Why India will never be China

Or will it?

May 30, 2022

Dear Friends,

A few years ago, I wrote a piece predicting that despite Indian Prime Minster, Narendra Modi’s efforts, India was simply not suited to authoritarianism. That debate and contestation were existential for it.

Ultimately, I argued, despite its seductive visions of discipline and infrastructure, the “China model” would only have limited cache in India because it did not present robust solutions for managing dissent and diversity. Beijing’s propensity to ignore or criminalize dissenting opinions left China with a question mark over its political future, one that India for all its surface anarchy no longer has.

I came to this conclusion in 2018. Four years later, my words about China stand. However, it increasingly looks like I was overly optimistic about India.

Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi Photo credit

Please read this piece, reproduced below, and let me know your thoughts. In Europe, India is praised for its ostensibly being the anti-China; for its democracy and diversity. There is little awareness about the steady erosions - especially of the latter, that have taken place since Mr. Modi came to power 8 years ago.

For those who harbour these illusions, consider these facts:

In the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index that looks at civil liberties, pluralism, political culture, and participation, India’s global rank has fallen from 27th in 2014 to 46th in 2021.

Freedom House rates political and civil freedoms for 162 countries. On its scale, India’s rating fell from 94th in 2019 to 111th in 2020. Classified as “free” in 2014, India is now classified as “partly free.”

It seems to me, dear reader, that we are at a historical juncture where the battle is on between Mr Modi and the idea of India as plural, secular and argumentative.

Let me know your thoughts here:

WHY INDIA WILL NEVER BE CHINA

Large-scale corruption, environmental degradation, yawning inequalities, food contamination scandals and historical revisionism in school textbooks: this could be a laundry list of the challenges faced by twenty first century China under the rule of its authoritarian Communist Party. Or, it could be an accurate summary of twenty first century India celebrating its 70th year of secular, democratic politics.

When looked at with India-habituated lenses, China’s pathologies, so often ascribed to its one party rule, become less about political system than the contradictions and trade-offs that result from populous, poor nations undergoing fundamental transitions.

This is not to argue that China and India are Himalayan birds of a feather. They might both be large, transitional Asian economies, but they are markedly divergent in temperament and culture, as well as on contemporary parameters of economic development and geo-strategic heft.

They have an uncomfortable relationship with each other. India, with its urban slums and overwhelmed infrastructure, is China’s go-to cautionary tale about what could go wrong were it to abandon its authoritarian, paternalistic mores. India views China with a confused mixture of pride and prejudice. It wants to both be China and not-China: a six lane highway-filled, manufacturing powerhouse that is praised for its political openness and liked for its yoga.

As it struggles to spread its fledgling twenty first century-wings in the shadow of its northern neighbour’s ascent, India is arguably more influenced by Beijing at this moment than ever before in its modern history. China lurks below the surface of the nation’s dreams and nightmares. It creeps into imaginings of what India might be and what it should be. It informs debates about values. It shapes considerations of how to act in the world. It is bogeyman and siren. It warns against military complacency. It whispers seductively that to get rich is glorious.

Part of the explanation for China’s current influence on India rests on the shoulders of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who swept to power in 2014 with a reputation - cultivated over a twelve year stint as Chief Minister of the western state of Gujarat – as a China-style economic reformer. As Chief Minister, Mr Modi visited the Chinese mainland on four occasions. He returned each time with a bad case of SEZ-envy.

Mr Modi went on to attract investments in large manufacturing and power projects in Gujarat, introducing business-friendly measures aimed at cutting red tape and making land acquisition easier. He borrowed liberally from Chinese initiatives like instituting a “single window” system to fast track government approvals. Under him, Gujarat enjoyed double-digit economic growth.

Since graduating to Prime Minister, Mr Modi has shown his natural inclination is to centralize power in his office. His ideal is an India of bullet trains and disciplined citizens bursting with an officially sanctioned version of national pride. But first he must deal with the real India, in all its plurality and truculence.

Will he be successful? To reframe the question: having spent much of the last twenty years playing catch up with China what will India look like twenty years from now? Will it grow up to be China 2.0?

The difficulty is answering this question partly stems from the fact that we don’t know what China will look like in 20 years time. Will it have imploded, having failed to fix its myriad political and economic contradictions? Will it be a world power, dominating space, oceans and global trade? Or will it be somewhere between these extremes: a “moderately prosperous,” regional power?

Tea leaf reading is not a rigorous science, but it’s fair to guess that regardless of China’s eventual evolution, in the short-to-medium future India is going to increasingly resemble China. That is until it realizes why in the longer term it can only be itself.

By having successfully recast its economy, China provides a ready made model, one that Beijing itself lacked when embarking on its own experiments with reform and opening up. For many of India’s middle classes this is a model to embrace because it is relevant, and because it has delivered results. They want their cities to be transformed into glittering nouveau-Shanghais, rather than New Yorks or Londons, because Shanghai is close, it is tantalizingly within grasp.

