Back in the 1980s Kremlinology was still a thing. Spies and academics watched obsessively for indirect signs about what was actually going on within the Soviet hierarchy. Two places to the left in the parade line atop Lenin’s tomb could mean nothing; or it could mean an extended vacation to Siberia.
The 21st-century equivalent is Beijingology. How will the Chinese manage the transition to a consumer-driven economy? What are their real intentions in the South China Sea? Are Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaigns real reform or just old-fashioned political bloodletting? The complete lack of transparency in Chinese politics turns these critical geopolitical and economic questions into a cottage industry. In the political theatre of the Chinese state, the real action is going on behind the curtain, so we still need seers to read the tea leaves.
Contrast that opacity with India, another society going through a radical multi-decade transformation, yet a country where there’s no curtain to speak of. Compared to China, Indian civil society is improvised ‘theatre in the round’. A country where the chaos, excitement and pain of far-reaching structural change is dissected, debated and addressed through democratic processes, an aggressively free press, and an independent judiciary.
The demographics alone are staggering. India’s population will pass China’s at some point in the mid-2020s, and will likely peak at around 1.65 billion in the middle of this century. Just like China, India is also urbanising, with the city population of 350 million expected to double by the early 2020s. India is also one of the world’s youngest countries, with a median age of 27 versus nearly 40 in the UK. With 300 million kids currently under 15, the 2020s will see around a million Indians turn 18 every month. Rather than being burdened by a growing geriatric bulge and a shrinking working-age population, India is poised to reap a demographic dividend that could drive sustained economic growth. This growth will lead to an explosion in the Indian middle class, defined as households with an income of $10 to $100 per day, who have the money to move from subsistence to consumption. Currently only 60 million Indians meet this criterion, but by 2030 the OECD predicts the middle class will have ballooned to well over 500 million.
Beyond the demographics there is much to admire about modern India. It’s already the world’s third-largest economy and quality of life has improved dramatically in the 70 years since independence. Infant mortality has plummeted, and life expectancy has more than doubled to 66 years, which puts some of the health issues in the east end of Glasgow into perspective. There’s also the ambition to fast forward and become a technological leader.
Despite only 50% of households having a toilet (for which there are cultural as well as plumbing reasons), 80% have a mobile phone and the national biometric ID scheme recently passed one billion registered citizens. The benefits of this technological infrastructure are already being felt through reduced benefits fraud and hundreds of millions of new bank accounts being opened. Yet the most admirable thing about India is that we are still able to describe it using the lazy journalistic tag-line of ‘the world’s largest democracy’. Apart from a brief period of emergency rule under Indira Gandhi in the 1970s, India has resisted the allure of authoritarianism. Unlike China, India has let the Brownian motion of local, state and national elections shape its path, and its democratic tradition has proved to be surprisingly resilient.
India is a country stretching towards the first world on many dimensions, but like Wile E Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons, there’s a long piece of elastic tying India to the rock of its past. Despite its forward progress, that elastic is always in danger of snapping backwards if India can’t break free of it. In a country as multi-faceted as India, it’s sometimes difficult to separate the signal from the noise; and if you’ve ever been to Mumbai or Delhi, you’ll know that it’s indeed very noisy. But there are three principal tensions, the resolution of which over the coming decades will determine whether India crosses to safety as an economically developed and truly modern society.
The first is the dark side of India’s demographic dividend. Prior to the relaxation of state controls in the early 1990s, India’s managed economy chugged along at 3% growth. Released from petty bureaucracy, the economy surged forward at close to 10% for the next 20 years. Just like China, growth has now slowed to a more measured 6 to 7%, but the challenge for India is that its demography creates a need for around 10 million net new jobs every year. That demand now threatens to coincide with decreasing supply as the gains from nearly 30 years of labour arbitrage with the West begin to disappear. The call centre and basic IT support jobs that built the huge office parks of Mumbai and Bangalore are increasingly being automated, and unlike China where 30% of the economy is manufacturing, India is predominantly an agricultural and service economy.
To sustain its economic growth, India will need to create a higher skilled workforce, yet Indian education is shockingly bad. The elite colleges of the ITT system are among some of the best in the world, but the gap to the rest is precipitous. Almost all elementary aged kids are enrolled in school, but by the age of 10 only 60% can complete work at the level of a five-year-old, and more than half can’t subtract.
