Free On the Grand Trunk Road by Steve Coll Page A

have rebounded and reasserted themselves with impressive ability, strengthened not so much by the righteousness of their politics as by their positions of social privilege, whether inherited, acquired by force, or bought with money siphoned from or granted by the state.
     
    The Nehruvian state’s present crisis, which has produced so much talk of radical economic reform along democratic-capitalist lines in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, flows from several accumulated failures. After decades of egalitarian socialist rhetoric, the South Asian elites have failed to eliminate or even seriously reduce poverty or economic inequality. Per capita income remains pitiful, in the range of $350 to $700 per year across the region. Several hundred million people—a minority, but a large one—live in dire squalor. The South Asian economies have fallen badly behind Third World economies that tilted to capitalism earlier, even unwieldy and oppressive ones such as Communist China, not to mention the East Asian tigers of Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, which lately have been racking up annual growth rates nearing 10 percent. As their neighbors to the east raced on, the bloated South Asian governments fell so badly into debt internally and externally that they eventually found they had little choice but to slim down and tighten up. And of course, the socialist ideas that so animated Nehru and other South Asian leaders forty years ago have fallen into disrepute. Theorists such as India’s Prem Shankar Jha, who argues that the socialist elites in South Asia deliberately created shortages in their economies to enhance the profitability of controlling their governments, are helping, directly and indirectly, to write the reform agendas. It is a remarkable turnabout, although the elites are anxious to present it more as a form of continuity so as not to discredit themselves and the history they have made.
     
    In India, and to a lesser degree in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the impetus for capitalist reform is also rising from what has been arguably the state’s most important success: the creation of an expanding middle class. In Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the questions of what the middle class is and whether it has real strength are problematic. In Bangladesh, Nepal, and Afghanistan the middle class barely exists, although there are relatively small urban classes that sometimes wrestle for power with the old elite. But in India nowadays the middle class—one hundred million to two hundred million people who earn incomes large enough to permit savings, families who organize themselves around familiar Western concerns such as planning for college, providing for children, acquiring creature comforts—is broad, deep, simultaneously a bedrock of social conservatism and a vehicle for revolutionary social mobility and progressive change. What successful political economies exist in the world today—in the West, in Asia, and now the tentative embryos in Latin America and elsewhere—were erected atop the middle classes. To see India at the threshold of a similar achievement cannot help but inspire hope in anyone who feels sympathy for South Asia’s centuries of suffering. The Indian neocolonial elite likes to take credit for the middle class that swelled beneath it during the 1980s—15 to 25 percent of the population, depending on how you measure it. But truly, this was in many ways an involuntary and painful birth. And now the Indian middle class is showing the same ingratitude to its feudal parents that middle classes throughout history and around the world have done. The Indian middle class by and large wants opportunity, stability, a level social and economic playing field, and a share of power in a clean, forward-looking government, which these days means an orientation toward the internationally ascendant free market. It wants the corrupt neocolonial elite, Nehru’s wayward children, to step