this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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With people like Modi and Bulldozer Baba in charge, India's economic future is bleak regardless of how much you agree to be whipped.
Unfortunately being good / not authoritarian and economic outlook do not go hand in hand.
India has been the fastest growing major economy since it started aligning with the West and embraced the Western capitalist mantra.
Even with profound income inequality, the living standard for the average person in urban India is completely different from 10 years ago.
I doubt that rate of growth changes anytime soon with or without Modi.
The Berlin Global Dialogue was a few weeks ago. The CEOs of Airbus and BMW were gushing over entrepreneurial spirit in India and India's demographic dividend (having more young than old people) which nearly guarantees economic growth over the next 10-20 years.
Economists globally have estimated India will be a high income nation by the late 2040s on its current growth trajectory.
First of all, yes it does go hand in hand. The fall of the old monarchy and the fight against colonization led to their growth as an independent nation. The abolishing of the caste system has decreased the widespread inequality.
Second, they've barely aligned with the west at all. One of the regions of India is the largest and most successful democratic socialism/communist to ever exist, since the USSR and CCP were both autocracies.
Which region are you referring to and how are you defining success?
America has had a race based caste system for most of its history. It arguably still does today according to Pulitzer prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson (in reference to her book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents)
None of this stopped it from becoming the wealthiest nation on earth. It became the wealthiest nation on earth before it let black people use the same bathroom facilities as whites, before it let women acquire their own credit, even before outlawing marital rape.
Authoritarianism / subjugation of disenfranchised groups is not mutually exclusive to wealth, even shared wealth.
Saudi Arabia remains a monarchy to this day and is wealthy because 1) America had no issue with a monarchy holding power if it meant access to oil and 2) America spent decades helping extract and then purchasing that oil. You'll see that social progress / lack of authoritarianism were not a part of the equation there.
Saudi Arabia is the poster child of inequality and is regularly hostile to world powers, only maintaining independence by playing both sides an in infinite proxy war between eastern dictatorships and the free world.
So we consider India's growth a success even when we know it's being built on the backs of the underpaid? Like, if they were actually feeding people into a concrete mix to build walls and roads, it's the only way India's growth can be more strongly tied to abuse of the working class.
If their success is by all but eating their own, can we call that a success? Can we call that growth without drawing parallels to rising humanitarian debt like a gambler's bank account? They're spending the lives of their workers the way Ai companies spend investment money, with no escape function to get out of the loop.
Did not the two wealthiest and most powerful nations on Earth today have the same trajectory?
Workers rights weren't exactly pretty in the US in the early 1900s and we've witnessed the human cost of China's development in our lifetimes.
The way I see it you have two (simplified) options. You can try to to go slow and do it a bit more perfectly or go fast and get there sooner.
India tried to go slow. It spent 40 years post independence being isolationist and quasisocialist. What did it get for that?
The Western capitalist/neoliberal world order didn't see value in it so what India got was what was later termed by Indian economist Raj Krishna as the "Hindu rate of growth" ie. 4% GDP growth annually (underperformance for an emerging market).
India has since embraced the neoliberal world order which makes it a friend of Western nations economically. This means it's now growing at a rate of 6 to 8% annually and on track to be a high income nation in 20-25 years. Millions have been pulled out of poverty and millions more will be still.
Do I like neoliberalism? Of course not. But the richest nations on earth make the rules and they've made it very clear that you can either play by them and have some of their wealth make it to you sooner or reject their framework and die in poverty and squalor.
Do I think this is an ideal situation? No its not. In an ideal world India could provide advanced economy level worker protections and still grow at the same rate. The problem is the richest nations on earth see India's monetary value as its young, more affordable workforce. If India refused to bring that to the table, the timeline on which it would achieve becoming a high income nation would extend substantially.
There are other nations where people aren't treated like chattel
Doubt they are of the size and diversity of India which makes things far from simple. Exaggeration aside, people are not chattel in India.
If you're referring to the four Asian tigers:
Two received substantial aid from the US post WW2.
More predictable terrain and abundant coastline (relative to size) make an export based model (selling goods to the West) more feasible.
Small population size and less linguistic variability makes central planning (when it comes to education and skills building) more effective on a shorter time scale.
Ultimately India's economic growth post WW2 was harmed most by