Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- PART I DEMOCRACY AND GLOBALIZATION
- PART II INDIA AND THE WORLD
- 11 Jakotra Village, Santalpur Taluka: Debating Globalization
- 12 India at Fifty and the Road Ahead
- 13 The Indian Economy: Take-off and Strategic Policy Issues
- 14 Has Poverty Declined in India?
- 15 Infant Mortality and the Anti-Female Bias
- 16 Labour Laws and the Role of Contracts
- 17 The Reform of Small Things
- 18 Is India's e-Economy for Real?
- 19 India's Trade Policy and the WTO
- 20 The Coming Textile Turmoil
- PART III SOCIAL NORMS AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
- PART IV PERSONS
- PART V ON THE ROAD, AROUND THE WORLD
- Index
12 - India at Fifty and the Road Ahead
from PART II - INDIA AND THE WORLD
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- PART I DEMOCRACY AND GLOBALIZATION
- PART II INDIA AND THE WORLD
- 11 Jakotra Village, Santalpur Taluka: Debating Globalization
- 12 India at Fifty and the Road Ahead
- 13 The Indian Economy: Take-off and Strategic Policy Issues
- 14 Has Poverty Declined in India?
- 15 Infant Mortality and the Anti-Female Bias
- 16 Labour Laws and the Role of Contracts
- 17 The Reform of Small Things
- 18 Is India's e-Economy for Real?
- 19 India's Trade Policy and the WTO
- 20 The Coming Textile Turmoil
- PART III SOCIAL NORMS AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
- PART IV PERSONS
- PART V ON THE ROAD, AROUND THE WORLD
- Index
Summary
To the saying ‘Behind every great man there is a woman’, Groucho Marx famously added, ‘And close behind her is his wife.’ Much is to be learnt by looking beyond what meets the eye. In trying to understand India's predicament we often look only for the proximate causes—corruption, squabbling politicians, rhetoric sans action. But fifty years of Independence is a good time to go behind these immediate factors to take stock of how we have come to be where we are.
India was born of an astonishing intellectual legacy. It had the good fortune of immense inputs from statesmanship and scholarly intelligence over its formation. This gave us our democratic tradition and commitment to higher education. But it also became the source of economic ambivalence. India's economic system emerged from an uneasy compromise between Mahatma Gandhi's objective of a village-based economy and Jawaharlal Nehru's faith in the welfare state and heavy industry. Nehru confided to his diary in 1933 his growing alienation from Gandhi's ideology: ‘I am afraid I am drifting further and further away from him mentally. His continual reference to God irritates me […]. What a tremendous contrast to the dialectics of Lenin & Co.’ By the time India became independent in 1947, Nehru was disillusioned by Lenin's method, but he still believed in planning and heavy industry.
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- Information
- The Retreat of Democracy and Other Itinerant Essays on Globalization, Economics, and India , pp. 97 - 104Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2010