez faire within a liberal democracy. the barrier to tyrany are the self-correcting nature of the market, the guranteed liberl freedoms, and ultimeately the possibility of govt interference, as thats allowed for in the liberal system.
this is ironically teabagger nonsense coming from an apologist of the worlds most failed and despotic regimes. the bailout and stimulus are govt intervention, neo-keynesianism, but it is not socialism. keynesianism is meant to preserve capitalism by creating a safety barrier of government intervention.
the fatal flaw with socialism is that it has no correcting mechanism to stop corruption, whereas capitalism does. in this sense. so the "corrupt, incompetent, unaccountable, blood-sucking nexus of babus and banias" were indeed real socialsits. The worlds leading left-wing economist explains why:
"...nowadays we take the triumph of capitalism as something preordained by the superiority of our economic system. After all, it now seems obvious to everyone except North Korea and Cuba that a market economy is vastly more productive than one controlled from the center - and the Cuban economy is imploding, while the North Koreans are quite literally starving to death. Moreover, every time a Communist regime collapses, it turns out that the actual state of the economy it governed was far worse than anyone had imagined. For example, typical estimates of the GDP of East Germany before the old regime collapsed put its real GDP per capita at 70 or 80 percent of the West German level - meaning that East Germany was actually richer than some regions in the West. Yet after the fall of the Berlin Wall, visiting Westerners found something that looked like a Third World economy, with antiquated factories (and disastrous environmental problems) producing consumer goods of ludicrously low quality (like the notorious East German Trabant, an automobile that makes a Honda or Ford seem like a Mercedes). We used to think that the Soviet Union had an economy about half as large as America's, that is, bigger than Japan's; nowadays Russia seems to have less economic power than, say, Italy. We used to think that there was a real technological race between socialism and capitalism; nowadays the symbol of Russian technology is the hapless Mir space station. It seems obvious to many people in retrospect that the productive and technological triumphs that Communists used to claim - all those heroic photgraphs of dams and posters of muscular steelworkers - were mere propaganda; in reality, we think we have learned, socialism is a system that just can't deliver the goods, while capitalism is a system that can."
(he goes on to add some nuance to this, that for a short period of time socialism can actually work, but in the long run even the world's most prominent leftists economist gets the fundamental truth).
china, and a handful of undemocratic capitalist regimes are bucking the fukiyama thesis. but this has happenned before. there were some fascist regimes that proved economically powerful. franco's spain comes to mind and his economic liberalisation imposed by the IMF and Opus Dei was not accompanied by political reforms and repression continued unabated. but eventually these very reforms lead to socio-economic changes in Spanish society which would make the regime’s continuation untenable. it still took more than a decade for this to happen.
i think the rising bourgeoisie in china will eventually demand political freedom to go with their economic. indeed, one could argue it's already happening because if one considers the repression, ethnic cleansing, and absolute orwellian bloodbath only comparable to the uisssr and nazi germany the chinese expericed under maoism, the current regime in comparison is practically Jeffersonian.
Fujikyama will likely be proved correct.
Manju: How about this complementary thesis to Fukiyama that those states that get political freedom (democracy) before they have any economic freedom basically became failed states with neither democracy nor economic wealth. Every state from Burma to Africa seem to corroborate this. India and Russia seem to have bucked this thesis; they have clearly suffered a lot and continue to do so, they are not failed states though.
One thing that communism does is it preserves poverty. That is it. True communism is impossible.
And what you guys have in the U.S today is a big government - big business nexus, where taxpayer’s money is transferred to big business via the government. It is as if both socialism and the free market have failed in America.
Communism will never be successful in India as Indians are too traditional to stomach something like true communism. I mean communism is anti-religion, anti-family, anti-traditional etc.... Indians will never stomach something like that with the exception of the poor tribals. But the tribals are not the majority in India.
Al beruni wrote
“I encourage others to actually read about the hostility and open racism that accompanied the creation of independent india, how the western powers assumed it would collapse and be destroyed within a few years”
I think that had less to do with our racial abilities and more to do with the fact that India is so diverse with so many castes, ethnic groups and religions who hate each other. The British felt that they were impartial outsiders and that once Indians take control themselves, they will support their own and eventually all hell will break loose. They were proven wrong of course but not completely. All those Hindu muslim riots, Hindu-Christian riots, MNS Raj Thakarey attacking North Indians, Shiv Sena attacking South Indians in the 60s and 70s in Bombay with the slogan ‘pungi bajao, lungi hatao’, Bodos wanting their own state, Khalistan movement, South Indians overcharging North Indians for speaking Hindi, Kashmir and the North Eastern states fighting for independence from India etc… does prove that they were partially right. However it was not enough to break up India. Let us not forget the Tamil issue in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the brutal Pakistani rule over Bangladesh and the eventual independence of Bangladesh, independence movements in the Chittagong Hill tracks against Bangladesh, independence movements in Baluchistan against Pakistan etc… does partially vindicate them and remember Muslim India or Pakistan did break into two. But ironically what kept India so united was that the British built a brilliant system to run the Raj, which all the Indians had to do was fine-tune further to local requirements.
