Month: October 2023

A lightly edited version of this article, written with Karuna Gopal, appeared on Firstpost here.

On October 20, Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened the newest stretch of line on the metro in Bengaluru. A journey across India’s technology capital could have taken hours even on a good day. Now it takes 45 minutes. The same day, the Prime Minister also opened the first section of a new high speed railway system around Delhi. Excited Youtubers now post videos of themselves riding high above small towns in western Uttar Pradesh at 150 kilometers an hour. Eventually, the network will spread to 3 states. This will bring millions of new people, who live hundreds of kilometers from Delhi, into the thriving National Capital Region. That week, India also welcomed the first ship to a new deep water seaport in the south. It is the first transshipment port of its kind in India, built to compete with Dubai and Singapore.

That was just one week in the life of new India. Each day is part of the relentless march ahead. Each week that goes by without making something new, now feels like a waste. India is set for yet another year as the fastest growing economy, according to the IMF. A just released report by Morgan Stanley ranks India as their standout market, the first among all emerging economies. Since the growth numbers for the latest quarter came out, India’s GDP projections have been raised by the IMF, Goldman Sachs, Fitch, OECD and SBI Research. What a difference from 2013, when India was seen as a Fragile Five economy, public sector banks were struggling with bad loans, and people asked if Indonesia should replace India in BRIC. It is also a loss of face for naysayers like Dr. Raghuram Rajan who said India would be “lucky” to get “even 5 percent” growth this year. The IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook report comes with a simple message. Do not bet against India. 

The IMF’s big report is published twice a year, in April and October. Apart from compiling economic data from around the world, the report contains predictions for the next five years. The October 2023 report has been somewhat lost in the news cycle. Perhaps due to news of so much conflict in the outside world, or because of the festive season in India. So here is a summary. Because there is a lot to cheer for India.

India to remain the world’s fastest growing economy till 2028

By now, we have come to expect this. The IMF has upgraded India’s GDP forecast for 2023 to 6.3 percent. At the same time, they have downgraded China to 5 percent. The most exciting part is this. The IMF expects India to be the fastest growing economy till 2028 at least, growing above 6 percent every single year! Do you know what this means? It means that for 11 of the 15 years since 2014, India would be the fastest growing economy. For comparison, how many years were there between 2004 and 2013 when India was the fastest growing economy? Unfortunately, zero. 

In the last two fiscal years, India’s GDP grew 9.1 percent and 7.2 percent respectively. Most countries posted high growth numbers in 2021, as they bounced back from the pandemic in 2020. But very few could keep up the pace like India did. The United States grew 5.9 percent in 2021. But it came down to barely 2 percent in 2022. China posted 8.4 percent growth in 2021, but only 3 percent in 2022. The European economies showed a similar path, coming down from 6-7 percent to 2-4 percent. And in the next five years, they might only do 0-2 percent, sometimes even falling below zero. But India is expected to stay comfortably above 6 percent. In other words, the IMF is counting on India to lead global growth for a long time to come.

India became the 5th largest economy in 2021 itself

When India became the world’s 5th largest economy this year, there was a lot of cheer all around. But as it now turns out, these celebrations were a bit delayed. The latest data show that India had become the 5th largest economy in 2021 itself. India’s GDP in 2021 was estimated at $3.15 trillion. This was ahead of the UK at $3.12 trillion, and France at $2.96 trillion. 

This means that beyond a doubt, the last 10 years have been the most successful for India since independence. The Nehruvian style command economy adopted in the early years knocked India down from 6th largest economy in 1950 to only 12th largest by 1991. Things changed remarkably after 1991. But it was still slow progress up the world economic ranks. From 12th in 1991 to merely 10th in 2014. And now, India has jumped 5 ranks in just 7 years. 

The only question now is this. How soon can India jump two more places and reach the 3rd position? The IMF expects that India will become 4th largest in 2026, ahead of Japan. And then 3rd largest by 2027, overtaking Germany. 

Inflation in India to stay under control, around 4 percent

In the last several years, one thing that India has always done well is manage inflation. For inflation, the ‘comfort zone’ of the RBI is around 6 percent. This is entirely reasonable for a developing economy like India. The IMF projects that India will do even better, with inflation around 4-4.5 percent during each of the next five years.

