At independence, India’s ruling class was arguably the best educated in the developing world. The father of the nation, Mohandas Gandhi, was a lawyer educated at London’s Inner Temple. The first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, studied at Cambridge University, and the chief drafter of the constitution, B. R. Ambedkar, had a doctorate from Columbia University. Simply put, in both erudition and probity, India’s founders were on average several notches above their present-day successors. Today, nearly a third of state and national legislators have criminal charges pending against them, including serious ones such as murder, kidnapping, and extortion.
Neither dynastic politics nor corruption is uniquely Indian. The former hasn’t appreciably hindered Singapore’s progress, nor the latter South Korea’s. But India also bears the harmful legacy of past mistakes that have not been fully acknowledged, and therefore not fully repudiated. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a Fabian socialist who was contemptuous of markets and enamored of state planning. His daughter, Indira Gandhi, raised rabble-rousing to an art form and turned the crude license-permit system she inherited from her father into a refined instrument of economic torture. In her time, the marginal tax rate rose to 97 percent, and thanks to the license system even the most routine economic decisions, such as where a business could build a factory or how much it could produce, were made by bureaucrats.
For India to join the developed world, it needs to drag its politicians into the 21st century. Or else, they may just drag India down with themselves instead.
- More Here
Neither dynastic politics nor corruption is uniquely Indian. The former hasn’t appreciably hindered Singapore’s progress, nor the latter South Korea’s. But India also bears the harmful legacy of past mistakes that have not been fully acknowledged, and therefore not fully repudiated. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a Fabian socialist who was contemptuous of markets and enamored of state planning. His daughter, Indira Gandhi, raised rabble-rousing to an art form and turned the crude license-permit system she inherited from her father into a refined instrument of economic torture. In her time, the marginal tax rate rose to 97 percent, and thanks to the license system even the most routine economic decisions, such as where a business could build a factory or how much it could produce, were made by bureaucrats.
For India to join the developed world, it needs to drag its politicians into the 21st century. Or else, they may just drag India down with themselves instead.
- More Here
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