"How about this complementary thesis to Fukiyama that those states that get political freedom (democracy) before they have any economic freedom basically became failed states with neither democracy nor economic wealth. Every state from Burma to Africa seem to corroborate this."
I know this question was directed an Manju but I would like to answer. There are exceptions to this, namely South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. South Korea and Taiwan became prosperous before they became democratic.There are even Saudi Arabia and the other states of the Gulf but I guess nobody considers them because they have oil. But nigeria has a lot of oil and is a democracy right now but is extremely poor.
Kabir wrote:
Kabir wrote:
Kabir wrote:
Kabir,
Surely you can find a way to disagree with Vinod without resorting to personal attacks.
I expected better from you.
Disappointed,
TTCUSM
Suresh, my question was what if democracy before there was economic freedom. South Korea Taiwan and others as you say became prosperous before, so they would not be exceptions.
Why would democratic states want to prevent a shoemaker from selling his shoes to companies down the street?
Indeed, I don't think we can lay the fault of communism and socialism at the feet of blinkered economic philosophers, there is something very ingrained, something not just in those that are simultaneously educated and poor, we can atleast understand their attraction to socialism, or in those that are greedy and feel entitled since others have ostensibly exploited them. No, there is something more ingrained, something feudal, something religious. A God, a King. Something elemental.
On second thought, it's entirely possible that it wasn't the real Kabir who wrote those posts.
These snippets sound very similar to something that Prema would write:
Plus, the real Kabir typically leaves a link to his blog in his handle.
BTW, where is Conrad Barwa?? Of all the SM commentators, he is probably the most qualified to speak on this topic...
Suresh
I hope you are not a DBD, as this comment is so off-base, it would be laughable if it were not so shockingly ignorant. Administrative and political structures have evolved enormously in the last 60 years. New states - linguistic, cultural and so on created with peoples participation. Gigantic groups which were disempowered and invisible (even in my childhood!) have emerged to demand their rightful place. Over the last 20 years, a new balance has emerged between state and federal powers.
These are huge achievements - and, yes, india does owe a debt to Britain for a legacy of constitutional rule and a reasonable administrative system. But to blow off the indian achievements (versus Iraq, pakistan and so many other ex-brit colonies) is either deep ignorance or a massive colonial inferiority complex.
Al beruni, I am not blowing off the Indian achievement at all. The skeleton of the present system Indian system is based on the British Raj administration. Never before had India been ruled in such an organised fashion. Just because I praise someone for what he deserves does not mean I am suffering for inferiority complex, indeed not being able to praise someone where it is due reeks of inferiority complex feelings. I did mention fine tuning to local conditions and I think the British would have had trouble doing that as Indians had a better idea of what local conditions were.
Anyways one of the wisest steps taken by the new administration is dividing Indian states on the basis of ethnic groups and in effect we are like the E.U., a collection of peoples. The process still continues and I hope the people of Bodoland, Telangana etc... get their own state.
" But to blow off the indian achievements (versus Iraq, pakistan and so many other ex-brit colonies) is either deep ignorance or a massive colonial inferiority complex."
I would go with V.S. Naipaul on this one. The fact is Hinduism being a more flexible ideology than Islam was better able to absorb the products of the Enlightenment in Europe which the British brought to India. After the European renaissance, India had its own renaissance led by Bengali intellectuals like Ram Mohan Roy. The fact is Islam is an excellent system to run a pre-industrial byzantine agricultural society but not very efficient to run a modern post Industrial revolution society. Hindus (including Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, Jains and some Islamic elites) being flexible, absorbed the learning’s of Europe very fast. Just released from Islamic tyranny, the Hindus took over the administration of British India with gusto. I mean except a thin sub layer of British civil servants at the top, the entire administration was run by Indians but Muslims were under-represented. That is why after the end of the British Raj, Indians did not have much of a problem running the system. But things were different in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Except a small elite, the Muslim masses remained un-modernised as Islam is quite rigid in nature compared to Hinduism (and Sikhism, Christianity, Jainism, Buddhism and the Parsi faith). Indeed with time the Pakistanis tried making the country more and more Islamic with Sharia laws and all. In India, the legal system was more or less same as that in the British Raj. As I had said before running a modern state on Islamic values is not an easy task. That explains the difference between Pakistan and Bangladesh on one hand and India and Sri Lanka on the other.
7*6,
Are you saying socialism is ingrained in man and the destruction of old socialistic institutions (which existed in feudal times) by post Industrial revolution capitalism, leads to the masses wanting to go back to similar systems?
