India’s Democracy at 70: Growth, inequality, and nationalism

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 28, Issue 3, 2017, Pages 41-51

  Varshney, Ashutosh ^a  

^a BROWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85026260660     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: 10863214     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.2017.0043     Document Type: Note

References (19)

1. This is based on the global list of billionaires published annually by Forbes magazine. India has been known to trade fourth and fifth position on this roster with Germany, depending on stock-market conditions.
2. 2.M.V.Rajeev Gowda and E.Sridharan, “Reforming India’s Party Financing and Election Expenditure Laws,” Election Law Journal11 (June2012): 226–40.
3. Unless otherwise noted, this section contains arguments and data from my book Battles Half Won: India’s Improbable Democracy (Gurgaon: Penguin, 2014), 278–311. Data not contained there, but mentioned here, are from the World Bank and IMF statistical tables and the Indian government’s own Economic Surveys.
4. PaulBairoch, “International Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980,” Journal of European Economic History 11 (Fall 1982): 296, Table 10. See also PrasannanParthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
5. B.R.Tomlinson, The Economy of Modern India, 1860–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 5, Table 1.2.
6. This period includes the growth deceleration during the last two years of the most recent Congress-led government, from 2012 to 2014.
7. In 2015, China’s GDP, which in nominal terms was second only to that of the United States, was five times bigger than India’s, and in real (Purchasing Power Parity) terms, two and a half times bigger.
8. There are exceptions. The seaboard states of West Bengal and Odisha struggle while landlocked Delhi and Haryana thrive.
9. Economic Survey 2016-17, ch. 10, http://indiabudget.nic.in/e_survey.asp.
10. AshutoshVarshney, Democracy, Development, and the Countryside: Urban–Rural Struggles in India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), ch. 2.
11. Economic Survey 2016–17, 300.
12. There is debate about whether the numbers from the 1980s or 1990s can be compared with those from 2011 and2012. Technical issues aside, however, it is plain that India still has mass poverty. China has attacked poverty far more effectively with not only higher, but more labor-intensive, growth. India’s slower growth, by contrast, has relied more on capital and skills than on the unskilled labor of the masses.
13. In 1951, after nearly two centuries of British rule, India’s literacy rate was a paltry 18 percent. The 74 percent literacy rate reached by 2011 is a more than fourfold increase, but many would argue that it could have been substantially higher. A number of societies that were as poor as India in 1951—China and South Korea among them—achieved nearly universal literacy over this period. See Census of India 2011: Provisional Population Totals, Paper 1 of 2011 (India: Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner), ch. 6,http://censusindia.gov.in/2011-prov-results/prov_results_paper1_india.html.
14. JeanDreze and AmartyaSen, An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
15. 15.YogendraYadav, “Understanding the Second Democratic Upsurge: Trends of Bahujan Participation in Electoral Politics in the 1990s,” in Francine R. Frankel et al., eds.,Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000).
16. “Reserve Bank of India Annual Report, 2015–16,” 89, https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/AnnualReport/PDFs/0RBIAR2016CD93589EC2C4467793892C79FD05555D.PDF. Those holding the banned currency notes were given till December 30 to exchange them for newer notes, which however could not be printed in sufficient quantity and had to be rationed.
17. 17.KennethRogoff, “India’s Cash Bonfire Is Too Much, Too Soon,” Financial Times, 92016, www.ft.com/content/59c3e922-bd72-11e6-8b45-b8b81dd5d080.
18. Economic Survey 2016–17, 2.
19. How the two can be joined, and how elite politics and mass politics can be driven by different impulses, I discuss in more detail in my 2014 book Battles Half Won, ch. 10 see note 3