India Grows At Night , livre ebook
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2013
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128
pages
English
Ebook
2013
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Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus
Publié par
Date de parution
15 juillet 2013
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9788184756746
Langue
English
Publié par
Date de parution
15 juillet 2013
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9788184756746
Langue
English
GURCHARAN DAS
India Grows at Night
A Liberal Case for a Strong State
Contents
About the Author
Praise for the Book
Also by Gurcharan Das
Dedication
Introduction: A Rising Economy, an Aspiring Society and a Declining State
1. The India Model
2. A People but No State
3. A Crisis in the Rule of Law
4. A Flailing State
5. The Dharma of Capitalism
6. Middle-class Dignity
7. Politics of Aspiration
8. Confronting Corruption
9. What Is to Be Done?
Conclusion: A Quest for a Strong, Liberal State
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
India Grows at Night
Gurcharan Das is a well-known author, commentator and public intellectual. His books include the much acclaimed The Difficulty of Being Good and the international bestseller India Unbound. He writes a regular column for a number of Indian newspapers and occasional guest columns for Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs and Newsweek. He graduated from Harvard University and was CEO of Procter & Gamble before taking early retirement to become a full-time writer. He lives in Delhi.
Praise for the Book
Why should it take us 15 years to get justice in the courts or 12 years to build a road? argues Gurcharan Das . . . You need a strong state and a strong society, so the society can hold the state accountable. India will only get a strong state when the best of society join the government . . .- Tom Friedman, New York Times
Das has written a timely book that deserves to be widely read. And it has its share of hard-headed proposals . . . Simply calling for less government is no answer, says Das. It needs also to be strong. Indian capitalism needs an honest referee . . . India has much to celebrate nowadays but also faces a cacophony of institutional challenges . . . Das s core argument is right and urgent -Edward Luce, Financial Times
An Indian political pamphlet of the 21st century . . . Das moves swiftly across centuries and continents, between anecdotal evidence and occasional factual detail, to outline his liberal case for a strong state. The essence of this argument is that while India has grown over the last two decades the state has not kept pace. And he does not see this as a recent phenomenon but a part of a longer term reality -Narendar Pani, The Hindu
It is hard to disagree with Das s bullish take on the future of the subcontinent. Indian middle classes are on the rise, and are increasingly becoming an interest group in their own right. As they grow in size, wealth and respectability, they will have a greater say in Indian politics and hopefully push for reforms improving government effectiveness and accountability - Dalibor Rohac, Mint / Wall Street Journal
The eclectic mixture of mythology, history, sociology and economics is overwhelming, but the reader can t disagree with Das s prescription of a strong liberal Indian state -Dipankar Bhattacharyya, Hindustan Times
Offers one significant new twist for the global discussions on markets and states . . . While the Western world wrings its hands about the loss of the moral on the way to the market, Das celebrates and promotes the discovery of a new version of an old moral compass, driven by and supportive of the market . . . If the state enables the market, the market will reshape society, and the weak state will become strong, in the sense of being compelled by public aspiration to push back on the illiberal aspects of the social order . . . In the end, this may be the underlying point of the book: the social system for shaping both markets and states toward development begins with the individual enterprise of introspection -Jessica Seddon, Caravan
Gurcharan Das s latest book captures the deep discord in today s India-a robust, aspiring society thriving in a flourishing economy held hostage by a flailing state and governance failures. Its focus on what is to be done to create a strong, liberal state in India makes it a brilliant read for all Indians hoping for a better India and keen to contribute to creating one -N.R. Narayana Murthy
Gurcharan Das has written a provocative book on the prospects of economic growth in India today. He writes in such a way that even those who disagree with him are forced to reconsider the grounds on which they base their views. This is a stimulating and challenging book -Andr B teille
Excellent . . . gives a brief conspectus of the current working of our democracy . . . The moral component of the rule of law to justify it as dharma is perceptive -J.S. Verma, Former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court
Also by Gurcharan Das
NOVEL A Fine Family (1990)
PLAYS Larins Sahib: A Play in Three Acts (1970) Mira: Rito de Krishna, tr. Enrique Hett (1971) Three Plays (2001, 2011)
NON-FICTION India Unbound: From Independence to the Global Information Age (2000) The Elephant Paradigm: India Wrestles with Change (2002) The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma (2009)
GENERAL EDITOR
THE STORY OF INDIAN BUSINESS Tom Trautmann, Arthashastra: The Science of Wealth Tirthankar Roy, The East India Company: The World s Most Powerful Corporation Kanakalatha Mukund, Merchants of Tamilakkam: Pioneers of International Trade Lakshmi Subramanian, Three Merchants of Bombay: Doing Business in Times of Change
For Maya Sukshma, Kabir, Nisha, Neha and Megha
Introduction
A Rising Economy, an Aspiring Society and a Declining State
The state exists for the sake of a good life, not for the sake of life alone.