If the "democratic process" has failed in India, which is by far the largest Democracy, for well over half a century, isn't that another way of saying that Democracy (blindly aped from the British) has failed in India? Ditto for numerous other failed third world democracies? How can one claim with a straight face that Democracy is a Universal Panacea when the great majority of the world's most abjectly poor, hungry and backward folks live under democratically elected governemnts?
that's not fukiyama's thesis. he claims societies will inevitable evolve toward liberal democracy and capitalism, as opposed to advocating the aforementioned. other systems play an intermediary role in his outlook. in this sense, ironically, he has a neo-marxist anaysis, or he calls it hegelian.
so, to answer 7*6 at 54, i don't think Fujiyama would necessarily disagree with that though i haven't heard him address it.
This is the usual hindutva deceit. Hinduism with its hereditary caste system is fundamentally opposed to the egalitarianism of the European Enlightenment.
1. And the sorry results of this imitative neo-colonial bureaucratic administration aka babudom by native hindu black/brown sahibs are there for all to see and be disgusted by. Yet you and your ilk remain inordinately proud of it!
2. Your ilk was singing the praises of the mughals, boasting of your facility with their urdu and persian language, rebelling against british rule in favor of reinstating the Mughal Emperor and so on. A few decades from now your ilk willl be boasting of your fluency in Mandarin....
India beats Pakistan in hunger, homelessness, inhumane conditions etc. First time visitors to India are shocked and horrified by the hellish living conditions of the great majority of Indians. Far more so than when they first visit Pakistan, Nepal or Sri Lanka. Yet people like you thump your chests with pride and mock these neighbours of India!
That, Suresh, proves both your ignorance of history and your servile identification with your erstwhile colonial masters. The pathetic legacy of Macaulay shamelessly lives on. Even the current Prime Minister of India praised the brits for ruling India efficiently! When the reality is that they were in India to exploit it ruthlessly and they demeaned the natives of India as racial inferiors. It is unfortunate that desis are the most spineless and sycophantic breed of humans.
What a pile of nonsense. Government intervention is the "correcting mechanism" whenever capitalism spins out of control as it inevitably does. Just look at what happened in the 1930s and what happened in 2008-9. No one trusted the market's ability to correct itself. Not even the Reaganite Republicans in the White House.....
And it is the height of deceit to pass off the selfish, corrupt nexus between babus and banias during the Nehruvian License Raj as "real socialism"!
Exactly. We should judge the success of our istitutions not by the economic measures that the rest of the world uses, but the impression that a visit to the country conveys.
If you read that carefully, I do not see a contradiction in exploiting ruthlessly, being demeaning, and ruling efficiently. In fact efficiently ruling a country is necessary to exploit it properly. So what MMS said was technically true. It may not be the complete truth, but you know, he is a politician.While I am not necessarily proud of the bureaucratic administration, I think it is vastly superior to the mughal-rajput-maratha-other-kings non-existent administration that it replaced. Vastly. It is also vastly superior to other democratic-or-otherwise governments in large parts of the world including most of Africa and the middle east. Yes, there is room for improvement. But the Indian democracy actually works fairly well. We haven't yet discovered a perfect socio-political system, and democracies everywhere have problems. Even in this country. But I think the Indian system deserves some credit for enabling, or at least not getting in the way of, enormous economic progress. Yes, we could do better. But we have done, by any reasonable objective measure, better than other states with similar talent pools in the neighbourhood, in Africa, arguably even in eastern Europe. On measures of social justice and education, social mobility, and freedom of press, while there is certianly room for improvement, we do beat the competition quite solidly. I think it is to the credit of the system set up by constituent assembly (our founding fathers, if you may), that they set up a system (by imitating or otherwise) that produced remarkable results inspite of the corrupt/incompetent/both politicians and bureaucrats.
The real irony here, that escapes your comprehension, is that Keynesianism proposes a socialist medicine to rescue capitalism. What else would you call a government jobs program if not socialism?
BTW, long before the teabagging idiots of today, the rabid capitalist ideologues during the Great Depression were calling Keynes and FDR "socialists".
i would call it a mixed economy, the most leftist tranche of the free-market ideology. its still within the free market camp, since it recognizes the fundamental flaw of a central economy--as the quotes i provided you from Keynes most famous modern day disciple demonstrates, but just one that recognizes occaisional inefficiencies and limits of laissez faire (which itself, at least in most incarnations, recognizes a role of government). they are no more socialist than bush is a fascist, to give you some "teabagger" nonsense that we often saw during the last admin.
at least back thn there were real socialists looking to get into power. so one can forgive them for being vigilent. whats your excuse?
This is shameless deceit and dishonesty. Or pathological self-delusion. India is poor even by third world standards. It leads the world in hunger, in unsanitary conditions, in child slavery etc and yet you claim with a straight face that it has achieved "enormous economic progress" and is "solidly" beating the competition (including eastern europe!)!
Take a look at the Human Development Index. India ranks #134. Well below every east european country. Every region of the world, including Africa, has countries ranked much higher than India.
By any rational and humane definition India should be ranked among the Failed States.
