Sujatha Gidla: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Absolutely. It used to be called the LL Line when I was a kid. I was shocked to learn it’s now the L Line. I don’t know why they did that. For me, that’s very confusing. [laughter] But I don’t actually take the subway much at all. If you were to describe to us your take, what’s going on in India now? If I were to ask a neoliberal, they would say something like, “Well, Modi, he’s trying to be a reformer. Maybe he doesn’t have the will. Maybe the special interest groups are interfering. He’s not getting much reform done. Things are progressing in fits and starts. There’s no great wonderful turnaround, but India’s still growing. This is a country we should be positive about.” That would be a normal neoliberal take I would hear from a lot of people, say in the investment community. But your overall take on where India is now and where it’s headed, how would you put your alternate version of what’s going on? India, it’s not under Modi that these bad things are happening. They have been started by Congress, the so-called liberal party, which I would compare to probably the Democratic Party here. They have started all these measures themselves in 1991 after the market liberalization. And Modi is shoving them down our throats. Congress probably had some kind of hesitation in imposing these measures, but that’s why India, I guess, needed somebody like Modi, who can just terrorize people into accepting these things. In India, I don’t know for whom it’s developing, but for the majority of people, it’s going down. I can say, from my point of view, there may be some Ambanis and Adanis that are profiting from it, but everybody else is losing. If you think of the Bengali intellectual class from India, do you think of that itself as yet another caste creation, like a caste club?…

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