Are we better off, as a nation, than we were 15 years ago?

Something is seriously wrong with the Congress party. It is in power in New Delhi, it has an internationally respected prime minister leading the government, the economy is roaring ahead, and even the stock market is broadly on a climb after sliding a while. True, it has coalition partners who try political blackmail from time to time to get their way. But the rumours that raged around the country on Friday about Manmohan Singh wanting to resign — pulling the Sensex down in the process — revolved around a gathering, anxious perception that he was fed up with mounting anti-reforms pressure from within his party.

The anti-reforms momentum comes from two arguments. The first is that if any party pushes economic reforms too hard it will lose politically. “Ah, you see, the ordinary Indian voter doesn’t understand economics and, therefore, the logic of economic reform,” a Congress party analyst sagely told me, meaning, “You poor sod, you don’t have my understanding of the great Indian reality.”

Look at what happened to Narasimha Rao, they say. He carried out economic reforms for five years at the end of which he was thrown out of power. Ditto the NDA government, which lost the last general elections despite an ‘India Shining’ campaign. And, what about Chandrababu Naidu, champion of reforms, didn’t he lose too?

Well, there can be another way of seeing it. One is that if economics doesn’t matter, why should voters be swayed by arguments for or against reform? No big deal, either way.

Second, Narasimha Rao probably lost for a number of causes, including the beating his government took from corruption charges and shady political deals. The NDA coalition and Naidu, on the other hand, lost because they didn’t pick the correct state partners. A switch of partners in Tamil Nadu, for instance, could have changed the national results.

Similarly, Naidu failed despite efforts to close a deal with a regional party which went over to the other side. If he had succeeded, the Congress would have found it hard to win. In the coalition era, electoral fortunes depend on alliances, not economics.

The other argument put forward by anti-reformists is that reforms haven’t worked, won’t work, can never work in this profit-crazy, market-enamoured, evil capitalist system. That is the Royist line; no, not as in the late radical humanist MN Roy — does anyone remember him — but as in Arundhati Roy. These folk are rabid.

That’s why I was more than a little disappointed to see that fine young intellectual Pankaj Mishra write an article for the New York Times on Friday repeating several arguments of the loony left. He is no crackpot; nor is he a motivated ideologue. As a fellow Indian, I have been proud to see his frequent contributions to the New York Review of Books, which is arguably the most intellectually refined contemporary magazine in English.

What I found baffling in his Thursday piece — which we carry on the page facing this one — was his apparently gullible acceptance of the kind of loose, non-contextual data that’s peddled by the usual suspects of the left to bash India’s economic reform programme.

Thus, he says, for instance, that India’s per capita GDP is only $728. True, except that he might consider it an achievement. That figure is nearly double of what it was a mere five years ago, that too on a fairly low inflation rate, which means that much of that extraordinary increase is real. Or, you could look at it in purchasing power terms—which tell you more accurately how much a dollar can buy in each country — to arrive at a more impressive figure.

He says nearly 380 million Indians still live on less than one dollar a day. Untrue. An income of a dollar a day is the internationally recognised line of absolute poverty. Around 26 per cent of Indians today — or 265 million — live in that unfortunate state, down from around 39 per cent 15 years ago. Which means that almost 130 million — the population of World Cup finalists Italy and France put together — have been lifted out of absolute poverty since the reforms began! Yes, 380 million probably live on two dollars a day. That might not seem much of an improvement to Mishra’s international audience, but it comes to roughly Rs2700 a month, which on purchasing power can buy you a modest living in rural India where a lot of the persisting poverty is concentrated.

I could go on. But read his article and make up your mind on the basis of your own experience. Just ask yourself: Are we better off, as a nation, than we were 15 years ago?

Email: gautam@dnaindia.net