OK, it's pretty obvious now that Kabir is actually Prema.
lock up the kimchi
Prema wrote:
If you're interested, Foreign Policy has published the Failed States Index for 2009.
India is ranked #87, well below Pakistan (#10) and Burma (#13). It's even below China (#57).
What a load of illogical BS. How can a "mixed" economy that recognizes the intrinsic limitations and dangers of unregulated markets and corrects for it/supplants it through government actions be considered "within the free market camp"??
The very word "mixed" identifies such an economy as a mixture of both capitalism and socialism. Every developed nation in the world has a mixed economy. Most of the successful nations of the world are more socialist than America and many of them rank higher than America in the Human Development Index.
easy, the same way one can put limits on democracy but still be considered democratic. keynes recognized the fundamental superiority of capitalism, as does krugman above, so his govt interference is placed within those limits. most wealthy nations are similarly economically free...ie fundamentally market economies with various degrees of interference allowed.
india and china are two nations who have recognized the fundamental flaw of socialism. had they stayed on that route they most likely would've become failed states.
There is nothing rational or humane about this Index. It is obscene to rank India which is home to the world's largest concentration of starving women and children, millions of whom die every year from malnutrition, better than China which has done a FAR better job feeding, housing and educating its citizens. Even subsaharan Africa does a better job than India in feeding its children despite the occasional famine.
It is the selfihness, cruelty and callousness so deeply ingrained in the casteist culture of India that makes folks like you ignore the misery around you and claim that India is a "shining", "incredible" success story. Grow a spine and a heart.
For everyone who doesn't like kool aid, please read the discussion on the other thread for historical, political, economic, methodological, and other context on the topic of how-neoliberal-capitalism-saves-babies. Or google "Ha Joon Chang."
That said, it is enteraining to witness the irony of seeing the argument that an Indian elite clung to an out-dated ideology for too long from someone making an argument for free-market fundamentalism. Remember the old joke: when someone points to a $100 bill lying on the street, the economist doesn't pick it up because "it's not there- if it were market forces would have removed it."
for the record, fukiyama is a not a free market fundamentalist and i don't see vinod making that case here, where he is, as you point out, really making the case against fundamentalism of the communist and nehruvian socialism type. some even think he's(fukiyamam not vinod) is a Marxist, of sort...as he's associated with the nebulous philosophy of leo straus ,Allen bloom, and Kojeve...who have been accused of many things, but certainly not fundamentalism. bloom, who i'm most familiar with, had nothing but disdain for ayn rand.
fukiyama also voted for barack obama, a well known fascsit.
http://www.thecommonwealth.org/news/215304/281009washingtonconsensus.htm
Neo-liberal Washington Consensus ‘is now dead’
The global financial crisis has finally put paid to the ‘Washington Consensus’, the neo-liberal economic doctrine long adopted by international institutions, donors and developing countries, two acclaimed United Nations experts claimed at the Commonwealth Secretariat last week............“There is no doubt in my mind that the Washington Consensus - as it was conceived with privatisation, liberalisation, de-regulation, free-trade all over the place - is now dead,” said Professor Emmerij, addressing an audience of academics, policy-makers.............He added: “There is always a danger that things will come back, but [the Washington Consensus] will never come back in its strong and pure form. The role of the state has been firmly re-established through the crisis in all countries.”.............Neo-liberal economic policies pursued under the Washington Consensus have proven damaging for developing countries, noted Sir Richard: “I think the consensus ought to be discredited after the catastrophic events of the last two years, not merely financially but in terms of economics, in terms of the impact on developing countries.”
what does that have to do with the fukiyama thesis?
Manju o zen master how do you be so never irritated.
Interesting that the same debate is currently playing out again within the capitalist believers - between the rational-actor camp and the people-are-crazy-mfers camp. That is a finer grained distinction though, as you pointed out.
More importantly, yeah capitalism has pretty much proved to be the most efficient form of maximizing output, but the distribution of this output is still a pretty thorny issue. You're kidding yourself if you think workers have put the pitchforks away. Both India and China have pretty serious concerns about unrest among the poorest classes.
Btw, not really fair to involve healthcare in the US in this particular debate. For one, it is already run on a very top down approach - it's more a change within the system than a new system (unless the public option goes through). Second, even in a hypothetical world where we started with true free market insurance, it's not clear that it would lead to good social outcomes. The incentives don't really line up very well. Healthcare is always going to require heavy scrutiny and regulation - some element of top-down-ness is required imo.
Kabir wrote,
‘This is the usual hindutva deceit. Hinduism with its hereditary caste system is fundamentally opposed to the egalitarianism of the European Enlightenment.’
You have got me wrong, yes the caste system is elitist and anti-enlightenment but Hindu society has change a lot since the time of Ram Mohan Roy. Sati has disappeared, the caste system has weakened though has not disappeared, child marriage has disappeared, Kulin marriages among Brahmins has disappeared etc… Unlike Muslims Hindus do not wish to go back to a medieval system like Sharia.
