Recasting India Read Online Free Page A

the Birla family, the overall ties of the Congress Party, which led the independence movement, with entrepreneurs never went very deep.
    The historian Claude Markovits makes this point in his excellent book
Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs: Indian Business in the Colonial Era.
He points out that Indian Marxist historical writing, often the dominant point of view, “stresses the limitations of the Indian bourgeoisie without treating it as compradore.” 4
    He writes:
    For these (Marxist) authors, the bourgeoisie could establish only a limited hegemony over the national movement, given an alliance with propertied elements in the countryside. The concept of “passive revolution,” borrowed by these authors from Gramsci, by which they define the Indian freedom struggle, serves to emphasize that neither the masses, in spite of their mobilization, nor the bourgeoisie, because of its own weakness, could give the national movement a clear direction for the radical transformation of the country either in a capitalist or socialist direction. The process was basically one of limiting popular initiative and maintaining the movement within limits that objectively suited bourgeois interests.
    Markovits says there are two problems with this reasoning. First, the Indian bourgeoisie barely existed as a defined class in pre-1947 (before independence) India, and the relationship between economics and politics in Italy was very different from the relationship between economics and politics in India.
    In India, the dominant ideology—which still had a powerful hold on the minds of even the members of the westernized elite—treated the economy as a simple function of the social and political order, and not as an autonomous domain. The attitude of the Congress leaders to Indian capitalists must be placed within this context. They believed in the primacy of politics over economics and therefore did not attach much importance to the precise nature of the economic regime of an independent India. They thought that the economy would somehow “follow” and that once the fetters of foreign domination were removed, it would become robust.
    It is this kind of loose nonchalance and lack of engagement that has, in some sense, led to the disconnect that exists today, so much so that in the 2014 elections, prominent political leaders regularly bashed the country’s top businessmen as corrupt and venal (sometimes quite correctly).
    Markovits points out that this pre-independence unease still echoes 60 years later. “Is it not possible to see in institutionalized corruption, the financing of political parties, especially the ruling party, by business houses, and state financial support to private ‘monopolies,’ the modern equivalents of the farming of tax revenue or of the granting of state monopolies to private firms?”
    This is why, in a sense, enterprise and social change so diverged in modern India. The tale of enterprise has been divorced from the larger sociopolitical tale of India—this is partly because some of the most successful entrepreneurial tales of the liberalization period that began in 1991, like the information technology (IT) companies such as Infosys, happened far away from the usual shenanigan-filled world of India Inc. (the term used to describe the aggregation of business houses in India). In fact, one prominent government minister even used to joke that the IT companies could grow swiftly because the government didn’t know much about them in their early years of the 1990s and 2000s.
    This is the story of that enterprise of the
aam aadmi.
India is unlikely to have a cohesive spring of revolt. How can we, in a country where land area under Maoist rebel control and shopping malls often rise simultaneously? What we are having is a daily climatic noon, somewhere in this vast nation, the total of V. S. Naipaul’s “million mutinies.” Except that it might not always be a