Free On the Grand Trunk Road by Steve Coll

complicated business. My own view, in brief, is that there were many successes but more failures, and that some of the failures were catastrophic.
     
    South Asia’s ever-expanding socialist bureaucracies, stretching their tentacles into far corners of the subcontinental hinterlands left to rot by the British, managed some improvements in literacy, health care, life expectancy, and agriculture. In a few places, such as the Indian state of Kerala and Sri Lanka, these improvements were spectacular. Literacy and life expectancy rates soared to become the highest in the world among comparably impoverished countries. But in most parts of the subcontinent the plans came to little, as slothful bureaucrats and abusive politicians siphoned off money or watched programs decay from neglect. Agricultural advances eliminated the threat of famine, which still gnawed at the subcontinent as recently as the early 1970s. But productivity growth was slower than in some other developing areas and was unbalanced. In India employment expanded with the new five-year plans, but the planners tended to direct resources into factories and power plants and sugar mills controlled by members of their own families, castes, and clans, so the pattern of development was sometimes duplicative. At least the factories were built. Private enterprise, forced to adapt and mutate in order to survive amid the strangulating public sector, nonetheless grew and sometimes even flourished. In contrast to what happened in some African and Latin American countries during the 1970s and 1980s—and despite excessive spending, absurd subsidies, great legions of unproductive public-sector employees, and the overall creep of corruption and rot—the bloated state did not implode. It kept on chugging, generating economic growth rates that varied between pathetic and adequate, but that contrasted with the shrinking economies of some Third World countries that had stood with British India at the postcolonial starting line following World War II.
     
    On the whole, independent India did better than its South Asian neighbors, in part because it preserved its constitutional democracy, and thus its elite was more able to creak and bend and respond in a constitutional, evolutionary way to the injustices and stupidities and competing claims inherent in the new form of feudal, neocolonial socialism. The conventional wisdom these days in Pakistan, the Islamic state carved from Hindu-majority India in the bloody horror following the 1947 partition, is that Pakistan might have done just as well if its founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, had lived as long as Nehru did. It is certainly true that Nehru laid crucial democratic foundations for India between 1947 and 1964. It is also true that the successors in Pakistan to Jinnah, a lawyer and secular democrat who fell ill and died shortly after independence, botched things badly, leading to a series of military coups from which the country has yet to fully recover. The catastrophe of 1971, in which Pakistan split in two and the new nation of Bangladesh was formed in the midst of war and natural disaster, is the most gruesome testimony to the sometimes extreme mendacity of the Pakistani elite that took charge after Jinnah’s death. Sri Lanka’s feudal socialists did no better, bequeathing to their tiny island paradise one of the century’s most brutal civil wars, in considerable part because they hoarded the proceeds of the postcolonial state for themselves. The Indian elite has tended to look down its nose at the collection of militarists, plantation owners, and corrupt industrialists running the nations on its borders, but this attitude can be difficult to justify, especially if you wander through Kashmir or Punjab or the northern urban slums. Nonetheless, one remarkable thing about the state across all of South Asia has been its resiliency. Even amid catastrophes such as the ones in Sri Lanka and Pakistan, the bureaucracy and the political class