Kabir wrote,
‘And the sorry results of this imitative neo-colonial bureaucratic administration aka babudom by native hindu black/brown sahibs are there for all to see and be disgusted by. Yet you and your ilk remain inordinately proud of it!’
After the years of brutality and rape face by the Hindus for centuries of Islamic rule, British rule was a sanctuary of sanity and peace. And there was a lot of racism against brown Indians under Islamic rule. Many of the Islamic rulers were fair skinned foreigners like Persians or Turks. The language of official business and the elites was Persian which is a foreign language. When Ibn Buttata came to India he found that the new Islamic masters did not trust Indian Muslims and reserved some of the most important jobs for any non-Indian muslim.
Kabir wrote,
‘India beats Pakistan in hunger, homelessness, inhumane conditions etc. First time visitors to India are shocked and horrified by the hellish living conditions of the great majority of Indians.’
I am not denying that India has more poverty but over all India is considered a more well run nation. India never faced military coups like Pakistan or Bangladesh. The government institutions have worked reasonably well. Overall India is considered a stable and successful nation by the rest of the world. Pakistan is considered a failed state by many today.
Kabir wrote,
"That, Suresh, proves both your ignorance of history and your servile identification with your erstwhile colonial masters."
The British obviously did much less damage to India than what the Islamic invaders did. Islam is Arab imperialism, where the conquered is utterly brainwashed to consider a foreign religion his holy language and a foreign place his holy land. Indians do not shamelessly bow down to the Big Ben five times a day. Bowing down five times a day to a foreign monument does strange things to the enslaved person's mind.
"Even subsaharan Africa does a better job than India in feeding its children despite the occasional famine."
India has a population bigger than all of Africa placed inside a country slightly bigger than Sudan. One look at a world map will show you how tiny the Indian subcontinent is compared to Africa, indeed Africa is ten times bigger than India with a much smaller population and much more productive land. We have to deal with a much much higher population density than Africans have to. India's agricultural achievements are way ahead of sub-Saharan Africa in general. India is the largest producer in the world of milk, cashew nuts, coconuts, tea, ginger, turmeric and black pepper. It also has the world's largest cattle population (281 million).It is the second largest producer of wheat, rice, sugar, groundnut and inland fish (info from Wikipedia).
I wasn't talking about Fukuyama - I was talking about Vinod. And he draws a link between India's plannign policies and the completely dissimilar health care bill, which, in a general sense, places him well within the group that opposes all government action. I would hate to see what he made of single-payer health care, which is practically self-evident by any economic or commonsense measure. It's one thing to say - the market does some things well (e.g. eliminating unsuccessful companies) - it's quite another to say that every single thing that every single person ever does should be done under the guise of a market context.
It's more the popular use of the phrase.
Washington Consensus
There Is No Alternative
New World Order
Dustbin of history (a particularly assholish one)
These are all part and parcel of a similar range of thinking about capitalism and american geopolitical position. They come together in the themes of supreme arrogance, blindness to both the nature of american capitalism past and present, the past and present of previous core states that moved into the finance capital export phase and then eventually declined while some other state rose to become a manufacturing hub, and the utter, utter, shortsightedness with which the politics of the 1990s and 2000s were conducted by the American elite.
The only question is how knowingly it was done - whether it was a CLASS based move to secure a new consumer base - or whether it was simple stupidity and shortsightedness. Meaning, did not investing in infrastructure so that resources are not devoted to levee and bridge maintenance and isntead relying on BPOs signal that the American capitalist class was ready to just cut ties, so to speak, with the rest of the U.S., or did it signal some complete and total failure of humility and comprehending reality that continues to this day in the Obama Democratic Party.
That's just from the standpoint of trying to understand the American elite. For the rest of us - as Gorbachev said, America needs its own perestroika. More than that would be nice.
This webpost from OpenLeft which I saw on the same day as Vinod's lays bare the inadequacies behind the kind of thinking that celebrates the kinds of ideas I described in the last comment. It details the secular trend of the rise of China and the decline of the United States over the past decade. I don't like the potential China bashing implications, but it is worth looking at the easy to read charts.
#57,Suresh wrote:
However it was not enough to break up India. Let us not forget the Tamil issue in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the brutal Pakistani rule over Bangladesh and the eventual independence of Bangladesh, independence movements in the Chittagong Hill tracks against Bangladesh, independence movements in Baluchistan against Pakistan etc… does partially vindicate them and remember Muslim India or Pakistan did break into two. But ironically what kept India so united was that the British built a brilliant system to run the Raj, which all the Indians had to do was fine-tune further to local requirements.
This is a serious misconception that most Indian elites have (including perhaps the PM). The British did not come to civilize us or to build up our system. That was a result of their need to exploit India economically. Agreed, that they were less of religious fundamentalists than the previous Muslim rulers, but is that enough for India to be indebted to the British?