During the recovery from the pandemic, much of the western world went through a wave of inflation. In the US, it soared at times above 9 percent, and above 10 percent in the UK. For any developed economy, such numbers are shocking. But in India, inflation never went beyond the 6-7 percent range. Further, the gamble with high inflation did not pay off for the West. In 2021, their economies did recover from the shock of 2020, but they lost steam in 2022 and 2023. GDP growth crashed to around 2 percent, and many countries went into recession. India has managed to keep inflation low, and still hold on to high growth. 

India’s $5 trillion goal is essentially on target

Of course, it is not just the global ranking of the GDP that matters, but also its absolute size. In this respect, India in 2019 had set an ambitious target of achieving $5 trillion in GDP in the next five years. But that target had been set before the pandemic. 

What happened then to the $5 trillion goal? The IMF says that India will reach this milestone by 2026. Or $4.95 trillion by 2026, if you would like to be exact. Like the rest of the world, India lost two years to the pandemic. But India bounced back strongly, and did not let things slip any further. In fact, with the $5 trillion goal now in sight, there is a new buzz about $7 trillion. First there were officials at J P Morgan, who talked of $7 trillion by 2030. A more precise number came from S&P Global Intelligence the other day, that of $7.3 trillion by 2030. Indeed, if India reaches the $5 trillion target by 2026 as predicted, a further increase to $7 trillion by 2030 seems well within reach.

The gap between India and China is finally reducing a little bit

In the geopolitical great game between India and China, the biggest headache for India is the much bigger size of China’s economy. In the 2000s and early 2010s, India did well. But China grew much faster, leaving India far behind. In 2004, India’s economy was 37 percent of that of China. By 2014, this had shrunk to just 19 percent! In other words, relative to China, India’s economy had been nearly cut in half. This was also the period when India’s economy was surpassed by Brazil and Russia, leaving India as the smallest economy among the BRIC countries.

Since then, India has managed to stop the decline. And get back a little bit of lost ground. The Indian economy is now up to 21 percent of that of China. Over the next five years, the IMF expects that India will consistently grow above 6 percent, while China will be stuck in the 3-5 percent range. If these projections hold, India’s economic size relative to China will grow to 25 percent by 2028. Still a huge gap. For India, this is a time for bold economic decisions.  

India has no room for getting complacent

As India has gone up the global GDP ranks in the last few years, some dangerous myths have been floating around. Some people say India just got lucky. Others say that India’s rise is inevitable. It will continue no matter what decisions we make as a nation. Clearly, these people do not understand the importance of hard work and good policymaking. Nor do they realize how difficult it is to rise to the top and keep going. Look at Japan. There was a time in the 1980s when people thought they would replace the United States as the world’s largest economy. But that never happened. Instead, China pushed them down to the 3rd position. This year, the IMF says that Germany’s economy has also overtaken Japan.

So you cannot take anything for granted. Especially not with an ever more powerful China to the north. India is doing extremely well, for now. But India will need years of good economic decisions and the right leadership in order to complete our rise to the top. As with any democracy, our fate is in the hands of our people.

A lightly edited version of this article, written with Vijita Singh Aggarwal, appeared in News18 here.

“In practice, the Hindu is certainly not tolerant and is more narrow minded than almost any other person in any other country except the Jew.” Jawaharlal Nehru wrote this in a letter to K N Katju on November 17, 1953. We are not surprised by Nehru’s outburst against Hindus. But why the dislike for Jews? The Jewish minority in India  is too tiny to cause such strong feelings. They must have been imported from somewhere. Nehru’s close associates like V K Krishna Menon were even more vicious. In a speech in Cairo in 1965, Menon told the Arabs not to throw the Jews into the sea. Because throwing the Jews into the sea would make it polluted.

From where did they learn this intense hatred? We are still watching the reactions to the recent terrorist attacks by Hamas in southern Israel. See the crowds bursting crackers in Toronto, New York and Sydney. These are dressed up as “Free Palestine” rallies. But their obvious aim is to celebrate the death of over 1200 Israelis. Outside the opera house in Sydney, the crowd raised chants of “Gas the Jews.” How is that a slogan for a free Palestine?

