Socialist path terrible stranglehold

India’s terrible problems can be traced back to those who brought in a culture of pettifogging regulations, writes Philip Collins.

While he was in custody in Ahmednagar Fort in 1944, at the pleasure of the British, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote The Discovery of India, one of the great prison notebooks. Disguised as a history of the nation, it is a manifesto for a modern India.

‘‘It is obvious’’, says Nehru, that ‘‘she [India] has to come out of her shell and take full part in the life and activities of the modern age.’’

The designation of the nation as female has never been more grimly appropriate in the wake of the funeral of a 23-year-old medical student, now known as ‘‘India’s daughter’’, who was gang-raped on a night bus in Delhi on December 16.

India is a democratic country, but it is also a nation in which child marriage, female infanticide, sex trafficking and domestic violence are problems so serious that the only country in South Asia with a worse United Nations ranking for gender inequality is Afghanistan.

It is not without cause that a throng of angry women marched last week in Delhi to demand changes to the law.

However, the central point of Nehru’s history is that the culture has to adapt too, and the continued mistreatment of women is just one index among many to show that so much in Nehru’s demand for modernisation remains unfulfilled.

No visitor to India, however gilded, ever leaves without an impression of poverty – a withered hand in the window at the traffic lights or a physical deformity displayed on the pavement for the alms of passers-by.

According to the UN Development Programme, 37 per cent of Indians live below the poverty line.

There are more poor people in the eight poorest Indian states than in all of the 26 poorest African countries combined.

Indeed, incredibly, during the period when its growth rate took off, between 1996 and 2011, India was one of only three developed countries in which levels of hunger actually rose.

In these conditions, it is not surprising that India has a public-health crisis of the kind that Britain suffered the 18th century.

A Unicef report last year showed that one in three of all malnourished children in the world livs in India.

An extraordinary 58 per cent of children below the age of 5 show stunted growth for their age, because of their mothers’ inadequate nutrition during pregnancy.

All across India, failures of public policy hold the country back.

India’s reputation, based on the software geniuses of Bangalore, for being in the vanguard of the technological revolution is only half true. In fact, only one in 10 Indians uses the internet, a lower rate than Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

The conventional explanation for the blind eye turned towards destitution, is that Hinduism offers both consolation in another world and a divine alibi for the caste system.

It is certainly true, as Amartya Sen, an Indian economist, has often pointed out that an elite mentality governs Indian politics. The distance between the political class and the electorate in age, outlook and behaviour is larger in India than in any established democracy.

Endemic corruption is the most visible and serious manifestation of this gap.

However, for all that, I still blame the English for the slow modernisation of India – not the usual English villains who went to India, but the ones who stayed at home.

The London School of Economics did as much damage, and probably more, to the Indian economy as the sort of hapless regional officials who are lampooned in George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days.

This is because the main intellectual influence on Nehru, the simultaneously brilliant and flawed architect of democratic India, was a kind of Fabian socialism left out too long in the sun.

From Harrow, Cambridge and London, Nehru took a belief in a planned economy with him back to India.

This was the way, he fervently believed, to achieve what Ramsay MacDonald had once described in his book The Awakening of India.

The economy of the newly independent India after 1947 duly became known as ‘‘the licence raj’’. That was because a licence was needed for the business equivalent of breathing.

Foreign trade and inward investment were discouraged and every transaction was subjected to a bewildering variety of pettifogging regulations.

The history of the British Labour Party can written as a slow lesson that trying to control a complex economy is damaging.

Unfortunately its sister party, Congress in India, took the Fabian theorists at their word.

The current prime minister, Manmohan Singh, repealed some of this when he was finance minister in the early 1990s, but the legacy of planning still distorts the Indian economy.

To take just one example, Mumbai has the potential to be a great world city. Its recent promise has attracted the former farm hands of Maharashtra in their thousands.

Unfortunately, they arrive to an encounter with faeces in open sewers, filthy water, traffic-choked roads and trains bursting to the point of danger.

This all goes back to the fact that, in 1964, the Mumbai authorities set strict limits on the height of buildings, citing English urban design as their inspiration. So, instead of going up, Mumbai spread out. The result is that space in downtown Mumbai is more expensive than it is in Singapore.

The transport network is crumbling under the weight of the commuters travelling from the illegal slums on the edge of the city. Across India, 93 million people, 11⁄ times the population of Britain, live in urban slums, buildings under construction or on the pavement.

The world will be safer and better if a democracy such as India is a major player, than if global power is left to China or Russia. The film of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children captures the excitement and the fragility of the moment in August 1947 that India gained its freedom. Right from the start, the new India was beset by fears that its democracy could not survive.

But for 65 years, with a brief hiatus under Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency between 1975 and 1977, it has thrived.

In the race for power, we should root for India, and so India now needs to read Nehru’s diagnosis again.

He asks the right question, just as long as they don’t also let him supply the answer.