-Aristotle, Politics , 3.9
Indians wryly admit that India grows at night when they sit down to sip chai and talk about their country s messy road into the future. But that is only half the saying. The complete sentence is: India grows at night while the government sleeps, meaning that India may well be rising despite the state. Prosperity is, indeed, spreading across the country even as governance failure pervades public life. It is a tale of private success and public failure. The private home is neat, clean and energetic. The government office is slothful, suffocating with controls and filled with mind-bending red tape. If it were a home, dirty dishes would be flung about the bedroom, old shoes and newspapers would be piled high in the kitchen, and everyone would have chai all day long. The difference between the two is a sense of responsibility in the Indian home-if you don t work you don t eat. That accountability is missing in public life.
How can a nation become one of the world s emerging powers despite a weak, ineffective state? And should India not grow during the day as well? It is questions like these that led me to write this book. I grew up in the idealistic days after Independence when we passionately believed in Jawaharlal Nehru s dream of a modern and just India. We were all socialists then. As the years went by, I watched Nehru create a command economy which took us to a dead end. Instead of socialism we ended up with statism, and we sardonically called it the licence raj . In my book India Unbound , I recounted the story of those four decades of missed opportunities and my own personal humiliation during the licence raj . In 1991, India s economy was finally unshackled by liberal economic reforms, which lowered trade barriers and tax rates, broke state monopolies, unshackled industry and competition, and opened up to the rest of the world. Growth accelerated, prosperity began to spread and the world began to speak about the rise of India .
No one in India quite understands how their noisy, chaotic democracy of a billion people has become one of the world s fastest growing economies. After all, sixty countries implemented the same reforms as India did. Clearly, suppressed energy burst out after 1991 but no one imagined that Indian entrepreneurs would respond so quickly to create innovative, red-blooded firms, who learned to compete brutally at home and have begun to stomp on to the global stage. India s is a bottom-up story, unlike China s top-down success that has been orchestrated by an authoritarian state.
After experiencing the pain of the licence raj , I became a libertarian, passionately committed to individual freedom and deeply suspicious of state power. The reforms were a defining moment in my narrative of national history in which India gained only its political independence in 1947; it did not win economic independence until 1991. India s rise has been enabled by two institutions of liberty-democracy and free markets. For our vibrant democracy, I give credit to Nehru, who laid its foundations. But India rose economically only after Nehru s over-regulating state stepped out of the way.
With my commitment to individual liberty, I began to believe that the state was a second-order phenomenon , at best a protector of what people choose to do in private life or in civil society and at worst capable of destroying those freedoms. I celebrated the heroic idea that India was rising despite the state. Two decades later, I have realized that I might have been wrong. I am now convinced that the state is of first-order importance. It can either allow human beings to flourish or it can become the biggest obstacle to their realizing their potential. To rise despite the state is courageous but it cannot be a long-term virtue. It only gets you so far. Prosperity does not magically appear when the government sleeps . India s recent success has come about because the state has quietly provided through the shadows reasonable property rights, reasonable security and reasonable law and order. And now India has begun to experience the limits of growing without the state . The growing-at-night strategy is no longer viable and the task is to reform the institutions of the state. The state must come out of the shadows and India should thrive during the day.
WHAT CONSTITUTES NATIONAL SUCCESS?
This raises a deeper question in my mind: what constitutes national success? A successful nation, i
