Opinion: As Modi discovered, India’s economy will never look like China’s
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a polling station in Ahmedabad, India, on April 23. By Ruchir Sharma April 25 at 3:43 PM Ruchir Sharma is an author, most recently of “Democracy on the Road: A 25-Year Journey Through India.”
The countries have nothing in common other than populations of more than 1 billion people. China is a one-party autocracy that mobilized its homogeneous Han, Mandarin-speaking majority behind a decades-long campaign of radical reform. India is a diverse, multiparty democracy that will always struggle to rally its hundreds of ethnic and linguistic minority groups behind any single goal.
Fed up with the stagnation and chaos suffered under Mao Zedong, China’s communist bosses began loosening their control of the economy in the late 1970s. They freed rural Chinese to till their own land or leave the interior provinces in search of work. They created economic zones free of heavy bureaucratic control in coastal cities, where new jobs flourished. When the government closed thousands of rusting state factories, millions of fired workers poured into the burgeoning private sector.
Already, one outcome of the 2019 election is entirely predictable, based on the party manifestos recently released by Modi and the main opposition parties. Instead of economic reform, the manifestos offer handouts that will leave the overburdened state less money to invest in roads, ports and electricity plants.
Centralized rule is particularly ill suited to India, where many of the 29 states see themselves almost as separate countries. Whenever prime ministers try to concentrate power in Delhi, as Indira Gandhi did in the 1970s, they have triggered a backlash, often spurred by state leaders.
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