In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India - Hardcover

Luce, Edward

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385514743 ISBN 13: 9780385514743

Publisher: Doubleday, 2007

Synopsis

India remains a mystery to many Americans, even as it is poised to become the world’s third largest economy within a generation, outstripping Japan. It will surpass China in population by 2032 and will have more English speakers than the United States by 2050. In In Spite of the Gods, Edward Luce, a journalist who covered India for many years, makes brilliant sense of India and its rise to global power. Already a number-one bestseller in India, his book is sure to be acknowledged for years as the definitive introduction to modern India.

In Spite of the Gods illuminates a land of many contradictions. The booming tech sector we read so much about in the West, Luce points out, employs no more than one million of India’s 1.1 billion people. Only 35 million people, in fact, have formal enough jobs to pay taxes, while three-quarters of the country lives in extreme deprivation in India’s 600,000 villages. Yet amid all these extremes exists the world’s largest experiment in representative democracy—and a largely successful one, despite bureaucracies riddled with horrifying corruption.

Luce shows that India is an economic rival to the U.S. in an entirely different sense than China is. There is nothing in India like the manufacturing capacity of China, despite the huge potential labor force. An inept system of public education leaves most Indians illiterate and unskilled. Yet at the other extreme, the middle class produces ten times as many engineering students a year as the United States. Notwithstanding its future as a major competitor in a globalized economy, American. leaders have been encouraging India’s rise, even welcoming it into the nuclear energy club, hoping to balance China’s influence in Asia.

Above all, In Spite of the Gods is an enlightening study of the forces shaping India as it tries to balance the stubborn traditions of the past with an unevenly modernizing present. Deeply informed by scholarship and history, leavened by humor and rich in anecdote, it shows that India has huge opportunities as well as tremendous challenges that make the future “hers to lose.”

About this title

About the Author

EDWARD LUCE is the Washington bureau chief for the Financial Times. He was the paper’s South Asia bureau chief, based in New Delhi, between 2001 and 2006. From 1999–2000, Luce worked in the Clinton administration as the speechwriter to Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Educated at Oxford and married into an Indian family, Luce now lives in Washington, D.C.

Reviews

Edward Luce, a keenly observant British journalist who headed the Financial Times's bureau in New Delhi at the cusp of the new century, ventures an answer in this insightful and engaging book. His sharp-witted prose brings today's India to life with insight and irreverence. ("If Gandhi had not been cremated," Luce writes, "he would be turning in his grave.") Luce's writing is richly evocative of place and mood, and In Spite of the Gods sparkles with the kind of telling detail that illuminates an anecdote and lifts it above mere reportage. Almost the only thing not worth admiring in this book is its awful title, which suggests a nation struggling against the heavens -- a thesis that has nothing to do with Luce's sophisticated and sympathetic narrative.

Advised early on that in India it is not enough to meet the "right people," Luce travels throughout the country meeting the "wrong people" as well. He explores economic development from the ground up while never losing sight of the big picture (a "modern and booming service sector in a sea of indifferent farmland"); he punctures the myths surrounding India's IT explosion (which he correctly argues will not solve India's fundamental employment problems because it employs only about 1 million of the country's 1.1 billion people); and he depicts the continuing allure of the secure and corruption-laden "government job." Few foreigners have written with as much understanding of the skills and limitations of India's senior government bureaucrats -- of their idealism and inefficiency, of the vested interests that impede growth and progress -- and Luce also captures the extraordinary triumphs of India despite these obstacles.

On my frequent visits home, I discover that India is anything but the unchanging land of cliche. The country is in the grips of dramatic transformations that amount to little short of a revolution -- in politics, economics, society and culture. In politics, the single-party governance of India's early decades has given way to an era of multiparty coalitions. In economics, India has leapt from protectionism to liberalization, albeit with the hesitancy of governments looking over their electoral shoulders. In caste and social relations, India has witnessed convulsive changes. And yet all this change and ferment, which would have rent a lesser country asunder, have been managed through an accommodative and pluralist democracy. Luce tells this story remarkably well.

