2. Dilip never explicitly questioned the reforms in his article.

3. A variant of Mishra’s NY times articles was first published in the Hindu.

4. Pankaj Mishra makes no such argument: please reread his article. You’re drawing it as an inference. Which makes surprising your vitriol against the equally valid inference that he is communist-pinko scum who wishes to cast doubts on reforms (Again I draw this inference from his history of articles, not just this one)

Falstaff, I admire your spirited defence of Pankaj Mishra, he of the everestine intellect bestowing interesting problems for our perusal;

the mistake is all mine for I have not given any systematic evidence drawn from his assertions from his past articles, which you’ve professedly not read, nor have I properly pointed out the evidence even from the current article.

I’ll try to do that in a post soon; meanwhile, as you say, we’ll have to agree to disagree

[btw, I agree with your positions on the political implications of not broadening the stakes of the populace in the reform agenda. ]

1) Mishra is not offering anecdotal evidence based on his personal railway trips. He’s citing perfectly respectable empirical studies. Sure, he’s cherry-picking the evidence to make his case, but this is more than his own personal musing

2) The point of Dilip’s article is explicitly to question the reforms and claim that they’re not working. The point of Mishra’s article (or at least its stated purpose) is that Western media has been too quick to celebrate India’s rise, when the reality, as we all know, is nowhere near that rosy and there’s a long way still to go.

3) Mishra’s article is targeted at the average NYTimes reader. In your first comment you say that his piece is ‘zero information’. But however obvious his points may be to you or me I seriously doubt they’re obvious to the average New Yorker. I doubt even more that the average NY Times reader is going to come away from that article thinking “Oh, India should turn back its reforms and go socialist again.” So to Ravikiran’s argument – it’s extremely unlikely that anyone reading Mishra’s article is going to come away with interpretation 1.

4) Mishra has an argument to make. He’s saying that unless reforms reach the masses, civil unrest will rise and political momentum will go against pro-reform politicians. He’s also suggesting that we simply don’t have enough resources to make the dream of Western style prosperity come true for a population the size of India’s, so that we need to start thinking seriously about what our aspirations from the reforms are. He’s not simply questioning whether reforms have worked so far, he’s asking where we think we’re going to get once they’ve worked, and whether that’s credible or not. Both of those are, in my opinion, arguments well worth thinking about. Dilip, in the article you point to, says nothing remotely as intelligent – he’s just saying there are too many poor people and he doesn’t like it.

I agree entirely with what Ravikiran and Nitin are saying in response to Dilip’s post. I’m simply questioning your assertion that that argument is related and instructive to this one. Dilip and Pankaj Mishra are not the same person. They do not share a point of view.

You say I’m being naive (it’s naivete with a single t btw) to take Mishra at face value. I say that you’re being paranoid and it’s unfair to condemn someone by reading into their words something they haven’t actually said. The only way reasonable way to resolve that, in my opinion, is to poll a random set of NY Times readers who read the Op-Ed piece and ask which interpretation they took away from that article. Since we’re unlikely to be able to do that any time soon, let’s just agree to disagree, shall we?

At the very least there seemed to be a detached curiosity as to why people were so pissed off. Hopefully, you now know.

With regards to reforms, you were clearly quite pro-reform from your post; unlike confused, I never tried to “convince” you of it, because there was no need to.

I only had issues with your taking of what people like Mishra say at face value: I reiterate, this is naivette and not objectivity.

Here are some related and instructive incidents:

About a year back, Ravikiran brought the exact same points as your post vis-a-vis an article by Dilip: clicky.
Only in it, he called out on Dilip’s mischief; there was even a discussion in some other blog, which I’ll try to dig up, in which people struggled to corner a splendidly dodging and equivocating Dilip into admitting that he supports the thesis that it is a lack of extending reforms to the poor that is not extending the “shining” to them as well.

A splendid post by Nitin on this, again a year back: clicky.

seventimessix: Ah. See my post was based almost entirely on his Op-Ed piece, not on a detailed analysis of his overall character / sympathies.

As I imply in the post and explicitly state in the comments – if it’s Mishra’s case that we should turn back the reforms and revert to pre-1990 economic policy then I’m certainly against him. And will oppose him if / when he says so. I’m just opposed to attacking a piece where he doesn’t say anything of the sort by assuming that that must be his agenda. I think the key difference is that you seem to believe that in order to stop the “socialist shenanigans” of these people we need to stop the people themselves. I’m saying – when they actually come out and make a socialist argument then we’ll oppose them. I’m not opposed to Mishra at all, I’m opposed to arguments for the turning back / stopping of reforms, whomever they come from. And just because he’s a communist sympathiser is no reason to assume he doesn’t have anything interesting to say.

Oh, and on the UPA government slowing down reforms. I agree that that’s troublesome. You suggest that that’s because the ruling party has communist leanings. Perhaps. Mishra would argue that that’s because the communist approach gets them votes – the reforms don’t deliver a tangible enough benefit to the masses for politicians to be able to leverage them into votes, so they have no incentives to put effort into reforms. I think there’s a good chance he might have a point. I’m a little sceptical about politicians having ideologies.

That doesn’t mean we need to turn back reforms. It simply means that we need to find a way to make the benefits from reforms more visible to the masses. That’s not just about achieving equity. It’s about creating the political momentum to speed up reforms.

grand panjandrum: Fine, question his credibility if you like. I’ve never claimed that he gets everything in his article right, I explicitly say that he says a lot of stupid things.

My point is that an argument should stand or fall on its own merit, not on the credibility of the person making it. Mishra’s point in presenting that fact is that despite Naidu’s supposedly outstanding performance as a reformer, he didn’t get re-elected to power, suggesting that whether or not the reforms are benefiting the common people, they’re certainly not voting based on them. You’re basically saying because he claims AP is one of the poorest states in India, which it’s not, therefore this argument can’t be true either. That’s not a refutation – it’s just dodging his claim.

YOu could argue that irrespective of whether people voted based on that or not, Chandrababu’s tenure as CM actually contributed to broad-based development in AP. That would be at least partial refutation of what Mishra is saying (which is essentially – if people didn’t vote for it, it couldn’t have benefited them). Just saying that AP is not one of the poorest states doesn’t disprove his basic argument.

Oh, and I’m not sure what you mean by “not just his agenda and politics”. The fact that he makes grave factual errors is reason to question his credibility, yes, but says nothing about his agenda or politics. Unless you’re assuming that he’s deliberately lying because you’ve already assumed that he’s a communist sympathiser.

precisely panjandrum, if not from a single article perhaps, most definitely if he is doing this for the past decade. Not to do so would be naive, not openminded and objective.

If even intelligent moderates like Falstaff remain lenient, perhaps stemming from naivette and/or a desire to be fair, then what hope do we have to stop the socialist shenanigans of these people and also by extension the UPA administration?

Andhra Pradesh had the fourth highest GDP amongst states in India in 2004, and was tenth in terms of per capita income. Neither of those statistics comes anywhere close to supporting the label ‘one of India’s poorest states’. Someone who claims to write authoritatively on economic policy in India and can still make a factual error as grave as that deserves to have his credibility questioned, not just his agenda or politics.

You’d be indeed be right to conclude that I’m a insecure, stupid, intolerant McCarthyite if I draw my conclusions FROM the article. But I do not, and never claimed I did.

ASSUMING he does indeed have communist sympathies and intentions, and that is indeed also the purport of confused comment, I ask this: would you agree with my comment?

Think that’s leading to various extensions depending on whether people prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt or not.