Picture India in 1991. You need to make several trips to Delhi and wait three years to import a computer. Coca-Cola is contraband; there is a 22-month waiting list for a car, and an interminable queue for admission to the exclusive club of telephone owners: there are only five million active connections in a country of 900 million people.
Post-colonial India elevated suspicion of private business into a public virtue. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which maintained a vital $6 billion trade relationship with India, the rhetoric of economic self-reliance and political non-alignment became insupportable. All that stood between India and bankruptcy when the government was compelled to throw open the economy in the summer of 1991 was $2 billion.
India vaulted from an era of austerity to an age of excess. The already rich became the principal beneficiaries of this transformation, going on to own nearly half of the national wealth. And within a decade, commentators began extolling India — home to the largest population of the world’s poorest people — as a future superpower. The mood was infectious. ‘I am confident that our time has come,’ prime minister Manmohan Singh, the brains behind the economic reforms of the 1990s, declared in 2007. ‘India is all set to regain its due place in the comity of nations, as a plural, secular and liberal democracy.’
Less than a decade later, Singh was toppled by a Hindu supremacist. Narendra Modi can breed nostalgia for the days of Congress. But as James Crabtree colourfully details in The Billionaire Raj, it was under Singh that inequality, crony capitalism and corruption attained Himalayan proportions. Indian billionaires, proliferating from a mere two in the 1990s to more than 100 today, financed their extravagant lifestyles with money raided from state banks.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in