This is extremely silly view of looking at things. India was just lucky that the institutions that the brits created gave the next generation of Indian rulers the tools to make it into a surviving sub-continent sized nation. If Indians should be indebted, then they should be indebted to the countless patriotic freedom fighters.
Ofcourse there were a few Indo-phile Brits (A.O. Hume) etc who might have had a long-term interest of India in mind, but then I am sure there were Muslim rulers as well (Akbar).
Suresh,
You must be new to SM.
For the record, "Kabir" is actually Prema, a longtime SM commentator who has an unshakable hatred of anything related to India.
You won't get anywhere arguing with her (ie, please don't feed the troll).
My last comment on this thread:
Kabir wrote:
Here are some findings from the International Food Policy Research Institute:
"Of the ten countries with the highest levels of hunger on the GHI, nine are in Sub-Saharan Africa. None of the Sub-Saharan African countries is amongst the ten most improved since 1990. "
"In Sierra Leone and Angola, more than one-fourth of all children die before the age of five, with child mortality rates of 27 and 26 percent, respectively, the highest of all GHI ranked countries. "
Thnaks for the info TTCUSM
I wonder if we can re-center the discussion, away from the crazies but also from the US framework - specifically -
1) what policies should Nehru have followed immediately after independence?
- keep in mind that when brits left, even match boxes were imported from britain. For the last 100 years of
"enlightened" brit rule, india had an economic growth rate of 0.75%. And, yes, the brits werent nazis, the constitutional
and other administrative models they evolved have been useful to the indian state.
2) What were some of the other transition points to move away from babudom/license raj before the 80s?
- given the cold war, and US hostility towards india's independent foreign policy, which peaked in the early 70s
(bangladesh war, wherein the US supported mass murder of bangladeshis by Paki army) how could this have
happened?
"The British did not come to civilize us or to build up our system. That was a result of their need to exploit India economically. Agreed, that they were less of religious fundamentalists than the previous Muslim rulers, but is that enough for India to be indebted to the British? "
I never denied that there were economic incentives to rule India but the Brits did have a civilizing mission. They found India an ancient civilization in a state of decay and stuck in the medieval age while Europe was moving forward with new ideas. I guess the British just wanted to play 'Romans'. If I were a British gentleman Governer who only wanted to fleece India why would I bother with stopping Sati or increasing the marriagable age for girls after incidents of injury of teenage girls during sex. Why would I care for those brown native girls? Why would I bother setting up experimrntal dairy farms like the Imperial Dairy Farm at Bangalore where research was conducted to increase milk production by Indian farmers? Why would I bother (at times against bitter religious opposition), setting up partial sewage system and water pipe-lines into Indian cities? Why would I bother setting up Hospitals and send English doctors to villages? Nor would I care about the exploitation of the lower castes. Why should I? I say just loot and leave. Why set up schools and universities? There are many such cases which escape me now. But if they never had a civilising mission, all this would not have taken place.
I wonder if we can re-center the discussion, away from the crazies
So sad that this discussion has been derailed by the self-hating, ignoramus Prema, DISGUISED as Kabir...I mean isn't that against the comment codes? SM Intern, can those comments from Kabir/Prema be deleted?
I was enjoying the comments, some of you guys have some excellent arguments, and have a great background on economics and history of South Asia as well as other countries; But now it is derailed b/c of a crazie. Suresh best to ignore the Kimchi-chomping Prema/Kabir, who has to come disguised as yet another commentator.
I'd interested to read how India's caste system has affected it's move towards liberalization in a way that China's hasn't?
Does the caste system hamper the creation of a real meritocracy?
I don't know what there is to learn from China. China has its "caste system" too, only their dominant groups simply exterminated all the other groups in what was probably the most brutal nation-building process in history. RJ Rummel supplies the narrative:
Needless to say, Kabir/Prema's narrative of China doing a"FAR better job feeding, housing and educating its citizens" than India is completely ahistorical. I suppose, India could try ot follow China model, and since both countries are already liberalizing economically, that would mean India should just exterminate its Muslim population, any language groups that prove problematic to a unified Indian Identity, and while we're at it might as well get rid of poverty by killing all the Dalits and OBCs.
So much for the chinese model.
nm
The short answer, is, yes, the caste system has hampered the creation of a meritocracy in india. I think your comparison with china is a poor one, as china hasn't hesitated to use extreme violence to crush traditional values and dissent. Any comparison with china would require us to take into account the 10s of million dead chinese in the last 50 years. In fact, this brutality towards their own people raises a very serious question about how china will deal with its neighbors and others. A person who beats their children regularly will also be violent in other interactions.
A better comparison for india would be societies like Malaysia and Indonesia. Both are multi-ethnic societies with some problems, but I think both have created a more egalitarian setup with less extreme poverty because of a lack of a indian-style caste system.
