reminiscent of confrontations of earlier years.
Had civilised India made no progress? Even
Bombay, where Muslims and Hindus were
devoted to making money and had lived together
for decades, erupted in violence in early 1993
with bombs and riots leaving hundreds dead. Yet
quietly India’s 72-year-old prime minister,
appointed in June 1991 as a ‘stop gap’, with the
able support of the finance minister Manmohan
Singh, set in motion a programme of reform, low-
ering taxes, and liberalising trade that has led to
foreign investment and lower inflation. The BJP’s
influence has weakened and prospects for stabil-
ity and development in 1994 began to look
better. Nevertheless, violence has a way of erupt-
ing unpredictably in India.
The population of democratic India, at some
860 million in the mid-1990s, was more than
double what it had been on Independence Day
- By 1947 China had overtaken India in pro-
duction per head of population and India’s inabil-
ity to impose measures to control its population
had a negative impact on economic growth.
Another striking difference is China’s much
higher literacy rate. The Indian poor, on the
other hand, never had to suffer human catastro-
phes on the scale of Mao’s ‘mistakes’, which led
to famines in which at least 20 million died. Nor
has India set up penal labour camps; freedom and
the rule of law are respected there.
India’s ethnic, communal and religious divi-
sions have made it difficult to implement national
policies. This was compounded by political insta-
bility and the corruption of leading politicians.
Until the elections of May 1996 the Congress
Party had been the dominant ruling party for
all but four years since Indian independence.
Recently governments have been made up of
unstable coalitions of twelve or more left-wing
and regional parties, brought together only by the
desire to prevent the largest political party, the
militant Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), from
gaining power. There was one glimmer of hope
in India’s turbulent power struggles when an
‘untouchable’, K. R. Narayanan, was elected pres-
ident.
India still suffers from the socialist economic
policies adopted by Nehru; the successive five-year
state planning took its model from the Soviet
Union. Nehru’s aim was to turn India into a great
industrial power, but the elephantine bureaucracy,
the difficulties in securing planning permission
and the endemic corruption stifled enterprise.
High tariffs also interfered with market forces.
During the 1960s and 1970s Nehru’s daughter,
Indira Gandhi, pursued such policies even more
rigidly, while population growth left more than
a third of the country below the poverty line.
Liberalisation of trade began in the 1980s but
made slow progress. India has remained saddled
with inefficient state-owned industries; plans to
privatise minority interests in the most efficient
were only at the planning stage at the end of the
1990s. With its large middle class and even larger
proportion of desperately poor people, the gap
between rich and poor is as wide here as anywhere
in the developing world. The need for change and
reform and for a tough line on corruption has
been recognised, but implementation is proving a
painfully slow process.
Kashmir continued to be the most serious issue
in India’s foreign relations. The province was fully
integrated into India; its predominantly Muslim
population remains an issue capable of quickly
flaring into a crisis between India and Pakistan. A
large Indian army is in occupation but low-level642 TWO FACES OF ASIA: AFTER 1949
The Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka, 2000Population (millions) GDP per head (US$) GDP per head, Purchasing
Power Parity (US$)
India 1,009.0 450 2,340
Pakistan 141.3 450 1,900
Bangladesh 137.4 360 1,600
Sri Lanka 18.9 862 3,500