India (63 page)

1.
See Ramachandra Guha,
India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy
, London, 2007, p. 134.

2.
Election Commission of India,
Model Code of Conduct for the Guidance of Political Parties and Candidates
, New Delhi, 2007.

3.
P. Sainath, “The Medium, Message and the Money,”
Hindu
, 26 October 2009.

4.
Quoted in Ajoy Bose,
Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati
, New Delhi, 2008, p. 21.

5.
Indian Express
, 27 May 2010.

6.
Scans of the affidavits of every national candidate are available on the Election Commission of India website:
http://eci.nic.in/eci_main/index.asp
. They make fascinating reading. Most are deciphered on another website:
www.myneta.info
. See also “Money Wadis,”
India Today
, 4 May 2009.

7.
Author’s interview with Mohammed Mustaqeem, 26 April 2009.

8.
Full disclosure: Kapil Sibal is my wife’s sister’s husband’s father.

9.
Rahul Bhattacharya, “Will It Rain Qorma?,”
Outlook
, 18 May 2009.

10.
Author’s interview with Dr. Sita Ram Sharma, 4 May 2009.

11.
Author’s interview with Bharat Godambe, 3 February 2009.

12.
Jai Bihar
, 4 September 2008.

13.
Author’s interview with Vijender Gupta, 25 April 2009.

14.
Indian Express
, 16 and 28 April 2009.

15.
Rediff.com
, 3 March 2004;
IndianExpress.com
, 9 April 2009.

16.
Indian Express
, 8 May 2009.

17.
For information about the 2009 general election that is not first-hand, see Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Lokniti, “National Election Study 2009,”
www.lokniti.org/read_how_india_voted_2009.html
;
indian-elections.com
; Prem Shankar Jha, “The Pie in Smaller Slices,”
Tehelka
, 13 June 2009; Rajdeep Sardesai, “Why India Voted for Congress,”
IBNPolitics.com
, 29 May 2009; James Manor, “Did the Central Government’s Poverty Initiatives Help to Re-elect It?” (unpublished).

18.
India Today
, 21 May 2009.

19.
CNN-IBN
, 19 January 2010.

20.
Zee News
, 19 January 2010.

21.
Tehelka
, 23 February 2010.

22.
Election Commission of India, New Delhi,
Statistical Report on General Elections
, 1951. Some of the UP constituencies returned two MPs.

23.
Author’s interview with Yusuf Ansari, 18 January 2009.

24.
Hindu
, 16 April 2007.

25.
Author’s interview with K. B. Byju, 21 November 2009.

26.
Mail Today
, 4 October 2009.

27.
Indian Express
, 27 April 2009.

28.
Mail Today
, 16 September 2009.

29.
Author’s interview with Annu Tandon and Mira Devi, 27 April 2009.

30.
Times of India
, 2 June 2009.

31.
Savvy
, 24 July 2009.

32.
Calcutta Telegraph
, 11 April 2010.

33.
Some sources suggest Baitha Kameshwar was working with conditional support from the Communist Party of India (Maoist), others that he was a renegade.

34.
Deccan Herald
, 18 February 2010.

35.
Coincidentally—or not—the foeticide of female children is higher in Punjab, Delhi and Haryana than in any other part of India. See National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3) India 2005–06,
Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in India
, Delhi, 2009, Appendix 2, p. 18.

36.
ExpressIndia.com
, 7 July 2008.

37.
See Jennifer Wells, “Canada’s Booming Asbestos Market,”
TheStar.com
, 20 December 2009.

38.
IBNLive.com
, 9 March 2010.

39.
In addition to her other roles, Girija Vyas was a member of the petroleum ministry’s Consultative Committee. See
Indian Express
, 24 October 2004.

40.
The full dataset and analysis of the “Family Politics” project are available on The
IndiaSite.com
, for free public use. We estimate that 3 percent of Lok Sabha MPs could arguably be switched to a different category of political background. If any member of the Lok Sabha would like to provide more information about his or her route to Parliament, or feels he or she has been placed in the wrong category, please get in touch with me directly or through
TheIndiaSite.com
. The “Family Politics” project will be updated after each general election in India. I should restate that I am not suggesting a “hereditary” MP is a bad MP, merely that this system excludes the overwhelming majority of Indians from participation in politics at a national level.

