Why India’s Public Debate Fails its Economy

Partisan shouting matches over growth, GST, and reforms drown out the nuanced discussion India’s economy sorely needs. For much of modern history, the economy has been too important to be left to economists—and too complicated to be left to politicians. That uneasy truth is being tested again. From Washington to New Delhi, the state of the economy has become the prime theatre of political combat. Since America’s “Make America Great Again” era ushered in a new age of tariffs and economic...

min read

Why India’s Public Debate Fails its Economy

Partisan shouting matches over growth, GST, and reforms drown out the nuanced discussion India’s economy sorely needs. For much of modern history, the economy has been too important to be left to economists—and too complicated to be left to politicians. That uneasy truth is being tested again. From Washington to New Delhi, the state of the economy has become the prime theatre of political combat. Since America’s “Make America Great Again” era ushered in a new age of tariffs and economic nationalism, economic arguments have drifted from the pages of financial journals to television studios and social media feeds. India has been no exception. The very vocabulary of economics has been co-opted by politicians seeking applause rather than understanding. A field which demands statistical rigour has been reduced to rhetorical ammunition in the battle for votes. Depending on who one listens to, the country is either “a dead economy” (as per US President Donald Trump, echoed gleefully by opposition leaders at home) or “the world’s fastest-growing major economy,” as the IMF insists. Every policy measure, from the Goods and Services Tax (GST) to demonetisation, invites the same binary ritual: a triumph for reformers or a catastrophe for citizens. The recent restructuring of GST slabs, which helped push festive season sales to record highs, is hailed by some as proof of economic vitality and dismissed by others as a token gesture too late to matter. Such ‘good-or-bad’ framing betrays an intellectual laziness. Managing a nation of 1.4 billion people with vast regional and class divides is a feat of complexity. To reduce its economic challenges to moral absolutes is to strip away the nuance that serious debate demands. India’s economic management, like that of any large democracy, calls for patient scrutiny, not soundbites. That scrutiny is often drowned out by partisan certainty, and an environment in which ideology substitutes for analysis and conviction trumps competence. Political patronage Oversimplification is hardly new. In 1991, when India’s foreign reserves had sunk so low that it had to mortgage its gold, policymakers abandoned decades of socialist planning and embraced privatisation. The reformers’ narrative was tidy: socialism had failed, and liberalisation would deliver salvation. But that argument mistook corruption for ideology. What collapsed in the late 1980s was not socialism itself but its bureaucratic caricature - the infamous ‘Licence Raj’ that throttled enterprise and enriched cronies. The backlash that followed produced its own extremes. The privatisation era of the 1990s unleashed growth and efficiency but also spawned some of the biggest stock-market scams in Indian history. The problem was never socialism or capitalism per se, but how both were distorted through political patronage. Yet, public discourse preferred to blame the ‘isms’ rather than the institutions that corrupted them. The same fate befell the Modi government’s farm laws in 2020. Proponents hailed them as a long-overdue liberalisation that would grant farmers the freedom to sell to private buyers, as they already do in sectors such as education, health, and telecommunications. Opponents branded them as a corporate land grab that would destroy rural livelihoods. What could have been a robust debate about implementation and safeguards collapsed into a street fight of slogans. The government, overwhelmed by protest and polemic, eventually withdrew the laws, making it another casualty of binary politics. Even the annual Union Budget, an exercise meant to calibrate the country’s economic priorities, has degenerated into a predictable theatre. The ruling party lauds it as “visionary and inclusive.” The opposition derides it as “elitist and inflationary.” Commentators feign “cautious optimism.” Few bother to examine the data or assess whether the budget meets the country’s long-term developmental needs. The missing middle While pundits squabble, genuine economic questions languish. How robust is India’s growth when its export basket remains dominated by low-value goods like textiles, gems, pharmaceuticals, while its imports include oil, semiconductors, and high-tech weaponry? How sustainable is ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ or self-reliance, when domestic manufacturing still depends on foreign inputs? Such questions require empirical honesty, not partisan loyalty. In truth, India’s economy is neither dead nor dazzling. A growth rate of around 6.5 percent in a sluggish global environment is no small feat. Yet structural weaknesses - from jobless growth to a narrow tax base and a fragile banking sector - persist. The IMF’s praise and the opposition’s pessimism both miss the point that the Indian economy is a work in progress, and neither miracle nor mirage. The need for sober analysis is all the more urgent because the global context is shifting. The same Western economies that once evangelised globalisation are now retreating behind tariff walls and subsidy regimes. From America’s industrial policy to Europe’s green protectionism, economic nationalism is back in fashion. India, once nudged into opening its markets, now preaches self-reliance. Today, ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ is not a choice so much as a necessity in a world where supply chains are weaponised. That context should inspire pragmatism. Instead, political actors turn every decision – be it GST, demonetisation, farm laws - into a test of ideological purity. Each becomes a litmus of loyalty rather than an opportunity for refinement. Economic policymaking, like democracy itself, thrives on iteration and feedback. But feedback has become impossible when dissent is dismissed as sabotage and support is equated with sycophancy. For democracies, such partisanship is dangerous. When the economy becomes a rhetorical battlefield, citizens lose sight of trade-offs and constraints. Every reform has costs and every welfare measure creates distortions. Yet the public imagination is conditioned to expect ‘free lunches’ - a fantasy that economists have spent decades debunking. As one cynical adage goes, if the road feels smooth, you are probably rolling downhill; if everything is coming your way, you are likely in the wrong lane. To rebuild trust, India needs a new kind of economic discourse – one that is grounded in evidence, open to compromise and separated, at least in part, from electoral arithmetic. Think-tanks, universities, and media institutions must reclaim the space ceded to partisan noise. Politicians, too, must learn that humility in economic reasoning is not weakness but wisdom. In the end, what India requires is not blind faith in any ideology but a realism that recognises complexity. The world’s fourth-largest economy cannot afford the luxury of intellectual shortcuts. History suggests that nations that persist with clear-headed, long-term policies, whatever their ideological hue, are the ones that prosper. Until India learns to discuss its economy without turning it into a partisan referendum, it will continue to mistake noise for debate and ideology for insight. And that, more than any fiscal deficit, is the real constraint on its growth. (The writer works in the Information Technology sector. Views personal.)

