It’s the politics, stupid; or, is it?
From Sunil Khilnani’s “Why India is at a crossroads,” published today at the BBC website:
For India’s founders, political freedom was their great prize.
Yet decades on, what that freedom has delivered measures up poorly for many.
For India’s business elites eager to compete with China, for the middle classes fed up with corruption, for radicalisant intellectuals, for desperate citizens who have taken up arms against the state - democracy in India is a story of unravelling illusions.
Democratic politics itself has come to be seen as impeding the decisive action needed to expand economic possibilities.
First, the “India a crossroads” metaphor is getting a little old, is it not? The country’s supposedly been at a crossroads for generations now. But second, the problem of so-called democratic politics in India is not that decisive action can’t be made to expand economic possibilities. It’s that the expansion of economic possibilities for a small fraction of the population remains too much at the heart of all political decision-making. India is not too democratic. It’s not democratic enough.
