There is a consensus -- history is a winners' narrative, after all -- that India chose the wrong economic ideology and hitched its fortunes to the losing side after 1947. Credit is generously allowed for its many and impressive individual economic achievements of the last 50 years, not least a huge industrial base, foodgrain self-sufficiency and a ranking among the top half-dozen economies on purchasing-power parities. But the bottomline is that 50 years since 1947, a third of the world's poorest live in India and that it cannot even keep all its people fed. Ironically, from the vantage point of today's economic theology, some even of the traditionally touted economic achievements seem diminished. Thus now that comparative advantage has supplanted self-sufficiency as the economic slogan of the day, food self-sufficiency seems like wasted labour. Greater wisdom could have been in financing foodgrain imports with a focus on exports.

Seen through the prism of the Nineties, India has little to boast of economically in the last half-century. There is no denying that its economic performance has been diminutive in relation to what might have been. Nevertheless, there is some absurdity in measuring the achievements of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies with the yardsticks of the Eighties and especially the Nineties. India made the wrong choice after Independence, but it has been insufficiently stressed that it was not an outlandish choice at the time. Socialism's future, and that of the Soviet Union, looked bright, and Jawaharlal Nehru was by no means alone in misreading the future. India is far better off than some others who made the same mistake. Fifty years since Independence is an appropriate time to acknowledge the gigantic mis-step, but it is also a good time to resolve not to be weighed down by it, especially when things are clearly on the upswing.

Upswing, yes. But a delirium of expectation, such as that unleashed after 1991, can only lead to severe disappointment. When it set out to reform after four decades of unrelenting control and stifling of enterprise, India put about an audacious lie about itself. Here, it was suggested, was another Asian tiger waiting to spring. The comparison was awe-inspiring -- and quite unjustified. As sometimes happens with truly audacious lies, this one was swallowed by a world eager to tap the great ``potential'' of the Indian market. The euphoria has since been tempered. If the cynics are right, India's outstanding potential for the last 50 years may not be realised in the next 50. What is remarkable is that the worst prophets of doom are at home, the rest of the world exuding greater, though subdued, optimism. There is no straightforward answer to the question: who is right? But India has, consciously, taken the path of gradualism it probably has no choice. The trouble is that too much gradualism can mean a loss of momentum. Yet there are reasons for optimism. One is governments' curtailed freedom to backtrack, which will become more pronounced in future. The other is the social and economic revolutions underway in India. A newly respectable consumerism, a newly prosperous rural population, individual enterprise unleashed by a mild dose of reform, and the winds of competition: all these add up to the cheerful chaos of capitalism and make for a historic opportunity to right a historic mistake. Let India not bungle it this time.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.