M D Nalapat
Till
two centuries ago, China comprised about 35% of the global economy
while India accounted for around 26%. Only after the grip of European
powers became strong in the 19th century that their economies
contracted. The mentality of the European powers was that only they had
the right to prosperity, while the rest of the world needed to be
content as slaves. In India, Britain ensured the destruction of almost
all of local industry, thereby seeking to create a market for its own
manufactures. Certainly this brought some prosperity to the UK, but the
wealth generated there would have been much more had India been allowed
to continue to be a prosperous country. The markets for British produce
would have been far larger. As for China, by squeezing revenue out of
channels such as the opium trade, the European powers ensured the fall
of the Imperial Dynasty and its replacement with a series of fractious
and incompetent warlord regimes, a phase that ended only with the
establishment of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949.
While China entered into its current period of economic growth through reform in the 1980s, till today India has continued with its colonial-era laws, that transfer obligations to the population and authority to the state Today, despite corrupt and incompetent governments at both the central and state levels, the Indian economy is growing at a speed of almost 10% annually, because of the savings of its people and their zeal for education and betterment. India is called a “free” country, while China is authoritarian, with no elections and single-party rule. However, here in Hong Kong, where your columnist has been since the beginning of the week, it would seem that people here have as much - if not more - freedom than people in Mumbai or Delhi, all of whom have to get permission from multiple authorities (usually in triplicate) before being allowed to do the simplest tasks.
