Six Theses about India

A response to David Volodzko

आ नो भद्राः करतवो कष्यन्तु विश्वतो.अदब्धासो अपरीतास उद्भिदः|

—Rig Ved 1.89.1

In March,

David Josef Volodzko

wrote to ask if I would like to exchange letters—a practice Substack suggests as a way for writers to introduce themselves to new audiences.

“Why not?” I said.

I republished his opening volley here with a promise to reply right away. But as you can see, it is now May. This sort of thing happens to me all the time.¹ David, I’m sorry. I’d promise to do better, but it would be a lie. At my age, I’m not going to change. I just have to hope that I’m worth the wait.

David writes The Radicalist, a newsletter about “communism, fascism and political extremism in all its forms.” He’s had an interesting life. As he mentions in his letter to me, he moved to India in 2012:

I had planned to spend my first few months kicking back on a beach in Goa but ended up homeless on the streets of Mumbai. I saw children maimed by the beggar mafias, lepers like the ones I had only previously known in the pages of the Bible, and the dismal sea of the Dharavi slums. It was human damage of a kind and on a scale that felt more like war than a regular state of being.

He wrote this because I had proposed we exchanged letters about an astonishing bit of news that received no attention commensurate with the drama of the story. The news is this: On March 1, the Brookings Institute reported that India had eliminated extreme poverty.

As David writes, between 2008 and 2021, 415 million Indians ceased to live in poverty.

The number of toilets, access to electricity, modern cooking fuel, and piped water have all dramatically increased. The report notes that in August 2019, for instance, roughly 17 percent of rural areas had access to piped water compared to roughly 75 percent today. …

You told me, Claire, that you once imagined such a change taking place and thought to yourself that if it did, “That would be the biggest advance in human rights and dignity that humanity has ever seen.” I couldn’t agree more.

The problem with answering his letter is that I agree with it, and it’s hard to have a lively conversation when there is no point of disagreement at all. So I’ve decided to elaborate upon his arguments.

The topic put me in mind of something I wrote a few years ago. In 2015, City Journal secured a small grant for me to go to India and do a bit of reporting. This essay—The Indian Century—was the result.

I came back from India, however, with hundreds of sketches, vignettes, anecdotes, and arguments that I was obliged to consign to the cutting room floor. I couldn’t get them out of my mind, so I also wrote another essay—the one I’d have written if I’d had no word limit—and published it as a book on Amazon. I’m fairly sure no one ever read it, so I’ll feel no compunction about borrowing whole paragraphs from it and repeating them here.²

What follows is, in part, a revised and updated version of that essay. The argument I made is holding up well, and I expect it will continue to hold up well. Among my predictions:

By virtue of the population, drive and the culture and curiosity bequeathed to it, India might develop enough intellectual capital, fast, to lift hundreds of millions of people out of absolute poverty, soon, and perhaps do quite a bit more.

As you see, I was right. (Those are always such satisfying words to write.)

Yet the significance of what I saw—and what I predicted—continues to be widely overlooked in the West.

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Photo by Tejj on Unsplash

“The West” and “India” are huge, complex, and almost impossible understand or to predict. Don’t try to game it out. That way lies madness. (Trust me.)³ Just focus on the heart of this argument.

Thesis 1: However huge, screwed-up, and complex India may be, barring total thermonuclear war or a truly unparalleled outbreak of disease, India’s economy will for the next thirty years keep growing.

You’ll go insane if you spend too long trying to make sense of any official statistic about India. But it’s safe to say that the real growth rate has been positive, every year, since 1980, the sole exception being 2020, for obvious reasons. The positive trend will continue.

How positive? In the past three quarters, India’s growth has been above 8.3 percent. The IMF believes it will remain strong, at 6.8 percent in 2024 and 6.5 percent in 2025. But it doesn’t matter. It could be almost-stagnant, it could be as high as 12 percent; as long as it isn’t negative, we’re talking about massive economic growth—because 1.417 billion times any amount is a massive number. Even dozens of (predictable) catastrophic natural disasters won’t set it back much. Economic projections are generally about as reliable as my tarot pack. But logically, by virtue of its population, India’s economy will grow massively unless it stops growing completely. Even if Delhi and Bombay are wiped out in a limited nuclear war, that still leaves Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Ahmadabad, Pune, Surat, Calcutta, Jaipur, Lucknow—all of which are bigger than Chicago—and a very long list of cities that are smaller than Chicago, but still massive.

