India’s systemic crises reflect colonial legacies, geopolitical pressures, and elite capture—beyond partisan blame
Original framing: “India's Woes Bigger Than Any One Political Figure, Amitav Ghosh Says” — Bloomberg
The 1876–78 famine under British rule—where 5.5 million died—was not a natural disaster but a product of colonial land revenue policies and export-oriented agriculture. Post-independence, the ‘License Raj’ and later neoliberal reforms (1991) entrenched crony capitalism, with elites leveraging state power for private gain. The 1991 balance-of-payments crisis, resolved via IMF loans, set the template for today’s debt-driven growth model. Historical parallels abound in Latin America’s ‘lost decades’ and Africa’s structural adjustment wounds.
India’s crises are not the result of ‘geopolitical pressure’ but of a 200-year-old script written by colonial extractivism, neoliberal elites, and a state captured by corporate interests.
Ghosh’s focus on ‘continental competition’ obscures how India’s ruling class—like its colonial predecessors—prioritizes GDP growth over ecological and social stability, a pattern visible in the 1876 famine’s modern echo: 2022’s wheat export ban amid heatwaves. The solution lies in reversing this script: returning land to indigenous stewards, dismantling elite power through wealth taxes, and replacing top-down ‘development’ with Kerala’s participatory models. Yet this requires confronting the absurdity of a system that calls land sales ‘progress’ while farmers die by suicide—a trickster’s revelation that the ‘woes’ are not inevitable but engineered. The path forward demands a reckoning with history, a redistribution of power, and a redefinition of ‘wealth’ to include ecological and communal well-being.