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1 Making Sense of Twenty-First-Century India

       1.1 Introduction

      Early in 2019, the London Financial Times announced, ‘The Asian Century is set to begin’ (Romei and Reed 2019). The grounds on which this pronouncement was based were that whereas in 2000 the Asian economies, all combined, accounted for just one-third of world output, according to calculations based on purchasing power parity (PPP – the method of comparing the currencies of different countries that takes account of differences in standards of living), it was projected that by 2020 they would account for more than half of world output. Among Asian countries, by 2017 China had by far the biggest economy, the biggest in the world according to PPP comparisons, or second to the United States measured in terms of exchange values. According to the first set of calculations (PPP), by 2017 India had the third largest economy in the world, though that of China was two-and-a-half times as big; in terms of the ranking of the gross national income of countries at exchange values, India had only the seventh largest economy in the world and it was only one-fifth as big as that of China, though it was only a little smaller than the economies of the UK and of France – and set to overtake both of them (see tables 1.1 and 1.2).

      Looked at historically, however, the world in the twenty-first century is returning to the way it was before the ‘great divergence’ that took place from the later eighteenth century. From about that time, or rather before according to some calculations, the Western European economies that had until then lagged behind the major Asian economies, took off, and their peoples became, on average, very much wealthier than people elsewhere in the world. In the eighteenth century the Indian share of the world economy is reckoned to have been as big as Europe’s. With China, India accounted for a very large share of the world’s manufactured products. But in the nineteenth century, thanks to European imperialism, ‘Asia was transformed from the world’s manufacturing centre into classic underdeveloped economies exporting agricultural commodities’, in the words of the economic historian, R. C. Allen (cited by Romei and Reed 2019).

      Table 1.1 Gross National Income (current US$) of Leading Countries, 2017

      SOURCE: World Bank, World Development Indicators

Table 1.2 Gross National Income (PPP$) of Leading Countries, 2017

      SOURCE: World Bank, World Development Indicators

      India was for long seen as perhaps the archetypal poor developing country, of very little account in the global economy. Latterly, even if it has not experienced quite such a dramatic economic transformation as has China in the last decade or so of the twentieth century and the first twenty years of the present one, India clearly has become a major economic power. According to the World Development Indicators of the World Bank, the average annual growth of GDP in China between 2000 and 2017 was 9.7 per cent, and that of India was 7.5 per cent – both rates much higher than those of comparator countries such as Brazil (2.9 per cent) or Indonesia (5.5 per cent). The average annual growth of GDP in the United States over this period, according to the same data set, was 1.7 per cent, that of the UK 1.5 per cent. In a delicious twist of history, an Indian company, Tata, has become the biggest employer of manufacturing workers in Britain, the former colonial power that ruled over the country for a century and a half. The Forbes magazine annual listing of billionaires across the world showed that in 2018 India had 131 of them, the third largest number, behind only the United States and China. There is no doubt that India, with China, will be at the heart of the Asian century.

In other ways, too, a country that was for a long time more or less a backwater in international affairs has thrust itself upon the world’s attention, as a state with nuclear weapons, and a very big spender on military equipment. In March 2019 Reuters reported, ‘Modi hails India as military space power after anti-satellite missile test’ (27 March 2019). The country had entered what was called ‘an elite space club’, with the United States, Russia and China, having successfully blown up a satellite in Low Earth Orbit. The Reuters headline reflected, as well, that India’s prime minister since 2014, Narendra Modi, had won global recognition, far surpassing the leaders of most other countries. But at the same time some other aspects of contemporary India were being recognized in the international media. On those dollar billionaires, an analysis produced by the NGO Oxfam showed, ‘Wealth of 9 richest Indians equivalent to bottom 50% of the country’ (NDTV, 21 January 2019). Aljazeera reported, ‘Seven of the world’s worst polluted cities are in India, a new study has revealed’ (5 March 2019). The Washington Post had the headline, ‘India’s railroads had 63,000 job openings. 19 million people applied’ (4 January 2019). An article in the New York Times, about an attack by upper-caste men on a Dalit (the name referring to India’s lowest castes, those who used to be called ‘untouchable’) was titled, ‘“Tell everyone we scalped you!” How caste still rules in India’ (17 November 2018). In July 2018 BBC News reported on, ‘How WhatsApp helped turn an Indian village into a lynch mob’ (19 July 2018), and a day later The Guardian carried an article, ‘Mobs are killing Muslims in India. Why is no one stopping them?’ On the other hand, a writer for the highly respected Christian Science Monitor wrote an article, ‘Global decline in democracy? The lesson from India may be “Not so fast’” (16 March 2018).

These

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