India’s economy is now the world’s fifth largest. In purchasing power parity, it is the third largest. The IMF just forecast India overtaking Japan in 2025 and Germany in 2027, racing ahead of the IMF’s previous projection. It will then be the world’s third-largest economy, period.

IMF, April 30, 2024

We have to wait a bit longer, according to standard projections, for India to become the world’s second-largest economy. But if the gloomier appraisals of the significance of China’s population collapse are correct, it will happen much sooner than these projections would suggest:⁴

Graphic: Visual Capitalist.

The chart above shows us returning to the era before the Industrial Revolution, when China and India dominated global GDP. All forecasts see India’s growth rate rising even as other large economies’ growth decelerates.

Thesis Two: China’s population is collapsing, catastrophically. India’s is not. It is India, not China, that is world’s next superpower.

Some time last year, India overtook China to become the world’s most populous country. India’s population will keep growing for decades, while China’s has already begun a precipitous decline. David appealed to Peter Zeihan in his letter, so I will, too. Here’s why Peter thinks this matters:

… India has, like everybody else, started to industrialize. And so India has, like everyone else, slowly transitioned to a chimney demography where they have as many people in their forties as their thirties, and [as many in] their twenties as their teens, but the process started a lot later than it did in China, and it’s preceding a lot slower. So while India is in the midst of rapid aging, it’s from a very late start, at a relatively slow speed compared to a lot of other countries in their peer group, much less the Chinese [who] really are in a category all their own. This means that India today has has plenty of people under age 40 to do consuming, and even [to] still have kids, if they can find a way to reverse some of these trends. It that means in ten, twenty, thirty, forty years, India is going to have a lot of people aged 40 to 65 who are going to be capital rich and high-value add. In a system with one and a half billion people, even if that’s only 10 percent of  the population—and it’s more—that’s still a whole lot going on.  

Now, in the worst case scenario, where birth rates continue to shrink and the Indian population continues to age, we’re still talking about it still being the world’s largest population for at least another half century. They won’t be in a European-style crunch for their demographics within 40 years. So even if they do everything wrong, even if everything turns against them, the future of India it looks pretty good.

They’ve got one other thing going for them that the Chinese don’t. They’re a lot closer to the things that they need. Australia is a much more friendly nation to the Indians than it is to China. So there’s always going to be some extra food supply or mineral supply that’s available. And India, the Subcontinent, is the first stop out of the Persian Gulf, so India is one of the last countries in the world that you should expect to ever have an energy crisis, whereas China is the last country on a very, very, long, easy-to-disrupt chain. So all of the normal issues that we think about when we think of Indian inefficiency, women’s rights issues, what that means for their economic growth—the fact that Pakistan is right there—these are all relevant, along with corruption. These are things we should worry about. But they’re an order of magnitude [smaller] than the problems plaguing China now. They’re all survivable. There are solutions the Indians can come up with, and even if they can’t, they can cope with them as they continue to grow—whereas with China, we are very close to the end.

I came to this conclusion in 2015. I’m gratified that I seem to have been right—or at least, that Peter Zeihan agrees with me. India is vastly younger than China.

India is a juggernaut. It should be the cynosure of all eyes. But Western attitudes about India—at least to judge by our treatment of India in the media and in popular discourse—haven’t caught up.

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Photo by Pop & Zebra on Unsplash

Sip was named after the Study in India Program, one of the many entrepreneurial high-wire acts run by my hosts in Delhi. A student from Liverpool, visiting India on a three-week whirlwind study tour, had found the puppy—lost, adorable, adoptable—in the street. Unfortunately for all concerned, I was there, and delivered a stern lecture to my hosts about the responsibilities of adoption. A puppy is for life, not just for Holi, and now you have a real commitment.