Al Beruni:
Thanks for that answer, but how will India ever get rid of it's caste system? And are there cases of Dalits or untouchables who have moved into the middle-classes in present day India?
Africa has been mentioned above, but in regards to the issue of malnutrition and since I am from there, I will offer my perspective on the issue of food security in Africa. Much of Africa has yet to achieve food security and the reduced deaths from hunger have largely been the result of massive food aid infusions from the World Food Program (it has not come from increased agricultural productivity on that continent). Kenya is currently experiencing a drought and almost 30% of the country is facing serious starvation issues (without food aid, the situation would have spiraled out of control).
Back to India: I have always wondered how Indian democracy has managed to survive in the face of such poverty and inequality. My experiences in Africa have shown me that in many instances, democracy (which is largely reduced to voting) does not create stability unless it's accompanied by economic changes in the poverty numbers.
So, for example, Kenya has "democracy" in the sense that people can vote & we have a free press, but the high poverty rates mean that it can descend (at any minute) into a bowl of violence and even civil war. Democracy has not brought the rule of law or even produced a fairer, more equitable society. In this respect, it has been a failure.
Yoga Fire:
Well, given that America now has it's first black president, I would say that they have come a long way in terms of addressing their race problems. It began with the civil rights movement in the sixties, then they introduced civil rights laws to protect minorities and so on and so forth.
And I wouldn't say that Americans have deep cultural restrictions about who they can marry or date or anything like that. Meaning, over time, they have become more open and less racial.
Throw in someone like Oprah who grew up black and poor in the deep south, but was still able to rise above her circumstances and become a success.
nm
There are literally millions of dalits who are part of the middle-class; they also a good representation at the highest level of politics. But relative to their overall numbers this is still quite a small percentage. Also, they tend to be mostly at the lower-levels of the middle-class and with many poor relatives outside the middle-class.
In the villages and countryside, their continues to be harsh discrimination against them, refusal to allow education to their children and access to shared resources and so on. Laws have been passed to outlaw discrimination but they are poorly enforced, especially in the countryside when the land is usually owned by non-dalits and these people also control the police force.
India and African countries such as Kenya or Nigeria do have a lot of similarities. And, yes, some of what you are describing Kenya is common in india, especially in the more backward northern part of the country.
Al Beruni:
Assuming they are free public schools in India (funded by the government) - who would stop a Dalit child from attending such a school?
What exactly differentiates different castes? are the customs different? is the language different? what?
Also, would you say that the creation of the state of Pakistan was the best thing that happened to India in terms of keeping it from descending into civil war? i.e. It created a country where 80% of the population were Hindu's and it would be crazy for the Muslims (who remained) to think that they could fight such a large majority?
Africa's civil wars are largely created because very few countries have such a large homogeneous group. So, you end up with continuous inter-tribal warfare because you do not have a super-majority that can overwhelm any threats from a minority group.
There are a few stray thoughts I can come up with, which are somewhat complementary: if he were interested in a socialist path to industrialisation he should have promoted much stronger land reform and collective rights for the poor in the country rather than violently suppressing movements in that direction; he should have appreciated the congress party's/india's political structure and realised that it was going to be impossible to sustain the license raj without a stronger and more autonomous state because the subsidies being granted would become monopoly rents through the political process (i.e. no one could ever take them away, leading to no stick and all carrot cake); he should have understood that other people would come along who refused to acknowledge that india had a structural break in gdp (i.e. accelerated its industrialisation) in 1950 that was larger than the one in 1980, and that those people would besmirch his name, not understand the valuable function that economic nationalism and non alignment played and continues to in strictly economic terms, etc.
however, most of this is pie in the sky - one person doesn't make history - even someone with as much power as nehru had in 1950.
i think the biggest failure of nehru was his role in contributing to Partition rather than being a bit more farsighted (even a confederal arrangement might have at least allowed a slow glide to three separate states - which is what the cabinet mission plan entailed).
his second biggest mistake was helping to turn kashmir into a perpetual war zone and flashpoint.
his second third biggest mistake was inadequate succession planning and institution building.
but with all of these, you'd have to research if that would be possible. and there are broader questions that are more important - like is industrialisation worth it, or was gandhi right?
1965/1966 would have been one maybe, when the Congress system (and planning, and productivity growth) collapsed. However, these things don't happen over night. what you can say is that the trajectory, which included several wars with pakistan, a war with china, several famines, resort to food aid from the united states and forced devaluation that was politically untenable, state repression in 1971 during the emergency and at other times, infighting among the elite that spilled over, and the development of Indira Gandhi as a very shortsighted leader might have played out differently.
but then, most people's image of 'babudom' is associated with the post 1960s license raj anyway. all the ideas about stagnation and perpetual inability to solve anything and black money are generated in the 1965-1980 period. very few people look at things like the culture of a steel mill in chattisgarh and how it reduced caste-based economic and social inequalities (compared to the private sector) through an ideology of equality - jonathan parry has written about this in 'two cheers for reservation.' or for that matter, that the 1980s 'take off' couldn't happen without the capacities that were built on the basis of the plannign period.
anyway, i feel unmoored in this discussion so don't take this comment to heart too much - just random stream of consciousness.
