India

The 'Modi Wave' that swept Prime Minister Narendra Modi to power in the 2014 national elections experienced some setbacks in 2015, with major defeats for his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Delhi and Bihar state elections and retreats on key elements of the government's reform agenda. Meanwhile, threats to freedom of expression increased, including intimidation of and attacks against writers, journalists, academics, and bloggers by Hindu extremist groups.

Our democratic British cousins in India in the Eighteenth Century must have learned their trade from Pizarro and Cortez. Edmund Burke called them "birds of prey and passage." Even the directors of the East India Company admitted that "the vast fortunes acquired in the inland trade have been obtained by a scene of the most tyrannical and oppressive conduct that was ever known in any age or country." Describing a journey, Warren Hastings wrote that "most of the petty towns and serais were deserted at our approach"; the people ran off into the woods at the mere sight of a white man.

Bright argued that the [Indian] mutiny of 1857 was caused by the ineptitude of colonial government. Capable Indians were excluded from the administration of their own country, positions being allocated instead by personal favor. Bright assailed the economic management which imposed onerous taxes on the Indian peasantry, stunting development to maintain a vast, inefficient Indian civil service ... He also saw the potential for conflict in a country of "twenty nations, speaking twenty different languages," and argued for a confederacy of smaller states.

Posterity's debt to the great civilizations of antiquity is enormous, but this legacy can hardly be regarded as consistently libertarian. Students of the centralized managerial autocracies of Egypt and Persia ... or of the rigid caste system of India will examine the records of these societies in vain for ideas and institutions specifically favorable to liberty. In the case of India, Buddhist criticism of violence and of caste distinctions never developed into a full-fledged critique of political power, perhaps because Buddhist teachings emphasized renouncing the world, rather than reforming it.

Private investors here would gladly pour funds into a country like India ... But they fear that the Indian government may one day nationalize the enterprise ... Who will compensate whom under this plan? The United States government would pay citizens for their investment losses, and our government would then "settle with New Delhi." Now the simple solution would seem to be for New Delhi to settle with the private investors in the first place, directly. Why set up a useless intermediary? New Delhi could just mail the check to each investor at his address in India, thus compensating him directly ...

In [1971], ... democratic India, was nonaligned but friendly with the Soviet Union. When India won independence from Great Britain in 1947, the subcontinent was partitioned into India and Pakistan. But Muslim Pakistan itself was divided into east and west with India in between ... [In March 1971, after a military crackdown in East Pakistan] 10 million refugees poured into India, "where they died in droves in wretched refugee camps." The onslaught helped spark a war between Pakistan and India (whose hands were also not clean), which ended in a decisive victory for India ...

An example of the willingness and versatility of educational enterprisers comes from India, where computer training in the state universities is poor, producing graduates who are unemployable in today's computing industries. Private enterprise in the form of NIIT (the National Institute for Information Technology), however, offers superior training ... and employers now regularly state in their job advertisements that they are seeking a GNIIT—a graduate of NIIT ... On NIIT campuses, all rooms and computers are in use constantly from morning to night—very different from state institutions!

Borlaug: ... The projections in food production in India continue to go up on the same slope. When we transferred the Green Revolution wheat technology to India, production was 12 million tons a year. Last year it was 74 million tons ... Once in a while production may go down by a couple of million tons when there's a drought, but in general it continues to go up. Also, the increase in production has occurred with very modest increases in cultivated area ... India has produced enough and sometimes has a surplus in grain. The problem is to get it into the stomachs of the hungry.

Smith: Are the economic premises in America different from those in Asia? ... Milton Friedman finds a remarkable contrast between Hong Kong and India which latter country, he says, received political freedom from the British but subsequently witnessed little in the way of economic freedom. The democracy established in India was used subsequently to churn out legislation that imposed extensive controls over imports, exports, foreign exchange, prices and wages. The result, Friedman argues, is that the standard of life for the great bulk of the Indians has hardly risen compared with 40 years ago.