An excellent op-ed piece by Pankaj Mishra in today's New York Times (registration may be required). Calling out the foreign media, and sections of our own, for incessantly crowing about India's financial and economic success, Mishra points out that
"But the increasingly common, business-centric view of India suppresses more facts than it reveals. Recent accounts of the alleged rise of India barely mention the fact that the country's $728 per capita gross domestic product is just slightly higher than that of sub-Saharan Africa and that, as the 2005 United Nations Human Development Report puts it, even if it sustains its current high growth rates, India will not catch up with high-income countries until 2106 (emphasis added)
Nor is India rising very fast on the report's Human Development index, where it ranks 127, just two rungs above Myanmar and more than 70 below Cuba and Mexico. Despite a recent reduction in poverty levels, nearly 380 million Indians still live on less than a dollar a day."
Noting that democracy is the only truly effective redressal mechanism which the people (i.e. the majority of India) have at their disposal is the power of the vote, Mishra also reminds us that
"But the anti-India insurgency in Kashmir, which has claimed some 80,000 lives in the last decade and a half, and the strength of violent communist militants across India, hint that regular elections may not be enough to contain the frustration and rage of millions of have-nots, or to shield them from the temptations of religious and ideological extremism"
Go read it.
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