12 february 2018 http://www.openthemagazine.com 87
from the caste system. He has in mind the
developments following the acceptance
of the Mandal Commission’s recommen-
dation of reservations in government
jobs and university admissions for Other
Backward Classes. It is claimed that this
has led to an improvement in the condi-
tion of Dalits and Backward Classes. As no
evidence is given, we are not in a position
to assess the claim, but the following can
be said. Though it is the case that those
able to avail of job reservations would
improve their lot, it is doubtful whether
reservations can improve the condition of
a whole section of society with public sec-
tor employment shrinking, as has been
the case in India since 1991, when market
forces were given a greater role. In general,
the argument that the condition of those
at the bottom of the social ladder will
improve only when they are represented
by leaders of their own social group—
read caste—is perhaps over-rated. It is
worth asking whether the condition of
Dalits is better in Kerala, which has not
had caste-based political mobilisation but
has seen communist governments, or in
UP, where Mayawati has been returned
to power four times. The ending of the
old elite that had led the national move-
ment, which Desai approves of, has also
come with a recrudescence of dynasty in
politics and an unimaginable increase
in personal wealth while in office of the
new one, outcomes that we would expect
democracy to keep at bay. Lalu Prasad is
in jail; Karunanidhi was among the first
politicians to be charged with serious
corruption while in office. It is worth
mentioning here that neither Nehru
nor Namboodiripad had promoted their
progeny, and, though both of them had
been born into considerable wealth, died
with very little.
Surprisingly, public-goods provision
does not figure in this evaluation of
Indian democracy. Surely individuals
come together to adopt the democratic
form of governance to better their condi-
tion, and it may reasonably be assumed
that public goods form part of what they
seek. On this score, European democracy
trumps other variants. While the Ameri-
can version champions individual
rights, group rights appear to dominate
the discourse in India. Both these societ-
ies have ended up with less public goods
than in Europe, where Britain’s National
Health Service and world-class publicly-
funded universities stand out. India has
either negligible or poor-quality health
and schooling in the public sector and
poor physical infrastructure. Public
goods matter not only for personal wel-
fare but also can be a powerful instru-
ment for extinguishing social distance
and inducing cohesion. Being non-
rivalrous and non-exclusionary, they
epitomise the democratic ethos. Such
provision of public services as there is
in India has suffered from the avoidable
sentimentality that striving for excel-
lence in this sphere is a form of elitism.This has ensured that many public
goods in India are of the lowest quality,
leading to exits across all social groups
and income classes, thus defeating the
very rationale for providing them.
The signal contribution in The Raisina
Model is the questioning of both the asser-
tion of the idea of a Hindu nation and the
response to it in the form of ‘secularism’.
For the author, India comprises many
nations, each with its language, history
and religion. There is ‘no need for a single
story, single religion, single language to
define India’, this search being the vice of
the nationalist. Equally, ‘privileging theHindu-Muslim divide’ as the sole axis of
differentiation, as secularists do, leaves
numerous other minorities and linguistic
nations outside the discourse. Desai lo-
cates both these tendencies in the history
of India’s Hindi heartland, with little pur-
chase elsewhere in the country. They have
endured because national politics after In-
dependence has been dominated by north
Indian politicians. Hindu nationalism
excludes the Naga tribes and secularism is
irrelevant when it comes to dealing with
issues raised by the Naxalites.
It is on the history of the economy
that this reviewer has differences with
the author. Rather than assess Indian
democracy on what it has achieved on
the economic front, much of a whole
chapter on the economy is devoted to
a scathing account of India’s economic
policy before 1991. This is disappoint-
ing, as Lord Desai is an economist of the
front rank, and one would have hoped
for analysis. Though we can now see
that India performed poorly by compari-
son with the economies of East Asia, it
would not be correct to say that India’s
economic policy in the early years was
‘mistaken’. Not only did the rate of
economic growth accelerate more than
once before 1991, but also there had not
been a significant alternative on offer to
what was pursued in the 1950s. India’s
failure was not in terms of the chosen
economic ‘model’, involving controls
and public investment, but the leader-
ship’s failure to see the importance of
primary schooling. The countries of
East Asia had worked with more or less
the same economic model as India did
but invested in human capital, and in
the absence of democracy were able to
implement their plans better.
This book deserves to be read widely.
It is based on a deep understanding of
India today, how it got here and what
its prospects could be. The narration is
compelling, the style is lucid, and excel-
lent production gives this volume
a fetching appearance. nPulapre Balakrishnan is a professor at
ashoka University, sonipat, and
senior fellow at iiM KozhikodeCentral to Desai’s evaluation is that inDia has DefieD
all oDD s to remain one Country. this haD not been
expeCte D at the time of inDepenDen Ce, the imperialist
Winston ChurChill having been among the sCeptiCs