This was an easier case to make than it usually is, given that theirs is largely a Hindu household. That is to say, no one looked at me sadly when I explained that I didn’t eat meat; the announcement evoked the approval one wishes it would. It was not an entirely Hindu household, mind you. Alma was a Christian, although what precisely this meant to her was unclear. Through sign language and pantomime we arrived at an agreement on one or perhaps three Gods. But this didn’t prevent her from doing the needful on Diwali, presumably on the grounds that it’s fun. I am no expert on the deeper meaning of Diwali, but I offer a superficial explanation based on the Annals of Bewildering Delhi Street Signs:

“WORLD’S BIGGEST FIREWORKS! Standard Size”

“Crackers, Sparklers, Rockets: Sri Kaliswari Fireworks Pvt Ltd.’s ‘COCK’ Brand!”

The latter thankfully did not boast to being the world’s largest.

Nick was drawn by some aspects of the Advaita Vedānta but willing to defend the argument that Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection of Christ was the greatest painting in history. Meetu was half-Hindu and all Brahmin (not technically—she’s Kshatriya, strictly speaking, and of no caste at all, even more strictly speaking, because on paper that’s been banned). She was half Sikh, too, and for her, not a day went by without a visit to the temple or the gurdwara, whichever was closer; and she was right, either one was a relaxing and necessary break from the harried pace of their lives, if you could get past your uneasy sense that your God would not approve of putting all these other Gods anywhere near him, not even in a when-in-Rome way.

As for my God, a number of Indians I met were curious to learn there was yet another monotheism, like the other white meat, so to speak—well, perhaps that’s not la métaphore juste—but they were not hostile, merely surprised. No bad memories. The general sense was that the two they knew about were not so good, but they were willing to be tolerant so long as neither of them ever tried it again. 

Still—the dog. Let’s not get distracted. Sippy-the-Adorable or was exhibiting behavioral peculiarities for reasons we could not fathom. Alma’s slipper and her NOSIPPYYESBADGOODYESDOGSIPPYGOODS! might have had something to do with that. A dog whisperer she was not. But to make a long story short, after Sippy-cum-Cujo mauled me, I fell onto a serving dish, the edge of which ripped off my nose.

I had been meaning, but perhaps not that very evening, to investigate the purportedly advanced state of India’s medical care and pharmaceutical industry. So while it seemed rather dramatic at the time, it did at least serve a useful journalistic purpose. I inspected with particularly keen interest Delhi’s state-of-the-art medical trauma facilities and low-cost maxillofacial reconstruction techniques. I learned much about Rabipur, manufactured at a strikingly reasonable price by Novartis in India.

Dr. Manohar Lal Sharma was on call. I was trying to make my horrified hosts laugh when they rolled me off to the operating room and I said, “I expect a better nose.” I didn’t, really. Dr. Sharma was born in 1950 in Rajasthan. An alumnus of Vidya Bhawan Higher Secondary School, he attended Rabindranath Tagore Medical College in Udaipur and apparently had many other excellent qualifications. I found that out afterward, though. The first thing I noticed about Dr. Sharma was that he had mercifully steady hands. He sewed my nose back on as if he did such things every day. (He does.)

End result: I was fine. No rabies, no infection, no lasting damage, and no one notices anything wrong with my nose now. Most interesting to me (apart from the obvious; the no-nose situation was inherently compelling) were the protocols in place for skin-testing incoming trauma patients, and by means of this checking for potential drug allergies. I noticed, too, the rigorous precautions they took to prevent nosocomial infections.

Dr. Sharma received me a week later in his outpatient office, a modest hovel amid a rat-ridden enclave of Delhi’s dark alleys. It did not look like the Mayo Clinic. But he and his staff had been every bit as skillful and competent as you pray when you walk into a hospital carrying your nose in a plastic cup.