PART II
LAKSHMI • WEALTH

1.
Robert Skidelsky,
John Maynard Keynes. Volume One: Hopes Betrayed 1883–1920
, London, 1983, p. 178.

2.
See Arnold P. Kaminsky, “The India Office in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Robert I. Crane and N. Gerald Barrier,
British Imperial Policy in India and Sri Lanka 1858–1912: A Reassessment
, New Delhi, 1981, pp. 30–37.

3.
Sir Josiah Stamp,
Some Economic Factors in Modern Life
, London, 1929, pp. 258–59.

4.
Skidelsky,
John Maynard Keynes
, p. 177.

5.
David Gilmour,
The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj
, New York, 2006, p. 48.

6.
This analysis draws in part on D. E. Moggridge,
Maynard Keynes: An Economist’s Biography
, London, 1992, pp. 201–2.

7.
Oscar Wilde,
The Importance of Being Earnest
, London, 1899 (first perf. Feb. 1895), p. 61.

8.
Skidelsky,
John Maynard Keynes
, p. 274. See also Wendy Moffat,
A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster
, New York, 2010, p. 128. While Keynes and Furness were in Egypt, their mutual friend E. M. Forster was by coincidence on his first trip to India, mooning after Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s grandson Syed Ross Masood.

9.
See Skidelsky,
John Maynard Keynes
, pp. 272–77. See also Sudhir Mulji, “India’s Role in Keynes’s Economic Theory,”
Rediff.com
, 11 March 2004.

10.
John Maynard Keynes,
Indian Currency and Finance
, London, 1913, pp. 40–42.

11.
P. L. Gupta,
Paper Money of India
, Mumbai, 2000.

12.
Keynes,
Indian Currency and Finance
, pp. 99–100.

13.
Ibid., pp. 165–66.

14.
See Moggridge,
Maynard Keynes
, pp. 214–16 and Annex 1. The most intense phase of the relationship between Keynes and Sarkar appears to have been between 1912 and 1913, which coincided with the conceptualization, writing and editing of
Indian Currency and Finance
. See King’s College, Cambridge, Archive Centre, JMK/PP/45/282. Sarkar appears to have worked for Indian Political Intelligence during the First World War.

15.
Skidelsky,
John Maynard Keynes
, pp. 260–61.

16.
Financial Times
, 24 March 2009. Zhou Xiaochuan proposed a development of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights, based on a new basket of currencies: individual governments would pass a proportion of their Special Drawing Right reserves to the IMF, and these would gradually replace reserve currencies.

17.
National Archives, Kew, CAB 66/65/247-257. I have written about this process in greater detail in
Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division
, London, 1997.

18.
Alison Light, “Lady Talky,”
London Review of Books
, 18 December 2008.

19.
John Bruce,
Annals of the Honorable East-India Company
, Vol. 1, London, 1810, p. 146.

20.
See Allister Hinds,
Britain’s Sterling Colonial Policy and Decolonization, 1939–1958
, Westport, 2001, pp. 5–21.

21.
Durga Das (ed.),
Sardar Patel’s Correspondence 1945–50
, Ahmedabad, 1971–74, Vol. 3, p. 226.

22.
See G. Balachandran,
The Reserve Bank of India, 1951–1967
, Vol. 2, New Delhi, 1998, pp. 595–601.

23.
United Nations Treaty Series
, No. 1796, 1952.

24.
See Meghnad Desai, “Drains, Hoards and Foreigners: Does the 19th Century Indian Economy Have Any Lessons for the 21st Century India?,” Reserve Bank of India P. R. Brahmananda Memorial Lecture, London, 20 September 2004.

25.
Balachandran,
Reserve Bank of India
, p. 605.

26.
Nehru,
The Discovery of India
, New Delhi, 2004 (first publ. 1946), pp. 437–38.

27.
Bidyut Chakrabarty, “Jawaharlal Nehru and Planning, 1938–41: India at the Crossroads,”
Modern Asian Studies
, Vol. 26, No. 2, 1992, pp. 275–87.

28.
J. M. Keynes,
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
, London, 1936, pp. 383–84.

29.
Pulapre Balakrishnan,
Visible Hand: Public Policy and Economic Growth in the Nehru Era
, Centre for Development Studies, Working Paper No. 391, November 2007, p. 26.

