Over the last two decades or so, the two most populous large countries in the world. China and India, have been growing at rates considerably higher than the world average. In recent years the growth rate of the national product of China has been about three times, and that of India approximately two times, that of the world average. This has led to a clever defence of globalization by a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Fisher 2003). Although China and India feature as only two among some 150 countries for which data are available, he reminds us that together they account for the majority of the poor in the world. This means that even if the rich and the poor countries of the world are not converging in terms of per capita income, the well above world average rate of growth of these two large countries implies that the current phase of globalization is reducing global inequality and poverty at a rate like never before.

Statistical half truths can be more misleading at times than untruths. And this might be one of them, insofar as the experiences of ordinary Indians contradict such statistical artefacts. Since citizens in India can reasonably freely express their views at least at the time of elections, their electoral verdicts on the regime of high growth should be indicative. They have invariably been negative. Not only did the ‘shining India’ image crash badly in the last general election, even the present prime minister, widely presented as the ‘guru’ of India's economic liberalization in the media, could never personally win an election in his life.