You don't have to be a socialist to see the validity of India's welfare schemes, like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which provides day labor to Indian farmers during idle periods. The rising tide of urban economic growth does not lift the boats of the rural poor in India. The same is true with India's incredibly elaborate system of "reservations," which provide slots at universities and in government jobs for disadvantaged groups like Scheduled Castes and Tribes. In a system in which hierarchies are as deep-rooted as they are in India, social mobility will not come about simply because of the pull of economic opportunity. But India's welfare schemes are wildly wasteful. Rajiv Gandhi, Indira Gandhi's son and India's most technocratic prime minister, famously asserted in the 1980s that only 15 percent of welfare payments actually reached the poor; the rest went to bureaucracy or "leakage" -- i.e., theft. Absent the sort of reform which the pro-market wing of the party advocates, this sort of bureaucratic statism will kill the golden goose of economic growth.
The "pro-poor" vision is the heart and soul of the Congress. "We give voice to the voiceless," Meenakshi Natarajan said to me, quoting Nehru. Rajiv's widow, Sonia Gandhi (he was assassinated in 1991) is a committed socialist; their son and heir apparent, Rahul, is deep-dyed in the Congress tradition. And many Congress officials think the party went astray when it liberalized the Indian economy in 1991. You can still get into arguments with them about whether GDP growth even matters. And whatever its merits as economic policy, pro-poor policy works very well as politics: scarcely anyone doubts that Congress won in 2009 thanks to programs like the employment scheme. There's a reason why Chidambaram found room for the food security program.
But the amazing thing about political life in this country is that many Indians are convinced that India is sui generis. The fact that something works or doesn't work elsewhere tells you nothing about India, because no other place is like India. I often get into arguments here where I find myself defending, say, India's admittedly corrupt and patronage-ridden democracy on the grounds that things are no better, and perhaps worse, in Brazil or Indonesia. "Brazil!" someone will sneer. "The whole population of Brazil could fit into UP (Uttar Pradesh, which has 200 million people)!" And woe be unto him or her who thinks to compare India favorably to Pakistan -- as if that hive of pathology bears comparison to the world's largest democracy. No, India can only be judged a success or a failure in comparison to itself.
So, how is India doing compared to itself? India suffers from a bad case of Greatest Generation envy, since Jawaharlal Nehru and his team of rivals really were great men who delivered India safe and more or less sound through the storms of Partition and the threat of fragmentation. But even leaving nostalgia aside, Indian politics, as I wrote last week, seems to have lost its capacity to represent national aspirations, and seems to be slipping into a phase of regionalism and of weak central government. So in that respect at least, not so great.
The economy, however, is another matter. India has been a far, far better place since it left behind Nehru's infatuation with state control of the "commanding heights" of the economy. The budget now available to India's central planners -- yes, India still has a central planning commission -- is 15 times greater than it was 20 years ago. That buys a lot of help for the poor, as well as for everyone else. Congress had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the late 20th century. Still, the party has been in power for 14 of the last 20 years.
The auguries for 2014 look very bad for the Congress -- though it's not quite clear just who they look good for. Somebody else is likely to have a chance to try their hand at running India's economy; possibly a party more unambiguously committed to market-oriented policies, like the right-leaning (and Hindu nationalist) Bharatiya Janata Party. Maybe they'll prove that what works in other places works in India too. On balance, I doubt it.
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