What people usually talk about when referring to social issues is caste (jati). An individual caste is a "lineage group," somewhat analogous to a "clan" or "tribe" in other societies. There are differences in norms, customs, interpretations on religious beliefs, and so on that can range from subtle to extreme. Some might be patrilineal and others matrilineal even though they live in the same village, for example.
It is an idea rooted in specifics of Indian history. Indian society was (and is) made up of migrants and the integration of numerous tribes around the subcontinent under a larger religious/cultural identity. The system that came up was a way of maintaining a lot of that diversity of customs that came with wave after wave after wave of migration over the past several thousand years while still being able to interact and trade with each other without fighting too often. Every time another big group of people moved in it was like splashing on yet another splotch of paint onto a Jackson Pollock. All the shapes and colors work together, but they were also distinct in themselves, and the end result ends up being a mind-blowingly complicated and unGodly mess. These individual jatis get roughly mapped onto some slot among the varnas, but historically there were always instances of various castes moving up and down the prestige chain as well as moving into and out of different lines of work.
A few hundred years in the modern world, though, and a lot of the differences slowly melt away. Some of them went away by fiat. A matrilineal clan, for example, could no longer be matrilineal since the British administration allowed descent and property to be passed down the paternal line only. Other stuff changed just because it wasn't relevant anymore as the economy became more commercialized and later on industrialized. People still hold the last names and the knowledge of lines of descent and there are still some vagaries as to what specific variations of myths and stories they tell and what kinds of jobs they do. For the most part though, the only real difference at this point is the money and contacts people have.
Some priestly families also start teaching kids the Vedas at a very young age, which makes sense because that kind of huge info-dump only really works when your mind is young and malleable. But for the most part people do whatever job they can get. My family never thought me how to raise crops and the only martial skills I have are from Brazilian jiu-jitsu. So much for my half-vaishya/half-kshatriya parentage. The discrimination is pretty much just people using whatever leverage they can to get goddies for themselves while beggaring their neighbors.
Suresh, #97
Probably as a gentleman, you want to attribute higher motive to what you are doing. Maybe guilt.
My point is not to criticize what was done. What was done in the past was in the past and I do not want to indulge in lynching the dead. But, atleast be clear on the history and not build false hagiographies.
@nm "Assuming they are free public schools in India (funded by the government) - who would stop a Dalit child from attending such a school?"
nm, many people.... Having lived in Bihar for a time, where the caste system is still very deeply entrenched, and mix that with poverty for most people (regardless of caste) and there are many situations were just trying to help a Dalit child can be dangerous to your life-- the place I volunteered at had two well-qualified Indian women teachers come from outside the area to teach the Dalit children, and they were brutually attacked and raped to drive them away-- upper caste people in that area do NOT want the dalits to get an education-- because the small level of power they hold over them is tenuious and could easily disapear with a little education-- they don't want to have to compete with jobs, and also lose the uneducated poverty-sticken dalits who make up their work force in the fields.
Bihar is an extreme, of course, and does not represent all of India, but there are certainly cases all over the country were Dalit children have not been allowed into school- govt school or not-- to make sure education is available in all communites for all people, the police force and school faculty would have to strongly believe in allowed ALL children in the school, otherwise pressure from locals to keep Dalits away from school can easily suceed.
When desegregation of scholls occurred in the U.S. the police force and military had to be employed to protect the children and allow them in the schools.
Things may be bad have been getting progressively better since independence,so even people in poverty have a stake in the country.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India Poverty wise the post liberalization phase has been a golden age, with huge decreases. The problem is the growth may not be enough to meet the new aspirations of the people.
A caste in India is basically a community. India has a first past the post electoral system, so that further increases the power of communities. There are limited economic resources there are strong incentives for communities to undercut each other. That said communities do change, and dissolve and as communities die out, the caste system weakens. Of course, if pure self interest takes over instead, what replaces the caste system will probably be worse.
Immediately after independence? Russian roulette for himself instead of Russian economic policies for India :-).Yoga Fire:
But in India where you have people who can identify by non-mutually exclusive categories like language, caste, class, religion, political ideology, and so on, what you end up with are a whole bunch of groups who are too small to dominate.
If the main cause of sectarian violence in India is religion (i.e. the Hindu/Muslim divide) wouldn't you say that Hindu's as a group represent this large dominant group?
So, if I look at the bloody riots in Gujarat against Muslims, was the violence perpetrated by one caste of Hindu's living in that state or did various Hindu groups (regardless of caste) band together to commit the violence?
milieu
"But, atleast be clear on the history and not build false hagiographies."
What I said was neither false neither a hagiography. It is just a balanced look. And besides history is very subjective and is prone to propaganda.