Tolerance and growth

CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA

The Economic Times MONDAY, JUNE 14, 2004

The British historian Paul Johnson has created a minor flap in desi circles with a controversial theory to explain India's economic boom. The catalyst, Johnson wrote in a recent article in Forbes , is tolerance. All societies flourish mightily when tolerance is the norm. And India is a good example of this because. “It is the nature of the Hindu religion to be tolerant and, in its own curious way, permissive.”

Johnson didn't stop there. The article had several other contentious assertions. In what appeared to be a thumbs-up to Hindu nationalism espoused by the previous dispensation, Johnson also took a swipe at the country’s Congress legacy, arguing that “under the socialist regime of Jawaharlal Nehru and his family successors the state was intolerant, restrictive and grotesquely bureaucratic. “That has largely changed (though much bureaucracy remains), he wrote, and the “natural tolerance of the Hindu mind-set has replaced quasi-Marxist rigidity.” The eminent historian appeared to have based his theory on just the latest growth figures.

From all accounts, Congressism and/or Hindutva had less to do with growth than plainold economic reforms. But Johnson writes, “India’s economy for the first time is expanding faster than China's. For years India was the tortoise, China the hare. The race is on, and my money’s on India, because freedom--of movement, speech, the media--is always an economic asset.” Were Indians any less free and any more shackled in the Nehruvian days when it's 3 per cent growth was mocked, ironically, as the ‘Hindu Rate of Growth?’ And does China, galloping at 9-10 per cent now, have the freedom of movement and speech now?

Evidently, Johnson's objective was to show that bigotry and intolerance, especially in Islamic countries, is a dampener for growth. But even there, the theory does not hold consistently. In our own neighbourhood, Pakistan, not exactly the embodiment of tolerance, is growing despite its ills (sure, helped by vast infusion of capital). The Hindu Republic of Nepal isn’t growing as much. Surely, there’s more than one explanation for economic growth.