There is, for instance, a gently sympathetic portrait of Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born leader of the ruling Congress Party, for whom "the political is very personal." Luce, who is married to an Indian, clearly admires much of India's culture, such as its remarkable novelists, musicians and film-makers: "If world trade were to be conducted purely in cultural products," he writes, "then India would have a thumping annual surplus." He suggests an answer to the famous question of why so few of India's 140 million Muslims, unlike their neighbors in Pakistan, have joined jihadist groups: because of "the political system under which they live," which guarantees them "freedom of speech, expression, worship, and movement."

But Luce is a far from uncritical admirer. He is unsparing on the corruption that infests Indian politics and society, on the ersatz Westernization that has seen sonograms used to facilitate the abortion of female fetuses by parents wanting sons, on the "unimpressive politicians" who run India's "impressive democracy."

Still, no one speaks seriously anymore of the dangers of disintegration that, for years, India was said to be facing. Luce demonstrates that, for all its flaws, India's democratic experiment has worked. The country has seen linguistic clashes, inter-religious riots and sputtering separatism, but democracy has helped to defuse each of these. Even the explosive potential of caste division has been channeled through the ballot box. Most strikingly, the power of electoral numbers has given high office to the lowest of India's low. Who could have imagined that, after 3,000 years of caste discrimination, an "Untouchable" woman would become chief minister of India's most populous state? Yet that has happened twice and looks likely to happen again this year when the northern state of Uttar Pradesh goes to the polls. In 2004, India witnessed an event unprecedented in human history: A nation of more than 1 billion people, after the planet's largest exercise ever in free elections, saw a Catholic political leader (Sonia Gandhi) make way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as prime minister by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam) -- in a country that is 81 percent Hindu.

Luce is right to list the many problems the country faces: the poor quality of much of its political leadership, the rampant corruption, the criminalization of politics (more than 100 of the 552 members of Parliament's lower house have charges pending against them). The situation in Kashmir festers, provoking periodic crises with Pakistan and leading to fears (mostly exaggerated) of nuclear war on the subcontinent. Luce summarizes these issues crisply and cogently. But I'd like to have read a little more about the strengths of India's vibrant civil society: nongovernmental organizations actively defending human rights, promoting environmentalism, fighting injustice. The country's press is free, lively, irreverent, disdainful of sacred cows. India is the only country in the English-speaking world where the print media are expanding rather than contracting, even as the country supports the world's largest number of all-news TV channels. Disappointingly, Luce tells us nothing of this.

But these are cavils. Luce clearly loves the country he writes about -- an essential attribute for a book like this -- but he is tough-minded as well, and his judgment is invariably sound. "In India," a colleague once told Luce, "things are never as good or as bad as they seem." If you want to understand how that might be, read his wonderful book.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

A burgeoning economic and geopolitical giant, India has the 21st century stamped on it more visibly than any other nation after China and the U.S. It's been an expanding force since at least 1991, explains journalist Luce, when India let go of much of the protectionist apparatus devised under Nehru after independence in 1947 from Britain, as part of a philosophy of swadeshi (or self-reliance) that's still relevant in India's multiparty democracy. From his vantage as the (now former) Financial Times's South Asia bureau chief, Luce illuminates the drastically lopsided features of a nuclear power still burdened by mass poverty and illiteracy, which he links in part to government control of the economy, an overwhelmingly rural landscape, and deep-seated institutional corruption. While describing religion's complex role in Indian society, Luce emphasizes an extremely heterogeneous country with a growing consumerist culture, a geographically uneven labor force and an enduring caste system. This lively account includes a sharp assessment of U.S. promotion of India as a countervailing force to China in a three-power "triangular dance," and generally sets a high standard for breadth, clarity and discernment in wrestling with the global implications of New India. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Reporting from India in recent years for the British newspaper Financial Times, Luce distills from his experiences this assessment of the country's social, economic, and international situation. Against the theme of India's anticipated ascent into the top tier of world powers, Luce sorts through facts of life that both promote and hinder that future, namely, its booming economy and the deep destitution of most of its people. Built on interviews with people from the top of politics and business to those from society's bottom rungs, Luce's presentation covers the breadth of India's billion-plus populace and its experience of economic improvement. Progress is spotty, however, and in addition to widespread poverty, it is hampered by pervasive corruption. As for caste and ethnic communalism, Luce's observations encompass both their continuing influence as social identifiers and their erosion under the forces of consumerism and relative upward mobility. Luce will accessibly acquaint readers interested in India with the country's salient contemporary aspects, from Bollywood to nuclear weapons. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1. GLOBAL AND MEDIEVAL
India’s Schizophrenic Economy


