Ram Guha: Thirteen years on, preening over the ‘India Story’ has been replaced by a sense of gloom

On August 15, 2007 – the sixtieth anniversary of Indian Independence – I published an article in the Hindustan Times about how our country was doing. At that stage, there was much talk about India being an emerging superpower. China had already made its mark on the international stage; and it was apparently now our turn. The 21st century was to be an Asian Century, where the rest of the world would watch with wonder and admiration while China and India dominated the spheres of economics and politics much as the United States of America had in the 20th century and Great Britain had in the 19th century.

These exultant anticipations of our imminent global greatness had two principal sets of cheerleaders: entrepreneurs in Mumbai and Bangalore and editors in New Delhi. The previous year, these groups had pooled their energies into hosting a splendid show at the World Economic Forum in Davos which boasted of India being the “World’s Fastest Growing Democracy”. The last word of this tagline was a sly dig at China: it signalled to American and European firms that their employees would find India a much more congenial place to live and work in while, at the same time, getting...

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