As he removed my stitches, I asked him whether he’d been born with steady hands, or whether it was a matter of training. “Natural aptitude, I think,” he said. He gently finished the unstitching. “You must be careful for a short while not to jostle it,” he said, “lest it fall right off. Do please avoid the metro.”

I came away from the experience sold. In the major cities, at least, the state of private Indian medical care is now such that I’d recommend it above ours. India had come a long way since last I’d been there. It had been far from sufficient when I’d last checked, in 1996—and I’m afraid I checked rather closely that time, too.

In that regard, I soon after learned that there was a shopping mall in Bhubaneswar, and that it had been there for some years. To say that Bhubaneswar was not on verge of that when I visited in 1996 would hardly convey the drama of this news, but nothing would, so let’s stick with the dry phrase “rapid economic transformation.” Add the dry phrase “linear equations” too. But note the caveat: Those are not the ones I’d use when trying to model what happened there. On learning that Bhubaneswar had a shopping mall, the word that came to my mind was “logarithmic.” As in the Richter scale.

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Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum is a good book. Shantaram is a genuinely great book. Mumbai’s slums, as David learned by misadventure, are very real, and very fascinating. Books about Mumbai’s slums sell well and win literary awards. But that story is wildly incomplete unless you already know that India is also the best place to fly if ever you need cardiac surgery.

Doctor Devi Shetty, in the Wall Street Journal’s words, is “the Henry Ford of heart surgery.” His heart hospital in Bangalore is the largest in the world, with a thousand beds. He performs thirty major surgeries a day. They cost a tenth what they do in the United States. His family business, the Narayana Hrudayalaya Group, also offers discount hematology, pediatric surgery, neurosurgery, and organ transplants. In his spare time, Dr. Shetty devised the world’s cheapest comprehensive health insurance scheme, at 20 cents a month, for farmers in Karnataka. His Bangalore Health City—which also houses the world’s largest cancer hospital—runs at a significantly higher profit margin than the average American hospital. It is funded by private equity.

His success is not merely a matter of volume: He’s remodeled the hospital care system wholesale. His business plan is based on Toyota’s lean manufacturing methods. He says he was inspired by Walmart. His surgeons’ performance evaluations are not based only on the obvious—their ability to keep their patients alive—but on the time they take to finish an operation, the number of stitches they use, and the units of blood they waste. Shetty receives the balance sheet daily by text message. 

But surely, you’d think, this can’t be right? Wouldn’t you wish your cardiac surgeon to use exactly as many stitches as he deems medically necessary? After all, these are beating human hearts we’re talking about here, not midsized Prius hatchbacks. But the Chicago-based Society of Thoracic Surgeons ran the numbers—they have no interest in reporting these findings, so there’s no special reason to doubt them—and found that patient mortality thirty days after a Narayana Hrudayalaya coronary artery bypass graft was 1.4 percent whereas the United States’ average is 1.9.⁵      

My close encounter with Cujo—or my “deeply reported journalism,” as I prefer to think of it—wound up costing me less than a takeaway for two in Manhattan. The itemized bill:

• X-RAY NASAL BONES 375 RUPEES

• 2 INJ DICLOFENAC (VOVERAN) 1 UNIT 16 RUPEES

• SYRINGE 2 ML, 2 UNITS 10 RUPEES

• SYRINGE 10 ML, 1 UNIT 12 RUPEES

• NEEDLE BD 18*15***, 2 UNITS 8 RUPEES

• VAC RABIPUR 317.50 RUPEES

• INJ CLAVOX 1.2 GM 133 RUPEES

• 3 SUR INSULIN SYRINGE 7.25 RUPEES

About fourteen dollars. The costs for the operating theater and the surgical team were roughly on a par. 

In India, some 80 percent of healthcare is provided by private enterprise. Providers don’t have the luxury of performing the economic legerdemain that characterizes the US healthcare system and its opaque Byzantine dance among employers, insurers, and taxpayers. So they’re forced to be competitive. They have to think long and hard about how much to pay for equipment and other supplies. They’re a lot less likely to order tests only because they can. India is therefore leading the world in innovation in affordable healthcare.