The economic gains of the last 30 years have also not been evenly spread. Just like the developed world, India has experienced rising income inequality. The difference in India is that the bottom is still very low, with a quarter of the population living at or below the starvation income of $1.25 per day and 30% of kids under five are clinically malnourished.
In the northern city of Ajmer only 130 of 125,000 homes are connected to the sewage system and a quarter of the people in the world who live without access to power are in rural India. In a country dominated by railways, the economic locomotive of India has decoupled itself from the cars carrying the vast majority of the population and disappeared behind the walls that protect the gated communities of the Indian elites.
As the swell of Indian youth peaks in the next 15 years, the economy may feel the pain of deindustrialisation as low-skill offshore service jobs evaporate. And as we all know, disillusioned youths without jobs can be a recipe for social unrest, and rising anti-immigrant feeling makes the traditional release valve of sending them to wait tables in Glasgow or become software engineers in Silicon Valley increasingly difficult.
The second tension stalking modern India is its ability to shed centuries of cultural tradition and embrace true equality. The creators of the modern Indian state had aspirations similar to those of the American founding fathers in the 18th century. The audacious 1950 Indian constitution promised social, economic, and political justice based on equality of status and opportunity. Yet DNA is still destiny for most Indians. Even now, the traditional caste system shapes not only education and economic opportunity but also politics, with local and state level affiliations often rigidly caste- based. Attempts to equalise opportunity through affirmative action have often backfired.
Delhi’s water system was recently held to ransom by a relatively privileged caste of land-owning peasants called Jats, who were agitating to be included in India’s list of ‘backward classes’ in order to access guaranteed university places and government jobs. The caste system and the stratified society that it creates is also self-perpetuating, as love rarely overcomes tradition, and only 5% of Indians marry outside their caste.
You also see the weight of tradition when you look at gender equality. The advent of sonograms and the rise in elective abortions that followed has created the world’s most skewed gender mix outside of China, with 1.13 male births for every female. Gender equality problems also extend well beyond the crib, with a recent uptick in honour killings of woman who transgress traditional boundaries and well-reported incidents like the horrific gang rape and murder of an educated woman in Delhi in 2012 who was dragged off a bus in broad daylight.
Just as in many other parts of the world, the third factor that threatens to undermine India’s future is religious intolerance. Founded as a secular democracy that promised liberty of thought, belief and faith, India has long endured bouts of religious violence. The original partition of the sub-continent into predominantly Muslim Pakistan and majority Hindu India is thought to have left a million dead. In 1984 prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards as revenge for the army’s assault on the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
The more troubling recent trend in Indian politics has been the rise of Hindu nationalism. In current prime minister Narendra Modi, India has a leader who is the low-born son of a tea wallah and who made his name as a Hindu militant. Despite his red carpet state visit last year, Modi was banned from the US for many years because of his failure to stop a Muslim pogrom that killed 1,000 in the state of Gujarat when he was its first minister. With the Hindu nationalist BJP winning a majority in the 2014 national election, the fear is that the vision of a multi-faith multi-cultural society is being replaced by a country in which non-Hindus are unwelcome.
One example is the government’s recent push to have all children pledge loyalty to the Hindu-inspired ‘Mother India’ figure each morning, which conflates nationalism with religion and in doing so marginalises the Sikh, Muslim and Christian minorities that make up 20% of the population. It also doesn’t help when a junior minister who talks about non-Hindus being ‘bastards’ and a home secretary who speculates about a Hindu-inspired national beef ban get to keep their jobs.
The principal stakeholders in resolving these tensions are the Indians themselves. But beyond having someone on the end of the phone who can fix your laptop, the rest of the world also has a material stake in India’s future. India’s public life can be messy and is often corrupt, but its resilience and pluralism sends a signal to developing countries in Africa and Asia that economic progress and democracy are not mutually exclusive. The next 20 years will continue to be a challenging transitional period for India, and the waters might get choppy, but that’s exactly the reason why Europe and the US need to engage and support what continues to be a bold and inspiring experiment in large-scale nation building.
By Alan McIntyre | 27 April 2016
