Decoding flaws in country’s economic, political policies

Mody joined host Milan Vaishnav last week on the “Grand Tamasha” podcast, a co-production of HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to talk more about his book.

In his new book , India Is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today, economist Ashoka Mody provides readers with an unvarnished look at India’s twin economic and political failures over the past seven and a half decades.

In his new book, economist Ashoka Mody provides readers with an unvarnished look at India’s twin economic and political failures (HT File)

An economic historian at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs and a longtime official at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Mody joined host Milan Vaishnav last week on the “Grand Tamasha” podcast, a co-production of HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to talk more about his book.

Challenging the conventional wisdom, Mody argues that India’s post-independence leaders—from Jawaharlal Nehru all the way to Narendra Modi—have failed to confront India’s true economic problems, seeking easy solutions instead. As a popular frustration grew, India’s democracy suffered, leading to an upsurge in nationalism, violence, and corruption.

Worrying statistics about the nexus of crime and money in Indian politics struck a chord with Mody and got him thinking about the state of Indian democracy, prompting him to write the book. “If Indian legislators and the Indian parliament were increasingly being occupied by people with very serious criminal charges, how could they also be making good public policy? How could a society like that not just make policy but implement and enforce it?” asked Mody.

According to Mody, the core of India’s shortcomings has to do with “a chronic lack of provision of public goods—education, health, good working cities, degraded environment—both air and water, and essentially a broken judicial system, especially for the poor and vulnerable.” Successive governments have failed to deliver on this core agenda, compelling them to pander to voters during elections by flogging caste, religion, and patronage politics, Mody says.

As a result, democracy in procedural terms might be robust, but the substance has very much lagged behind, says Mody. “[Political scientist] Robert Dahl said very early on that if corporate interests are going to be dominant in policymaking, then the question of equality before law becomes somewhat meaningless,” explained Mody. “Almost from the beginning of the post-Independence period, India has lacked equality before the law.”

For Mody, India’s economic shortcomings cannot be delinked from its political challenges. “Both equality before the law and the constraints on civil liberties come within a broader economic structure where corporate interests have become increasingly powerful, especially after the so-called liberalization,” said Mody. “Therefore, to me, the notion that this is democracy—in the sense that somebody like James Madison would have recognized—it does not pass the smell test.”