Try using me as a metaphor for an aging population and see where the thought leads. I found it to be a surprising way of thinking about the problem of the aging West’s health care costs. Anyone who’s been hospitalized in the United States and then received a US$30 bill for an aspirin tablet will appreciate that nothing in the incentive structure of the American medical system encourages physicians to consider the cost of every stitch. Of course, the cost is paid—either directly, by the patient, or indirectly, in the form of higher insurance premiums or higher taxes. (I’ve just revealed the Great Accounting Secret of the Western World.) But only people who live in a country where it is well understood that nothing is free, not even the things everyone needs most, build hospitals like Narayana Hrudayalaya.

India’s specialty is what the management-school jargon-generators call “frugal innovation.” Kirsten Bound and Ian Thornton of the British-funded Nesta Foundation describe this as an ability to turn limitations—be they financial, material, or institutional—into an advantage. The argument is that it is precisely because India has so long been poor, wretched, and often illiterate that it repeatedly discovers ways to develop and deliver things without anything like an adequate budget, often in strikingly novel ways. This results, as they observe, in products and services that cost so much less that the rest of the world will change, and radically, as soon as it has access to them. And very soon they will, for frequently, as the authors note, these products “outperform the alternative, and can be made available at large scale.”

“Frugal innovation” is quite the fashionable management buzzword, and for good reason. Such innovations are found throughout the entire Indian system—from affordable cardiac surgery and crowdsourced drug discoveries to Bharti Airtel’s approach to cutting the cost of mobile phone calls. The model developed by Bharti Airtel is well known to business-school graduates. It resulted both in impressive profits and the cheapest mobile talk time in the world. The Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay has developed a prototype 10.1-inch netbook that costs less than a hundred bucks. The students who have been testing it report that it’s not half bad.

Here are things India can produce at a tenth the price we can: Cloud computing. Mobile phones. Online education. Meteorology. Nanotechnology. New digital platforms. Nuclear research. Space research. An indigenous prototype fast-breeder plutonium reactor. Research on thorium as fuel for nuclear power reactors. The instruments on board the 2008–09 Chandrayaan-1 probe, which found water molecules on the moon.

An example of very frugal innovation: Have you ever wondered what happens to in-flight meals that don’t get eaten? I hadn’t, either, until a gentleman appeared on my hosts’ doorstep with a lovely basket of nicely wrapped things that foreign people like to eat. Apparently, he’d done well enough with this business to become a significant landholder.

Thesis Three: We’re not nearly as curious about this as we should be. If we only could get our minds off those slums and stop being so damned patronizing, we’d see that India is doing a lot of things we should imitate.

I do understand how annoying it is when a bunch of Western marketing yutzes in California have the nerve to pretend that the miseries of life in a poor and corrupt country in fact represent some genius new management cliché—as opposed the tragedy and the outrage they are. When it comes to life in the Fashionable Developing Country of the moment, those people have no damned clue what they’re talking about it.

But I am not suggesting we engage in patronizing Western veneration of Third World backwardness or “different ways of knowing.” To the contrary. Like David, I am old enough to remember an India where the streets were full of lepers. “Streets full of lepers” is now the stuff of orientalist clichés. But they weren’t clichés, then. They were lepers. And the streets were full of them. Everything that India has done to transform this is worth admiring.

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Names of Indian states replaced by names of countries of the same population.

Have a good look at that illustration. If you want to sound stupid, fast, make a generalization about an 8,000-year-old culture and a country of 1.4 (or maybe 1.2 or 1.6) billion people. If you plan to take the express train to justified public ridicule, say that India is optimistic and entrepreneurial, claim that this means something, and leave it at that. It doesn’t. (Other signs that you may as well stop reading now would include: A claim to understand Hindutva; a suggestion that something in India equals something-plus-cow; a show-display of Indian Muslims as proof of the diversity and tolerance of Islam; explanations of Indian political life in terms of the confrontation of traditional society with modernity; the argument that the problem—whatever it is—isn’t ideological, but one of unemployment; the equation of caste with class; and any comparison of Modi with Cavour, Bismarck, Jefferson, Nasser, or Putin. By this point in literary history writers might be able mention snake charmers or fakirs and sound so meta-orientalist as to be clever. But probably not.)