Here is a basic question. Are the Jews occupying anyone’s land? Why are the Jews even in Israel? Because they were oppressed and forced out of everywhere else. Quite literally so. In 1938, the countries of the world got together and had a meeting on the shores of Lake Evian in France. Everyone refused to take the Jews. America made a couple of concessions but did little. Canada said no. All the countries of Europe and South America said no. Australia said they were a white country and did not want to import a racial problem. The Communist USSR did not participate in the meeting, but refused to take in any Jews either. The Jews were on their own, left to die at the hands of Adolf Hitler.

The biggest religion in the world is Christianity, with nearly 2.4 billion followers. Next comes Islam, with roughly 2 billion. Another 1.5 billion people live in Communist states. These three forces do not agree with each other a whole lot. Except that each one of them has spent several centuries persecuting and trying to wipe out the Jews. Mind you that the number of Jews has never been more than 15 million. But there are 1.2 billion Hindus. One might ask how the struggles of the Hindus could be similar to those of the Jews. To understand this, we must look into the history of anti-Semitism. Here is an explainer.

Anti-Semitism in the Christian world

When talking about  anti-Semitism, the first name that comes to mind is Adolf Hitler. But where did the Nazis get the idea of packing the Jews into ghettos? For over 300 years, the Popes had ordered the Jews to be kept in a ghetto in the heart of Rome. The Jews would be locked in each night. Even water was scarce. The Popes also ordered the Jews to wear yellow hats, so that the Christian population would know not to mix with them. This is where the Nazis got the idea of making the Jews wear the infamous yellow star.

After the Italian state took over Rome in 1870, the Jewish ghetto was gradually abolished. But some fifty years later, the Italian state was seized by Mussolini’s fascists. The fascists secured the support of the church by giving back control of Vatican City to the Pope, and bringing strict anti-Jewish laws. The 1930s and 1940s saw a wave of anti-Semitism across Europe. After the Catholic Party voted for Hitler to become dictator of Germany in 1933, the Vatican quickly signed an accord with the Nazi regime. A network of fascist states came up on the continent, with close ties to the Catholic Church and the Nazi regime: Petain in France, Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal and Tiso in Slovakia. Many of these regimes survived the Second World War, and lasted well into the 1960s and 1970s, such as in Spain and Portugal.

Did the Church know everything about Nazi atrocities against the Jews? The Vatican archives on this were opened only in 2020, and the answer is a clear yes. But this had always been obvious. In one particularly infamous incident, the Nazi government rounded up some 1200 Jews in Rome in 1943 and held them in a building next to the Vatican. After two days, they were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp. Only 16 of them survived.

It should be noted that the Nazis and the Church had their differences. The Nazis were obsessed with the racial origin of the Jews. The Church focused on their religious conversion. But the end result of both was the same – more oppression of the Jews. During the holocaust, many Jewish parents had left their babies with Christian neighbors and local churches, in a desperate effort to save their lives. After the war, the Church decided that these Jewish babies were converts to Christianity, and refused to give them back to their families. In fact, it was not until 1993 that the Vatican finally recognized the State of Israel. 

Anti-Semitism in the Islamic world

You might wonder. If the Jews were persecuted in Europe, does it give them the right to take Arab land? On the internet, you must have seen that animated map of Israel since 1948. It seems to show Israel grabbing more and more land, leaving nothing for the Palestinians. That animated map is simply everywhere. Because that map is propaganda. It does not tell you that the Arab countries forced their Jewish populations to escape to Israel.

Once upon a time, Egypt had 80,000 Jews. At last count in 2022, there were just 3 Jews left in the country. Where were all the others supposed to go? Similarly, Iraq used to have 150,000 Jews. Today they have less than 5. Algeria used to have 150,000 Jews, today they have less than 200. Morocco used to have 300,000 Jews, today they have only 5000. Libya used to have 20,000 Jews, today they have none.

In fact, after the Second World War, the Arab world became a safe haven for Nazi officials escaping punishment in Germany. The Muslim Brotherhood organization in Egypt had secretly cooperated with the Germans during the war. After the war, Egypt also became the base for Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem who had recruited Bosnian Muslims to fight for Hitler. In the 1950s, Nasser became president of Egypt and ruled for nearly 15 years. Nasser was a holocaust denier. His successor Anwar Sadat had been imprisoned by the British for being a Nazi collaborator during the war. Worse, people like Nasser had much prestige in the 1950s and 1960s as leaders of the developing world. Nasser also enjoyed close ties with India. This is where the Nehruvians might have picked up some of their anti-Semitism. 

