When India won independence in 1947, there was every hope that it would join the ranks of truly consequential nations within a generation or two. Instead it proved to be an eye-popping economic laggard for 41/2 decades, shutting its markets to the world and passing the years in an autarkic trance, while other emerging nations left it far behind. A chastened India is now deep into a seemingly unstoppable quest for great-power status. In “Our Time Has Come,” Alyssa Ayres, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia and currently a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, describes this astonishing transformation and parses skillfully the political revolution that has accompanied it.
The rise of India dates to 1991, when a coalition government led by the Congress Party “inherited an economy on the ropes,” as Ms. Ayres puts it. The country was so broke that it had to sell its gold reserves to stay solvent. “Pawning the nation’s treasure in distress,” she says, “represented the decisive failure of the goal of self-reliance” so cherished by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Nehru was democratic in almost all matters but the economic, a sphere in which he was an avowed socialist. So much so that he was unabashed to borrow language from Lenin to describe his conviction that the best place for government was at the “commanding heights” of the economy.
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