India is Broken
Ashoka Mody (Stanford University Press, 528 pp., $35, February 2023
Anyone who wants to understand India in 2024 should begin with India Is Broken, Ashoka Mody’s magisterial history of Indian economic policy from 1947 to the present. Mody’s passionately engaged book is not just a much-needed antidote to the enthusiasm for India’s growth rate in the West’s financial newspapers. It also doubles as a political history of independent India, offering a bleak but indispensable introduction to the country today.
Mody, an Indian American economist, explains why successive prime ministers, from Jawaharlal Nehru to Narendra Modi, failed their basic economic brief to stimulate India’s sick agricultural sector, generate jobs for a chronically underemployed citizenry, and make the young republic competitive in the global economy.
Mody’s account of the policy shortcomings of Nehru’s long tenure is a tour de force; he reveals how a leader committed to development failed to educate his people into a literate workforce and missed the opportunity to invest in the basic, low-tech industries that could have employed them. Particularly relevant as India heads into a general election that Mody’s near namesake is tipped to win is his assessment of Modi’s economic record.
As Western media largely praises India’s GDP growth, Mody critiques the prime minister’s signature economic initiatives and their impact on everyday citizens. These include demonetisation, intended to flush black money out of India, and the botched rollout of the goods and services tax, implemented to rationalise indirect taxation. The chapter on Modi’s abandonment of the poor during draconian COVID-19 lockdowns also illustrates with grim detail the fragility of India’s social contract.
Price of the Modi Years
Aakar Patel (Westland Non-Fiction, 496 pp., $27.95, September 2022)
For a book-length report card on Modi’s decade in office and how he has transformed India from a creaking democracy into an electoral autocracy, turn to journalist Aakar Patel’s Price of the Modi Years.
The book is the best kind of political reckoning: dense with facts and low on rhetoric. It documents Modi’s record on diplomacy, war, security, and the economy; his assault on press freedom and civil society organisations; his use of opaque electoral bonds to tilt political funding in his party’s favour; and his marginalisation of Indian Muslims.
Patel’s book is invaluable for its systematic listing of the riots, lynchings, and other forms of violence that Muslims have endured through the Modi years.