Anti-Semitism in the Communist world

In September 1970, the world watched in horror as terrorists blew up three planes side by side at Dawson’s Field airport in Jordan. The hijackers were from a terrorist group called the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Unlike what one might guess at first, the PFLP was not a radical Islamist group. It was a Marxist-Leninist group, led by a man from a Christian background. His name was George Habash. In fact, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) pays tributes to this individual even today.

The relationship between Communism and Jews has always been full of ironies. In the Christian world, they often worried that Communism was a “Jewish plot.” But the Communists also worried that there was a global Jewish plot against them! They used to call it “Jewish cosmopolitanism.” In the 1950s, the Communists held show trials in Czechoslovakia against supposed “cosmopolitans” and executed all of them.  On his part, Stalin had got rid of his Jewish ministers in 1939, because he was courting Hitler at the time for a military alliance. But the alliance between Nazism and Communism broke in June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin then allowed the setting up of a Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC). But as soon as the war ended, his anti-Semitic impulses returned. Stalin dismantled the JAC and began a full scale crackdown on the Jews. In fact, Soviet spies used a public appearance by the new Israeli ambassador Golda Meir in Moscow to track down supposed “cosmopolitans” within the crowds. By 1953, the Communist leadership was in a state of panic, believing that Jewish doctors were out to poison them all. The terms “cosmopolitanist” and “globalist” are often used as dog whistles for anti-Semitism even today. 

Interestingly, the anti-Semitism of Communists has roots in Marxist theory itself. Technically, the Marxists reject all religions. But Marx himself believed in the stereotype of the Jew as greedy and self interested. “Money is the jealous God of Israel,” he wrote in a viciously anti-Semitic essay that he called “On the Jewish question.” And Marx believed that his ideas would create a world free of greed – and the power of the Jews.

What can Hindus learn from the history of anti-Semitism?

Karl Marx was from a Jewish background. But he held anti-Semitic views. This would not surprise Indian Hindus. Much of India’s intellectual class is from a Hindu background, but still rabidly anti-Hindu. But the similarities between Hinduphobia and anti-Semitism do not end there. The world does not like to talk about what happened (and is happening) to Hindus in say Pakistan or Bangladesh. Just like they do not talk about the Jews who have been forced out of everywhere else in the Middle East. Generations of persecution led many prominent Jewish intellectuals to reject their identity and agree with stereotypes forced on them. Hindus must be careful not to fall into a similar trap.

Much of Hindu intelligentsia balk at public displays of Hindu identity. It is not uncommon for any outward displays of Hinduism such as a Tika or Mouli to be seen as distrustful or even mocked. It is no surprise that most research on Hinduism coming from major international institutions is on regressive acts such as Sati. Or that the Harappan language has not received enough interest and funding to be decoded. The popular cultural perception is that Hindus are regressive and superstitious. This propaganda has been very effective in making Hindus reject their own identity rather than see it for the attack that it is.

Because Hindus have been so cut off from their identity, it becomes difficult to highlight injustices against them. Hindus have been persecuted in Pakistan, Bangladesh and even Indonesia. However, the larger Hindu population in India has never taken a strong stance against these crimes. One could say that this is because of internalized Hinduphobia. Similar to what Marx may have experienced, making him want to hate his own heritage.

Over centuries of oppression, the Jews have learned that to have long lasting change, there must be swift and collective action against any form of anti-Semitism. They are vocal against anti-Semitic tropes online. In real life, they act by means of organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in the United States. A recent example of this collective action was when Free Palestine rallies at Harvard turned into anti-Semitic marches. Organizers of such activities were publicly shamed.  Students who participated lost job offers and scholarships.

Such collective action stops injustices from going unnoticed. Hindus must learn from this. But this cannot happen until Hindus acknowledge and accept their own identity. Much like Israel, India is often the target of genocidal hatred. Much like the Jews, the Hindus are faced with prejudice and damaging stereotypes. We must learn to recognize them when we see them. And to act against them every single time.