The Decolonization of the Indian Mind

India is in the midst of general elections as potentially 670 million citizens cast votes at 700,000 polling places. For years, this gargantuan effort was one of the few bright spots in a perennially blighted land. Widespread corruption, inefficiencies stemming from a massive and wasteful public sector, and a post-colonial aversion to Western innovations left the subcontinent lagging in key indicators for modernization.

But as former CEO of Procter & Gamble India Gurcharan Das wrote in yesterday's Wall Street Journal ($), economic growth and opportunity are changing campaign rhetoric so that there's less talk of caste and religion and more about building stable and prosperous lives. As Mr. Das reports:

"If its economy continues to grow at this rate for the next few decades -- and there is no reason why it should not -- then a majority in the south, west and northwest should be middle class by 2025. The poorer Eastern states should get there by 2050. Had India's GDP growth continued at the pre-1980 level, Indian incomes would only have reached American per-capita income levels by 2250; but at the current rate India will reach it by 2066. It is thus increasingly possible to believe that India will finally be able to conquer its age-old worry over want and hunger."

He attributes much of what he calls a newfound "self-assuredness" to the decolonization of the Indian mind. An illustration is the widespread acceptance of English as one of the Indian languages rather than as an imposition from Britain. Das says that when he was growing up, "it mattered how you spoke; you could speak rubbish but you had to do it with the right accent. Today, young Indians in the new middle class think of English as a skill, like Windows." This in turn has led to the spread of "Hinglish," a mixture of Hindi and English.

No one is claiming that all's well in India, or that corruption and inefficiency still aren't serious problems. Nor should we assume that Hindu nationalism, resurgent in the recent past, has been permanently quelled by economic growth. But the infrastructure of self-governance left by the British is expanding into the economic realm. Rule of law is sufficiently strong to allow private property to become widespread (a stark contrast to the almost lawless Russian experience, where well-connected apparatchiks became oligarchs almost overnight). A growing Indian middle class has learned enough basic economics to know that rising living standards aren't achieved by state edict or anti-colonial posturing, but by allowing individuals to profit from their own industry and intelligence.