India story

By Fareed Zakaria

In India, politicians have generally pandered to the villager. No party has a serious urban agenda, but all have elaborate rural schemes. Popular culture reinforced this divide. Village life in traditional Bollywood movies reflected simplicity and virtue. Cities were centres of crime and conflict, controlled by a small, wealthy, often debauched, elite.

This focus on the rural poor has, ironically, been one of the major obstacles to alleviating poverty. For decades, the national political parties handed out lavish subsidies for work, food, and energy — among other things — distorting these markets and perpetuating many of India’s basic economic problems. Even after India’s economic reforms started, these patronage schemes continued, and this mentality has often taken precedence over good governance, efficient regulations and fiscal sanity.

Policies that actually alleviate poverty by promoting economic growth are often enacted quietly and are even guiltily called “stealth reform” by their advocates. In a broader sense, too much of the political elite still thinks of India as a poor, third-world country, a victim of larger global forces rather than one of the world’s emerging great powers that could and should be governed by the highest standards.

The middle class has played into this narrative, traditionally thinking it was politically irrelevant and, so, adopting an apolitical stance. Its response to India’s problems was to expect little of government.

From “The Rediscovery of India”.