125 Years of Rise of the Maratha Power

Shoumojit Banerjee
2 hours ago
5 min read

Justice Ranade’s 1900 classic remains a foundational text of Maratha historiography that sought to reinterpret Maharashtra’s past as a disciplined national effort.

When Mahadev Govind Ranade published ‘Rise of the Maratha Power’ in 1900, he was better known as a judge and reformer than as a historian. Yet, this book (more accurately, a collection of essays), issued in collaboration with his fellow jurist K. T. Telang, became the founding text of Maratha historiography. In a landscape dominated by colonial chroniclers such as Mountstuart Elphinstone and James Grant Duff, whose narratives, to a lesser or greater degree, essentially treated the Marathas as shrewd adventurers in the ruins of Mughal rule, Ranade offered a strikingly different account. His interpretation of the Maratha nation was one whose edifice was built of moral purpose, social awakening and collective agency.

As he explained in his preface, his aim was “to present a clear view of the salient features of the history from the Indian standpoint” and to dispel “misapprehensions which detract from the moral interest and political lessons of the story.” The rise of the Marathas, he insisted, was “a genuine effort on the part of a Hindu nationality…to achieve what had not been attempted before.”

Ranade’s thesis, steeped in nineteenth-century moralism, gave regional and Indian history an internal logic. Yet the same moral fervour sometimes led Ranade to see continuity where later historians found rupture, and religious revival where evidence pointed to political calculation.

Ranade’s career explains much about his method. Born in 1842 and educated in Bombay, he absorbed the analytic habits of the British and European liberal tradition - Gibbon’s irony, Mill’s utilitarianism, Ranke’s critical method, Macaulay’s literary flourish - but turned them to Indian ends.

In 1891, he had devised, with Telang and others, an ambitious plan for a collaborative history of the Marathas. It never materialised, but the fragments became ‘Rise of the Maratha Power.’ His judicial discipline gave his prose its measured tone while his reformist temperament, shaped by the Prarthana Samaj (the socio-religious reform movement founded in Mumbai in 1867 by Dr. Atmaram Pandurang and his brother), gave it moral weight.

In the opening chapter of ‘Rise of the Maratha Power,’ Ranade, in discussing the importance of Maratha history, rejected the idea that the Maratha confederacy was a band of marauders who prospered by accident. Freebooters, he argued, could not found empires that lasted generations. According to Ranade, the endurance of the Maratha power for nearly a century showed that it rested on deeper foundations like language, religion, local institutions and, above all, a moral sense of collective destiny.

In a subtle assertion of indigenous legitimacy, Ranade pointedly reminded readers that the Marathas, and not the Mughals, were the immediate predecessors of the Raj in India’s political hierarchy. “The fact that the Maratha power, taking its rise in western Maharashtra, attained imperial supremacy over the continent of India for a century,” he wrote, “cannot but be a matter of absorbing interest to the British rulers of India.”