So when I say that India is astonishingly entrepreneurial, optimistic, and creative, I emphatically don’t mean that all of India is this way.

But I can say this: six percent growth per annum in a country of a billion and half-odd people equals millions of people lifted into the middle class every month. Those numbers add up to excited, optimistic people and a mood that the West hasn’t felt for so long that it’s worth visiting just to know what it looks like and what we should be aiming for.

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Image by AMIT MEENA from Pixabay

Consider, too, how serious India is about science and technology education. India’s reverence for those with an education in the hard sciences was suggested by this terrible headline I spotted in the Times of India: “FIVE TECHIES AMONG 45 KILLED AS BUS CATCHES FIRE IN ANDHRA.” May they rest in peace, I thought, including the two infants and the 38 other souls who weren’t in the tech industry. They perished along with the techies, but weren’t as important, or so that headline might suggest.

The intimation is all the more awful for suggesting the truth. The techies, as they call them, are the people who will find ways to reduce the risk of that kind of accident in India. They are thus—in some real sense—more valuable to India. This is a logic no American would ever contemplate, which at once suggests all that is admirable about America and all that is dangerously naive.

Until 1997, four out of five graduates of the elite Indian Institute of Technology in Madras moved to the United States. But immigration law and economic opportunity is now pushing that talent out of the United States and back to India. Our loss. Their gain. Try reading these stories to get a vivid sense of it.

In 1970, the United States had three times as many university graduates in its workforce as India. The gap has now closed. By 2050, India will have more than 200 million graduates: twice as many as the United States; nearly as many as the US and China combined. What are Indians studying? Science, medicine, and engineering. Not a Postcolonial Interpretive-Dance major in sight. The number of highly educated Indians now exceeds the total population of France.

The Indian Institutes of Technology, or IITs, are India’s most famous educational brand. Five of them were established shortly after Independence and modeled on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The raw intelligence it takes to make it into one is vastly beyond anything it takes to make it to Harvard. The key: raw intelligence. It won’t impress them that you sat on the SPECPOL committee at the model UN or play the spinet harpsichord. The only way in is to pass an all-day math, physics, and chemistry exam.

Last year, 1.4 million Indians took it. Only 0.4 percent got in. Its graduates are the most intelligent and competitive people in the world. This is not because Indians are smarter as a people—nothing like that could be said of 1.4 billion people—but because the competition to enter these schools is so much fiercer than it could be anywhere else.

Competition in India is fiercer, period, and everything I saw in India suggests how fully Indians grasp this—and how fully Westerners fail to grasp it. My hosts organized a friendly cricket match for their mixed-sex visiting students at a local all-girls high school. The unprepared visiting students were game for a laugh until the all-girl India team thrashed them so hard that no one could miss the message: Indian students prepare to compete with the West. They take this very, very seriously. I was sitting next to the headmistress in the bleachers when the victory happened—and boy, did it happen fast. Her expression said so much that national pride compelled me to remind her that unlike those losers I was an American—a people who had likewise had fought to be independent of British rule, and who’d won it well before India had. I’m not sure what she made of that, but I hope she decided I might be okay for a white woman.

Every year, three million Indian students compete for a mere fifty thousand places at India’s top engineering colleges. If any other generalization about India is true, it’s this: Every Indian knows that education—and education alone—is the pathway to the middle class. Exactly as American higher education has fallen into terminal disrepute, Indians are scrambling like mad to get a serious education.

The first things Indians want, as soon as they can afford them, are mobile phones. The second is education. Few have a very clear idea what that entails, but they know full well it’s the route to the kind of job you get in Bangalore that makes you so wealthy that you can live in a nice house. They are incredibly motivated to get that. And soon many of them will.

Thesis Four: Indians are highly motivated to succeed and determined to be educated. (A vague generalization, yes, but hardly the worst you’ll find.) It is therefore reasonable to hope that when India becomes a superpower, it will solve many of the world’s worst problems.

