03/14/2024
Investor and Financial Times columnist Ruchir Sharma expands upon the concept of India as post-modern and pre-modern, as brought to our attention by iSteve commenter JohnnyWalker123:
In a country [India] of 1408 million people, there are only 46.3 million people (3.28% of the population) who have salaried jobs in the formal sector, able to regularly contribute to their Employee Provident Fund.
Of these, only half earn enough to pay income tax, and a mere one-tenth of them contribute to 80% of income tax collected. That too not by choice but by compulsion, because of tax deducted at source for their salary bracket.
This is a policy choice and a desired outcome for the state.
The leaders of post-Partition “independent” India were so traumatised by rural taxation and famine at the hands of foreign tyrants and occupiers, and so antagonistic to native systems of taxation and governance as ‘Manuvadi‘ and ‘regressive’, that they were scared of creating a bottom-up ecosystem of formal employment, thinking that to the ‘subaltern’ social strata, taxation is always and automatically ‘oppression’.
When people talk about how much colonialists benefited from colonialism, they basically have one really good example: India.
Most places, such as in sub-Sahara Africa, the colonized weren’t that productive and/or were violently averse (as in Boston) to paying a lot in taxes to their distant rulers. In contrast, in India before the Industrial Revolution changed the world… forever, Indians were reasonably productive and were submissive about paying taxes to their rulers, often invaders from somewhere to the northwest.
For example, in Thackeray’s 1848 novel Vanity Fair, one of the few major characters with a paying job, Joseph Sedley, makes a huge amount of money annually by being the tax collector for the British East India company in a remote Indian district. This is an easy job, other than the risk of dying of tropical disease, because he inherited the tax collecting bureaucracy from the former Muslim Mughal rulers of India. They, like the Brits, had come from the Northwest.
A decade later, many Indians mutinied, but most of the time it was pretty easy to cajole/intimidate Indians into paying their taxes.
So, the post-1947 governments of independent India must have been leery of trying too hard to collect taxes from the Indian masses.
But this misses the fact that paying taxes is an essential form of identity-building and nation-building — it gives people a sense of ownership over the state institutions, which means they can demand better service delivery from the state and more people-oriented policies.
In its absence, the masses are instead reduced to begging (in the case of the silent majority, who like sheep, blow on the grass to ask its permission before grazing upon it) or extorting (in the case of the violent minority who honed their skills during foreign minority rule and Abrahamic Apartheid) their mai-baap feudal MP/MLA/DM for access to state patronage.
This meant the Nehruvian elites created socialism for the rich and anarcho-capitalism for the poor.
Instead of being able to fund universal housing, healthcare, and pensions for all citizens, like actual socialist countries, these were treated as feudal privileges that the state would grant to representatives of collective identities, as a form of state patronage to rent their loyalty.
Recently, I opined in Taki’s Magazine:
Around the world, there is something a little feudal or imperial about affirmative action programs, with the higher power deciding to grant, for reasons of its own self-interest, complex special privileges to various ancestries, classes, and other hereditary groupings.
Sharma goes on:
This is also why reservations [affirmative action government hiring] are seen as the panacea to all electoral ills — because government jobs are not about serving the country or achieving policy goals, it is about the king distributing titles, salaries, and pensions, to keep his vassals and tributaries loyal.
And then intellectuals complain, ‘why do these Indians take three baths a day and keep their homes spotless, but then go walk about in filthy streets, are they stupid?’, disregarding that owing to these policy choices, the state lacks the funds or incentive to deliver basic services while the public rarely developed a sense of ownership over public property.
As I wrote in one of my many 2018 reviews of genomicist David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here:
In an age of postmodern postnationalism that worships diversity, China is old-fashioned. It’s homogeneous, nationalist, and modernist. China seems to have utilitarian 1950s values. …
This Chinese lack of diversity is out of style, and yet it seems to make it easier for the Chinese to get things done.
In contrast, India appears more congenial to current-year thinkers. India seems postmodern and postnationalist, although it might be more accurately called premodern and prenationalist.
India is the land of diversity, which is another word for inequality. India is kind of a subcontinental-scale version of a Democratic-ruled American city, such as Baltimore, where world-class talent such as Johns Hopkins resides side by side with intractable social problems.
India puts much of its effort into higher education, while allowing its mass schooling to be awful.
Sharma wraps up:
Which is why they neither have well-funded public services at the grassroots, nor any pride or incentive in looking after public spaces as their own.
In fact, in a perverted form of Gandhian passive resistance, some people find great joy in breaking anti-littering rules, seeing them as ‘unjust oppression’ from a state that never did anything for them, and the state foolishly encourages this, feeling pride that the public are ‘smashing Brahmanical patriarchal norms’ such as hygiene and cleanliness.
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