Ranade attributed the origins of Maratha power to geography and social organisation as much as to heroism. Maharashtra’s ridged landscape - the Sahyadri and Satpura ranges laced with hill-forts - had trained its inhabitants in the arts of defence and guerrilla war. Village panchayats and ryotwari land tenures had bred habits of independence unknown in other provinces. According to him, centuries of Muslim rule, far from extinguishing autonomy, had paradoxically honed it. By the seventeenth century, “a slow process of national emancipation was being peacefully worked up.”

Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, in Ranade’s telling, did not create this energy; he united it. “The power had already been created, though scattered in small centres all over the country,” he wrote. Shivaji’s genius was to consolidate these forces against a common danger - the Mughal advance southward. His sense of mission, “inspired by religious enthusiasm,” distinguished him from mere fortune-seekers.

For Ranade, religion was not fanaticism but social cement. The cults of Vithoba at Pandharpur and of Bhawani at Tuljapur and Kolhapur, the bhakti poetry of Tukaram and Ramdas - all supplied the moral voltage for political unity. Shivaji Maharaj’s interactions with these saints represented, Ranade thought, “the new aspirations of the time in intensified form.” The Maratha war of independence, therefore, was the political expression of a religious and social awakening.

Later scholars would contest Ranade’s cause-and-effect chain, especially the role of religion in the rise of Maratha power. G. S. Sardesai argued in ‘Marathi Riyasat’ (1915) that the religious revival followed, rather than preceded, political consolidation. Yet, Ranade’s larger insight, which was that ideology and organisation mattered as much as arms, has remained seminal.

The book’s later chapters read less like history than like moral audit. The later Peshwas, Ranade believed, had abandoned Chhatrapati Shivaji’s inclusive nationalism for Brahminical exclusiveness. Where earlier leaders had drawn strength from the peasantry and the soldiery, the Poona court degenerated into faction and patronage. “Parties within parties,” he lamented, destroyed the sympathy that had once bound classes together. Even the Dakshina charity, founded to support learning, had become “a grant generally to all Brahmins,” turning Poona into “a centre of a large pauper population.”

His diagnosis of military decay was equally stern. The adoption of European-style infantry under later Peshwas created mercenary armies devoid of national feeling. Unlike the old hill militia, these troops served only their paymasters. He observed that in assisting the English to put down Angre’s power, the Peshwas diminished the importance of their own navy while the neglect of the hill-forts that had been Shivaji’s backbone, symbolised a deeper rot.

Ranade’s argument culminated in a moral epigram worthy of a Victorian sermon: when a state limits its purpose to “protecting the cow and the Brahmin,” virtue decays and conquest follows “as a matter of course.”

Time has not been kind to all of Ranade’s conclusions. Maratha historiography has vastly advanced since ‘Rise of the Maratha Power’. Ranade’s comparison between the Maratha chauth and Wellesley’s Subsidiary Alliance overstated the analogy. Chauth, as later scholars such as Surendranath Sen showed, promised no real protection, and its function evolved only under Shahu.

Ranade’s likening of Chhatrapati Shivaji’s Ashta Pradhan council to the Governor-General’s Executive Council also strained credibility. Modern historians note that collective responsibility was only partly recognised in Shivaji’s system.

Ranade’s reading of religion as the prime mover of politics reflected his own reformist piety more than the evidence. The Maratha movement’s appeal, as later research has revealed, owed as much to local grievances, regional trade and the opportunism of warrior elites as to bhakti zeal. His insistence on moral unity occasionally blurred the distinctions among castes, sects and interests that made Maratha politics fractious from the start.

Yet, these are the inevitable blemishes of a pioneer. “Modern researches have made some of his conclusions untenable today,” admitted Dr. Surendranath Sen in 1925, “but the credit of pointing out a new angle of vision belongs strictly to him.”

That “angle of vision” transformed Maratha historiography. Later writers like Dr. Bal Krishna Rao Bahadur G.S. Sardesai and V.V. Joshi among them either refined or contested his framework, but none escaped it. Bal Krishna’s Shivaji the Great (1940) largely accepted Ranade’s interpretations, correcting only technical comparisons. Joshi extended his method to the whole eighteenth century in Clash of the Three Empires (1941). Sardesai’s New History of the Marathas (1946) retained Ranade’s sociological lens even while revising its chronology.

Revisiting the book on its quasquicentennial anniversary, one finds that Rise of the Maratha Power still remains valuable for its interpretation. Ranade’s Maharashtra was not just a province but a prototype for India - a polity in which geography, faith and self-government intertwined.

As a jurist who believed that freedom required self-restraint, and a nationalist who distrusted chauvinism, Ranade’s history was neither a hymn to rebellion nor a paean to empire, but a study in civic virtue.