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If India is a democracy, it is far from a model democracy. (Americans, these days, are in no position to be snooty.) But there’s a strong foundation in India for solid rule of law, even if it’s not there yet. In that regard, it does help to have been colonized by the British. It left India with an aspiration, at least, to be ruled by laws. How do I know? From the bookstores. Packed to the rafters with books about contract law, for one thing, as well as books about the principles of accounting and seismic engineering—books about things people who live in a country with a future want to read about. Someone of an optimistic nature could reasonably interpret this as: “We’re dead serious about turning this country into one that works.” I confess I am sentimental. When I walk into a bookstore and see volume upon volume of thick and impenetrable treatises about accounting and the principles of tort law, I get a warm, tender feeling. It’s not one I get looking at The New York Times’ bestseller list, by the way.

Don’t get too excited now, though, not quite yet, at least. Large parts of India are lawless, some parts to the point of being ungoverned. The country is simultaneously absurdly over-regulated and entirely unregulated. A big and contradictory place, as I and others may have mentioned. The “unregulated” parts might sound rather attractive to libertarians, and in some ways they truly are—though you’d better be in a part of the country that hits the sweet spot. Otherwise you’ll find out quickly enough why libertarianism isn’t as appealing as it sounds. Wherever the state fails to provide law and order, people find their own ways to solve problems. (Nepotism and bribery are the standard solutions.)

The point is this: When you say “BRICs,” drop the R. They’re only in it because they have nukes and they’re insane and people are rightly worried about that. The fact is that they’re dying out. China? Oh yes, they’re in it. But China is anything but the world’s largest democracy. There is no foundation there for democracy, nor rule of law, nor anything like it. Drop the C. And the B? Maybe. What’s their educational system like?

Only India, of the future’s superpowers, has any hope of emerging as a benevolent liberal democracy as we understand it. It’s the only one poised to do breakthrough science. It’s the only major emerging economy even remotely connected by history and language to Anglo-American liberal ideals. The opportunities for collaboration with India are huge. Who knows where they could lead.

Thesis Five: There is only one BRIC that might be anything like a natural friend or ally, and we need those these days. The ones who are studying like mad and conquering poverty and having elections—and having them more than once, indeed having them many times more—are the ones we should be courting.

As Peter Zeihan notes, India is not reliant on the US Navy. It could easily become a true superpower—a peer—without our help. Nor need it be dependent on foreign investment, although that surely wouldn’t hurt. All it needs to do is finish going through the Industrial Revolution.

It doesn’t need to become a colonial or a mercantile power. The natural resources it needs to be a superpower are already there—that’s why everyone kept invading the place, after all. What’s not there already can get there, because China has been doing all the unpleasant legwork, quietly killing people the in places no one looks and patiently building the infrastructural routes. Now you can easily get anything you need to India, if anything’s still lacking. India can piggyback on China’s brutal achievement, which, if Peter Zeihan is right, will be followed by its inevitable failure.

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Image by Innova Labs from Pixabay

We don’t need to kid ourselves: A hell of a lot is still wrong with India, too. This involves all the usual—and true—things people say about India, things concerning poverty, infanticide, rape, illiteracy, everything suggested by the phrase “open defecation,” and even, oh yes, suttee. Still. All of that. Then there is the bureaucracy that nearly defeated me from the start (just try to get a visa from a consulate that closes on every pantheistic holiday). Hindu fundamentalism is no joke. The Saffron Swastika is real and about as appealing as it sounds. Modi causes alarm for reasons that could seem trivial only to those who have paid no attention. Nor is the global trend toward the Putinization of democracy irrelevant. All of that is real.

So we don’t have to pretend. It’s not better than the West. Not yet.

But however flawed the “liberal” part of India’s liberal democracy may be, the cliché that India is the world’s largest democracy is a cliché for the usual reason: It’s true. India is right now holding a noisy, 44-day-long, seven-phase election. It is the largest election ever held in human history. Nearly a billion people will have voted by the end. I find this moving.

