Imagine a country that is deeply caste ridden, whose politicians are venal, whose middle class is caught in its own narcissism, whose state is not entirely averse to targeting minority groups, whose privileged are quite comfortable with exploitative labour, whose state does not deliver even minimal basic services, whose economists are so besotted with growth that they don’t see how limited it is, whose educational base is narrow and whose public morality does not embody values of modernity. Could such country ever sustain growth? If you are to believe Dipankar Gupta's provocative and loosely opinionated book the answer is an obvious: NO! Dipankar tells this story with a combination of anecdote, and selectively used statistics, in a way that get you to wonder, not just whether this growth is sustainable, but how India survives, if at all.
Of course one could complicate the story by imagining an alternative. Imagine a country where there is a functioning democracy, where there is social conflict but not deep enough to shake the centre, where there is violence, but enough resources and self-corrective mechanisms to stop it from being destructive, where the state had failed to provide quality education, but the sheer force of demand amongst the poorest of the poor is forcing change, where an aspirational revolution has been unleashed, where there are tremendous reservoirs of entrepreneurship at all levels, where change is never revolutionary but always real, where reference to a constitutional culture, however haltingly, is becoming a norm, where caste has moved from the encrustations of purity and pollution to an assertive demand for equality. Would this state have a chance of succeeding? I suspect the answer is closer to YES!
The difficulty is that material for both these narratives can be taken from Dipankar’s own work, even in this very book. When Dipankar is chronicling actual social change, as a traditional sociologist, he is at his best. His account for instance of the changing aspirations in rural India, of the way in which caste has changed, the impact of migration on identity, the importance of urban life, is spot on. But there is also the Dipankar, more interested in the quick jeremiad about middle class values (a middle class that is so self-flagellating about its imperfections must have a degree of moral awareness; that itself is a source of great hope), about kicking dead horses like culturally over determined explanations of India, more interested in using sociological facts to puncture philosophical pretension. The result is heady and not entirely without fun; at least it makes you think.
Part of the difficulty of assessing the grim story presented in these pages is that the argument lacks the rigor of historical perspective. It does not have a theory of growth at all. This may not be a fair demand (even economists don’t have one). But at least there needs to be an argument for the mechanism by which the ills of Indian society will impede growth. Dipankar is wonderful at rejecting culturalist explanations; instead he prefers sociological ones. But there is very little evidence in the book of why the supposed sociological infirmities (as appalling as they are in intrinsic terms) are necessarily an impediment to growth. They have been around for a long time, and were standard explanations for the Hindu rate of growth. So what changed in the last decade?
Dipankar’s argument is crucially ambiguous on the descriptive side. For at one level he seems to be arguing that nothing changed except one thing called IT, and that was both fortuitous and limited in its reach. So called claims about the growth of the consumer market, the expansion of the middle class are all illusory, India has in fact been in something of a static equilibrium. I find this argument unpersuasive, not least because of the evidence in Gupta’s own book (on the rise of non-farm incomes for instance). The other more nuanced argument would be that there have been far reaching changes but these are not yet inclusive enough.
But the second scenario still leaves open the question whether a reverse causality might operate. Far from the sociological ills impeding growth, you could argue that the only way to attack those ills is through growth that opens up new spaces for contestation. Dipankar laments the fact that Indian middle classes are not even minimally inclined to a welfare state. But the blunt truth is that it is only revenues generated by growth that will make a welfare state possible; and the astonishing expansion of government largesse we saw in the last five years is evidence of that fact. The book is a good cautionary tale, even if the arguments are bit all over the place. But in the end it underestimates the profound changes underway.
The reviewer is President & Chief Executive, Centre for Policy Research
THE CAGED PHOENIX: CAN INDIA FLY?
Dipankar Gupta
Penguin
Pages 322
Rs 550