Its stupendous population consists of farm laborers. India is one vast farm—one almost interminable stretch of fields with mud fences between. Think of the above facts: and consider what an incredible aggregate of poverty they place before you.
— Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897 (1)


It took a long time. But finally in the late 1990s India started to build roads that could get you from A to B at something better than a canter. Until then, India’s most significant highway was the Grand Trunk Road that bisects the country from north to south. Laid at various stages by the late medieval Mughal dynasty, then upgraded and extended by the British in the nineteenth century and popularized by Rudyard Kipling in his novel Kim, most of the “GT Road,” as it is known, got acquainted with asphalt only after independence. But it is a single lane and one can rarely exceed an average of thirty miles an hour. So the relative novelty of India’s double–lane expressways still generates a buzz. By 2006, India had all but completed the 3,000-mile “Golden Quadrilateral” expressway linking the country’s four largest cities: Delhi to Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay) to Chennai (formerly known as Madras) to Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta) (*) to Delhi. Average speeds on the better stretches are closer to sixty miles an hour.

For some, the expressways have heralded a modern era of speed, punctuality, and hygienic roadside bathrooms. For others, they represent a brash intrusion on the more lackadaisical world they cut through. To me, the new expressways provide an intriguing juxtaposition of India’s multispeed economics. Curiosity—and an instinct of self-preservation—means I occasionally move into the slow lane. One of the best ways of observing India’s galloping new economy is to count the number of car brands that whir past you in the fast lane. You tend to lose count at thirty or forty. In the early 1990s, as India was starting to relax import and investment restrictions on foreign manufacturers, you would at best have counted six or seven makes of car. More than 90 percent of them would have been Ambassadors, the stately but desperately uncomfortable colonial–era vehicles that are still used by VIPs, and Marutis, the cramped family passenger car, still manufactured under a joint venture between Suzuki of Japan and the Indian government. Nowadays you have little time to register the tinted and reflector windows of the Toyotas, Fiats, Hondas, Tatas, Fords, Volkswagens, and Mercedes–Benz, as they flash past.

But your speed is never quite what it should be. Coming far too frequently from the opposite direction, but on your side of the road, you encounter decrepit scooters, bicycles, and even camel–drawn carts, whose drivers appear blissfully unfazed by the fact that they are breaking all known rules of traffic and common sense. Once or twice, on the two–hundred–mile Delhi expressway to Jaipur, a city in the neighboring state of Rajasthan, my journey has been brought to a halt by a herd of goats. Even without the local fauna, the absence of lane discipline means you are mostly on the edge of your seat.

But it is at the side of the expressways in the glaring billboards advertising cell phones, iPods, and holiday villas and the shiny gas stations with their air–conditioned mini–supermarkets that India’s schizophrenic economy reveals itself. Behind them, around them, and beyond them is the unending vista of rural India, of yoked bullocks plowing the fields in the same manner they have for three thousand years and the primitive brick kilns that dot the endless patchwork of fields of rice, wheat, pulse, and oilseed. There are growing pockets of rural India that are mechanizing and becoming more prosperous. But they are still islands. It is in this almost continuous contrast that you observe the two most striking features of India’s early–twenty–first–century economy: its modern and booming service sector in a sea of indifferent farmland. It would be tempting, as you cruise happily toward your destination with a reasonable chance of being on time, to believe these features are from different worlds. Along the way, you might also glimpse an occasional factory and an assembly plant or two for vehicles or washing machines. But evidence of manufacturing in India is far thinner on the ground than it is in neighboring China.


