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By Root 1228 0

put in place by the British over two hundred years ago. In many other parts of Asia and in Africa, the British were a relatively temporary presence. They were in India for centuries. They saw it as the jewel in their imperial crown and built lasting institutions of government throughout the country—courts, universities, administrative agencies. But perhaps even more importantly, India got very lucky with the vehicle of its independence, the Congress Party, and its first generation of post-independence leaders, who nurtured the best traditions of the British and drew on older Indian customs to reinforce them. Men like Jawaharlal Nehru may not have gotten their economics right, but they understood political freedom and how to secure it.

The fact that a political and institutional framework already exists is an important strength for India. Of course, pervasive corruption and political patronage have corroded many of these institutions, in some cases to the point of making them unrecognizable. India has a remarkably modern administrative structure—in theory. It has courts, bureaucracies, and agencies with the right makeup, mandate, and independence—in theory. But whatever the abuses of power, this basic structure brings tremendous advantages. India has not had to invent an independent central bank; it already had one. It will not need to create independent courts; it can simply clean up the ones it has. And some of India’s agencies, like its national Election Commission, are already honest, efficient, and widely respected.

If the Indian state has succeeded on some dimensions, however, it has failed on many others. In the 1950s and 1960s, India tried to modernize by creating a “mixed” economic model between capitalism and communism. The product was a shackled and overregulated private sector and a massively inefficient and corrupt public sector. The results were poor, and in the 1970s, as India became more socialist, they became disastrous. In 1960, India’s per capita GDP was higher than China’s and 70 percent that of South Korea; today, it is just a quarter of China’s. South Korea’s is sixteen times larger.

Perhaps most depressing is India’s score on the United Nations Human Development Index, which gauges countries not just by income but by health, literacy, and other such measures as well. India ranks 119 out of 169 countries—behind Syria, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and the Dominican Republic. Female literacy is a shockingly low 48 percent. Despite mountains of rhetoric about helping the poor, India’s government has done little for them, even when compared with the governments of many other poor countries. It has made too few investments in human beings—in their health and education—and when budgeted, the money has rarely been well spent. In the 1980s, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi estimated that, of every ten rupees that was supposed to be spent on the poor, just one actually got to the person in need.

Can these problems be blamed on democracy? Not entirely. Bad policies and administration produce failure whether pursued by dictators or by democrats. Still, certain aspects of democracy can prove problematic, especially in a country with rampant poverty, feudalism, and illiteracy. Democracy in India too often means not the will of the majority but the will of organized minorities—landowners, powerful castes, rich farmers, government unions, local thugs. (At one point, nearly a fifth of the members of the Indian parliament stood accused of crimes, including embezzlement, rape, and murder.) These organized minorities are richer than most of their countrymen, and they plunder the state’s coffers to stay that way. India’s Communist Party, for example, campaigns not for economic growth to benefit the very poor but rather to maintain the relatively privileged conditions of unionized workers and party apparatchiks. In fact, India’s left-wing is largely opposed to the policies that have finally reduced mass poverty. In all this ideological and political posturing, the interests of the 800 million Indians who earn less than two dollars