> Hi Ulhas, could you tell me if this article by John
> Pilger is accurate? It smells like crap to me.
It's not completely false, but not many Leftist are capable presenting a balanced picture of India, so I am not surprised. I have posted articles on all the issues (and others as well) appearing in Pilger piece at various times.
> India's economic "miracle"
> By John Pilger
I don't think even sensible Indian liberals talk about India's "miracle".
> Mumbai is India's richest city. It handles forty per
> cent of the country's
> maritime trade; it has most of the merchant banks
Merchant banks have their HQs in Mumbai. Mumbai is India's financial capital. But to say that Mumbai has most of the merchant banks inccurate.
> and
> two stock exchanges
Two important stock exchanges have their HQs in Mumbai. But stock trading can be done from any part of India, because it s via electronic trading terminals. Scrips are dematerialised, so there isn't much physical delivery for major scrips. So stock exchanges are All-India exchanges.
> and Asia's biggest slum.
I don't know much about slums in other parts of Asia, so I can't compare. We have free movement, migration of people, unlike say China. In China they have internal passports. We don't. So we have massive slums in every city.
>the Prince of
> Wales museum
> (it is still called that on the streets, as Mumbai is
> still Bombay),
This is nonsense. It is Mumbai or Bumbai for vast majority of people.
> twhy should such a rich and resourceful and
> culturally wise
> society, with its democracy and memories of great
> popular struggle, live
> like this?
It's a complex question.
> Rather, it happened with
> the arrival of a strain of extreme capitalism,
> designed in England in the
> early 19th century and known today as neoliberalism.
Pilger should have described in concrete terms what is this neo-liberalism.
> With the defeat of
> Congress and the rise of the Hindu nationalist BJP-led
> government in the
> 1990s, the divided society was shorn of its
> paternalism and licensed by the
> International Monetary Fund.
India doesn't owe anything to the IMF. This has been the case for about a decade.
>The barriers that had
> protected Indian industry
> and manufacturing were demolished;
This is complete garbage, but I am not surprised.
> beneficiaries: the expanding
> middle class (a misnomer in India; there is no
> effective middle)
There is an expanding middle class, but that not in developed country terms. e.g. 25 million families (150 million people) own motorbikes, scooters etc. That is our middle class. 300 million people watch television. Indian TV network (public and private) is among the largest in the world.
> and
> transnational capital.
India gets less than 2% of the annual FDI flows to the_developing nations_. India's share of annual global FDI flows (_including that to the developed world_) is about 0.5%. The total foreign capital inflow in India between 1990-2000 was about $30 billion. China gets more than this each year. The total committed FDI to China $ 1 trillion.
>They said that India would
> catch up China as an
> economic power and that poverty would be eradicated.
China has not eradicated poverty either. I don't know who claimed that India would catch up China. But China's policies are more liberal in many ways than Indian policies.
> Indeed, official figures appeared to show that, at the
> close of the
> twentieth century, the number of Indians living in
> absolute poverty had
> fallen by ten per cent. However, in his study Poverty
> and Inequality in
> India: getting closer to the truth, Abhijit Sen says
> that the Indian poor
> actually increased and that, for them, the 1990s were
> a "lost decade". In
> 2002, those in absolute poverty made up more than a
> third of the population,
> or 364 million people. "Inadequate nutrition is
> actually far more widespread
> than either hunger or income poverty", he wrote.
Even if we accept Abhijit Sen's figures, it means 636 million people don't live in absolute poverty. India's total population in 1950 was about 364 million.
>"Half
> of Indian children
> are clinically undernourished and almost forty per
> cent of all Indian adults
> suffer chronic energy deficiency".
I have posted enough material on malnutrition in India on this list. I can provide references, if required. 150 million people suffer from malnutrition in China.
> Certainly, India's growth rate has leapt above six per
> cent, but this is
> about capital, not labour, about liberated profits,
> not people.
I suppose the claim about the development of underdevelopment of capitalism has been given up by the Left. Now it's a question of underdevelopment of people.
>The conditions these people live under are barely
> describable: an extended
> family of twenty is squeezed into a packing case, the
> sewage ebbing and
> flowing in the monsoon; in the dry season it stays.
Things are quite bad, but I am not aware of 20 people squeezed into a packing case ! But we have such a vast population, anything is possible. Sweeping generalisations are usually misleading.
> "India is in many ways a violent country", he told me.
> "The fact that we
> have democracy today is largely due to the
> non-violence of the main freedom
> movement".
> Democracy perhaps, but freedom waits.
True, but if an Indian marxist criticizes Indian government on the internet, he is not sent jail.
Ulhas