A survey on the state of democracy conducted by the Observer Research Institute in India, revealed a majority of those polled (over 53%) believed a strong leadership that delivered the economic goods was more important than a democratically elected one.[1]

Over the next few years India will beat China in every race to the bottom, from over population to air pollution, which will help make the case for those impatient with democratic niceties. Current estimates have India, with a landmass less than a third of China’s, nosing ahead as the world’s most populous country by 2024. Although demographic dividend-cheerleaders believe this labour-abundant trend to be in India’s favour, India has so far been unable to prove that it can educate and employ its young at anything near the levels needed. India’s per capita GDP is less than half of China’s.

The Chinese Communist Party might not be a monolith but it has an easier time devising and implementing policies to deal with large, complex challenges than India, where the line between the democratic and the populist is a fine one. Consequently, Beijing tends to deliver on its promises more than democratically elected Indian governments.

Political legitimacy in India is derived from process, while performance is more important for the CCP. In India, the process of getting elected provides governments with their authority. In other words the means (of getting elected) become more important than the end (such as the delivery of public goods, and economic growth).

In post-Mao China on the other hand, the legitimacy of the CCP is tied to its ability to serve up economic growth and shore up international clout. Authoritarianism has allowed the ends to justify the means. The result is support for the kind of ‘strong’ leadership indicated by the surveys mentioned.

***

If wishes were horses, India’s beggars might still not ride, but its middle class/upper caste urbanites would certainly be galloping along butter-smooth highways imported straight from their China-fantasies. However, wishes remain hoofless, and India is not China, something that Mr Modi and other would-be Indian autocrats including the Congress Party’s Indira Gandhi inevitably discovered.

To project forward, it helps to first look back. Independent India’s sole brush with the suspension of the democratic process was a 21-month period from 1975 to 1977 when then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency. It was a period when trains ran on time, labour strikes ceased, petty crime declined and beggars were removed from the streets. Many amongst the upper and middle-classes cheered believing it to have been proved that what India needed to function well was a dictator.

Riding high on this tide of boosterism Mrs Gandhi called an election. She found herself booted out of office by the legions of poor for whom the suspension of their vote had taken away their only power. Materially deprived, illiterate and malnourished they might have been, but their vote had stood between them and forcible sterilizations and the demolishing of their slum homes. It was the poor, not the middle-classes, who really needed democracy, a fact that remains true today and in the foreseeable future.

As Prime Minister, Mr Modi has not had the kind of untrammeled reform successes he did in Gujarat. He has had to compromise in dealing with powerful constituencies that have genuine, contesting political power from state Chief Ministers to organised labour. He has had to contend with institutional checks like the Supreme Court.

Despite his large majority in parliament Mr Modi has been unable to push through some of his most-cherished legislation, like the land acquisition bill. He has lost local elections in Delhi and Bihar, and he will lose others in the future. He needs to find accommodation with regional coalition partners with different agendas to his. He needs to win Muslim votes (Muslims make up 14 percent of the population) and those of the lower castes (25 percent of the population). He needs farmers as much as industrialists. India’s urban, Hindu, upper castes do not speak for India, because India never has and likely, never will, speak with one voice.

India is simply not suited to authoritarianism. Debate and contestation are existential for it. Historically India has been a civilizational rather than territorial entity, more metaphysical than geographic. It is a nation held together not by language (the constitution lists 22 official languages), religion or geography, but by an idea. Multiplicity is foundational to this idea. It is what has allowed India to persist and flourish as a political unit, despite the once widespread belief in the West that an independent India would inevitably balkanize.

India’s crowning political achievement has been the development of institutional mechanisms for negotiating large-scale diversity and accommodating frequent, aggressive disagreements. Arguably, this political achievement is as much deserving of awe as China’s economic miracle. It might be less shiny and more chaotic, but it is, in its own way, quite spectacular.

It is also what will eventually keep India from submission to the China-model even at the cost of slower, more uneven, growth. Modern India emerged out of a freedom movement and freedom is valued, especially by the poor. Voter turnout amongst the rural poor is markedly higher than amongst the urban middle-classes.

The freedoms many among the poor use their vote to protect -to have children without restriction, or to sleep on footpaths when they have no where else to go-may not always be congruent with a rational analysis of what is in India’s long-term interests. Change in India will therefore limp, stagger and trot rather than sprint and leap in China fashion. But there will be change, and the bulk of the transformations to come will emerge not because of diktats from above, but as a result of organic social shifts from below.

Unlike China, India wears its weaknesses on its sleeves. But although this may make it appear fragile, at core it is resilient, able to withstand major external and internal shock without fears of implosion. The coming collapse of India has not been up for serious discussion in decades.

Ultimately, despite its seductive visions of discipline and infrastructure, the China model will only have limited cache in India because it does not present robust solutions for managing dissent and diversity. Beijing’s propensity to ignore or criminalize dissenting opinions leaves China with a question mark over its political future, one that India for all its surface anarchy no longer has.

So, dear friends, this has been an unusuallay long post. I promise to terun to some fun global travel next week - tracking Komodo dragons in eastern Indonesia. But before that, don’t forget to comment, subscribe and share this post.

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