And India, unlike Russia and China, never resolved to exterminate its own elites. The making of money was never seriously demonized in India for all that long. That makes India a lot more like America than either China or Russia.

It isn’t insane to hope that India will get better use out of Modi than vice-versa. India isn’t Turkey. It isn’t Russia or China, either. It has a better record of escaping obvious authoritarian traps. It would be far more challenging to Putinize India than it was to Putinize Russia. Or Turkey. Or any of the long list of countries that have crushed our belief that the natural trend of history is toward liberal democracy. Remember the other cliché: India is ungovernable. That’s a good thing, if you’re hoping not to be Putinized. All Modi has to do, for India to keep doing better, is to do as little harm as possible.

Similar or not, India will soon be a superpower. That China will be one is a problem to be managed. That India will be? Not at all. We can’t be so suicidally multicultural that we fail to see and say this: India’s better. “Making friends with India” should be as central to our foreign policy as “competing with China.”

In fact, if we believe anything we say as Americans, we have to believe that. India has elections (over and over), a somewhat free-ish and certainly lively press (“Man gets penis stuck in toaster, rescued by fire brigade”) and a historic and linguistic connection to the Anglophone world and its ideals. China has nothing like a connection to our ideals.

If China is right about how best to run a country, we’re doomed—and we were from the start. We should save time, save ourselves, and skip right to the winning formula: “Capitalism with Chinese characteristics.” But if we don’t believe this, we have to believe that India has a much better hope of emerging from its industrial revolution as an educated, creative, open, tolerant, and prosperous superpower.

Thesis Six: That would be the best thing that’s happened to the human race in some time.

1. The spooky thing is that somehow my Internet browsing habits have convinced the Great Marketer in the Cloud that I would be tempted by endless advertisements for books, classes, podcasts, and seminars that promise to cure my procrastination. They’re marketing with taglines like, “Learn the time-management secrets of Fortune 500 CEOs.”

Does everyone see those ads? Every time I see those ads I feel guilty about whatever it was I did that caused them to appear. Could it be because my YouTube browsing history shows that I watched every single video on YouTube about Teddy and Dexter?

2. Don’t complain. They’re good paragraphs. It pains me that no one read them at the time.

3. Writing an accurate article about India is the reverse four-and-a-half somersault of foreign correspondence. The degree of difficulty is almost off the charts.

The problem—or one among many—is that we’re talking about a country of 1.4 billion people. Maybe. I say “maybe,” because if you look it up on the Internet, you’ll see that figure everywhere. You’ll see it so often that you’ll assume it’s a fact, the way “Delhi is the capital of India” is a fact. Then (if you’re me), you’ll find yourself standing in a huge crowd in India and thinking, “How exactly did they count everyone here? There are so many people in this country. That must have been quite difficult to do.”

And just out of curiosity, you’ll try to figure that out. Then you’ll realize the only source of information about Indian demographics that could even conceivably be connected to reality is the Indian Census. Who but the Indian government could conduct a census in India? No one. Anything short of a properly-conducted census would just be a wild guess.

Then you’ll learn that the government last conducted a census in 2011. That’s when the number “1.2 billion” number became an official fact. No one’s counted since then. So basically, anything you read about India now could be off by hundreds of millions of people.

This happened to me with every statistic I tried to nail down. I’d try to figure out where it came from and get tugged into quicksand. Total fertility rate? We don’t know. We’ve got figures on the bigger states. I reckon it’s safe to say it’s well above the replacement rate, because in no state where they’ve actually counted has it been below replacement. So maybe by now the population of India is 1.5 billion. Plausible. But the difference between 1.2 and 1.5 billion is a country the size of the entire United States. 

4. Note the significance of Indonesia. If India is generally neglected by the Western media, Indonesia may as well be in Alpha Centauri.

5. American patients are fatter and their diet is worse. But Indians smoke more and inhale more pollution. It’s hard to know how much of the difference may be attributed to superior surgical skill and how much to other factors, but it’s clear this hospital is very, very good at surgery.