* * *


By the time of independence, Nehru had already helped to forge a consensus in which the country would aim for complete economic self–sufficiency and the state would lead the effort by building up heavy industry, with an emphasis on steel plants and large dams. It has become fashionable since 1991 to write off Nehru as a hopeless idealist who tied the country up in socialist red tape for forty years. Much of the criticism is fair,(*) since India failed to achieve the high economic growth rates that were seen at the time in Japan and later in South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Malaysia. But in the late 1940s and 1950s Nehru’s economic strategy was perfectly in step with worldwide economic fashion. It came with the blessings of a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, which advised New Delhi on the country's early five–year development plans. India was also advised by Gosplan, the Soviet Union’s economic planning agency.

The idea, which combined India’s critique of the imperial economic system with a widespread global distrust of free trade following the disasters that had resulted in Europe and elsewhere during the “hungry thirties,” was to give the state a primary role in an economy aiming for self–reliance, or swadeshi—the second most important rallying cry of India’s freedom movement after swaraj, or self–rule. Of great importance in kick–starting this model were a series of large projects that stimulated further economic activity—much as the widely admired Tennessee Valley Authority had in the United States. Nehru liked to call such projects “temples of concrete.”

Nehru’s plans for a closed economy dominated by the state also came with the blessings of Britain’s postwar Labour government, which had agreed to Indian independence, and which carried out its own nationalization of private sector industries to a far greater degree than did Nehru’s India. Many of the Labour government’s Fabian advisers were accorded a warm welcome in Nehru’s New Delhi. Indeed, it was not until fifteen to twenty years after India’s independence that international praise of the country’s economic model was outweighed by rising concerns about its effectiveness. Until then India’s trajectory was uncontroversial and relatively unexceptional.

Yet, in retrospect and in comparison to other developing economies in Asia, Nehru’s economic policies served India poorly. In 1950 South Korea, which was yet to emerge from its war with Communist North Korea, had the same living standards as India (roughly $50 annually per capita in 2005 prices). Fifty years later, South Korea’s per capita income was above $10,000, which was more than ten times higher than that of India. More or less similar contrasts can be found between India and most of the countries of east and Southeast Asia. Even China, which devoted much of the first thirty years of its revolution to countrywide terror, now has double India’s per capita income, having started at about the same level at the time of its revolution in 1949.

Why did Nehru’s approach fail? In the answers can also be found the explanations for why India’s economy today is developing in such a curiously lopsided way. At independence, India was an overwhelmingly rural, agricultural, and impoverished country. Almost nine out of ten Indians lived in villages and depended on the meager yields of farming, mostly subsistence farming, to live from day to day. In 1951, when India conducted its first census after independence, the country had a literacy rate of only 16 percent—which means little more than one in seven of its 320 million people could even sign his or her name. Average life expectancy was just thirty–two years, an extraordinary but credible figure that gives a fair picture of the abysmal quality of life for most of India’s villagers. Common descriptions at the time talked of emaciated peasants with visible rib cages, “coolies” half bent from a (short) lifetime of manual labor, and children with potbellies from protein deficiency.

India at independence was a country desperately in need of rural land reform and measures that would drastically boost crop yields so it could feed its people and build a launch pad for future growth. What it got instead was public steel plants and aluminum smelters, which not only were, for the most part, heavily loss–making but also ate up India's precious foreign exchange resources. The Indian farmer needed local irrigation projects to help insulate him against the vagaries of India’s wildly erratic annual monsoon. Instead Nehru unveiled grand dams, most of which are now crumbling and some of which were never completed. The average Indian also needed to learn how to read and write and have access to antibiotics and antimalaria drugs, without which it was virtually impossible to escape poverty. Instead, Nehru’s Congress Party governments poured resources into universities for the urban middle classes and into new public hospitals in the cities.

Hindsight makes it easy to dismiss as hopelessly optimistic Nehru’s belief that devoting most of India’s scarce financial resources to grand projects would propel the country to industrial status within a generation. Yet even at the time...

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385514743
• ISBN 13: 9780385514743
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400