30.
Penderel Moon (ed.),
Wavell: The Viceroy’s Journal
, London, 1973, p. 383.

31.
Quoted in Judith M. Brown,
Nehru: A Political Life
, New Haven, 2003, p. 352.

32.
Valerian Rodrigues (ed.),
The Essential Writings of B. R. Ambedkar
, New Delhi, 2002, p. 159.

33.
Quoted in Vivek Chibber,
Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India
, Princeton, 2003, p. 96.

34.
The contemporary figure is extrapolated from census data for 1991. See Alain Bertaud, “Mumbai FSI Conundrum,” June 2004, available at
www.alain-bertaud.com
.

35.
Purshotamdas Thakurdas et al.,
A Plan of Economic Development for India
, Bombay, 1944, pp. 3–45.

36.
See Ashok Rudra,
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis: A Biography
, New Delhi, 1996.

37.
Somesh Dasgupta, “The Evolution of the D
²
-Statistic of Mahalanobis,” in
Sankhya: The Indian Journal of Statistics
, Special Volume 55, Series A, Pt 3, 1993, pp. 442–49.

38.
The original model was devised in 1928 by the Soviet economist G. A. Feldman.

39.
During the Second World War, John Matthai’s daughter Valsa had disappeared mysteriously during a snowstorm while studying at Columbia University in New York. Two months later her body was found in the Hudson River.

40.
Quoted in Sunil Khilnani,
The Idea of India
, London, 1997, p. 85. See pp. 75–95.

41.
See Arvind Panagariya, “Heed the Words of Wisdom,”
Economic Times
, 24 October 2001.

42.
Rakesh Batabyal (ed.),
The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Speeches: 1877 to the Present
, New Delhi, 2007, pp. 576–81.

43.
Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw,
The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy
, New York, 2002 (first publ. 1998), p. 58.

44.
Rudra,
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis
, p. 247.

45.
Balakrishnan,
Visible Hand
, p. 45.

46.
S. Sivasubramonian,
The Sources of Economic Growth in India, 1950–51 to 1999–2000
, New Delhi, 2004, p. 4, Table 1.1.

47.
Author’s interview with Gopal Srinivasan, 27 January 2009.

48.
Author’s interview with B. Santhanam, 27 January 2009.

49.
Heavy Engineering Corporation, Annual Report 2008–2009.

50.
Ravi Ramamurti,
State-Owned Enterprises in High Technology Industries: Studies in India and Brazil
, New York, 1987, p. 141. These figures are based on a reading of Table 4.5. Background research on India’s state-owned industries by Aaditya Dar.

51.
Starred question no. 252, 25 June 1980, quoted in Ramamurti,
State-Owned Enterprises in High Technology Industries
, p. 169.

52.
Ramamurti,
State-Owned Enterprises in High Technology Industries
, p. 153.

53.
Prabhu Nath Singh,
Some Aspects of the Managerial and Economic Problems of Public Enterprises in India
, New Delhi, 1979, pp. 150–83.

54.
Ramamurti,
State-Owned Enterprises in High Technology Industries
, pp. 138–49; M. M. Luther,
Public Sector Reforms: Myths & Realities
, New Delhi, 1998.

55.
Committee on Public Undertakings, 28th Report, New Delhi, April 1979, quoting Ministry of Industrial Development and Company Affairs, January 1969.

56.
Public Enterprises Survey,
Annual Report on Working of Industrial and Commercial Undertaking of the Central Government
, Vols. I and II, 1974–75 to 1990–91, New Delhi.

57.
Rajiv Kumar, “Nationalisation by Default: The Case of Coal in India,”
Economic and Political Weekly
, Vol. 16, No. 17, 25 April 1981.

58.
Ministry of Steel, Mines and Metals,
National Coal Development Corporation Committee, 1967 Report—First
, New Delhi, 1968.

59.
Dorothy Norman,
Indira Gandhi: Letters to a Friend 1950–1984
, London, 1985, p. 146. Mrs. Gandhi may here have been following the stereotypical north Indian perception that if somebody from the south has made good, he or she ought to be a Brahmin. Although Kumaramangalam’s mother was a Saraswat Brahmin and social activist, his father, P. Subbarayan, was a scion of a well-known Gounder zamindari family, a prominent agrarian caste concentrated mainly in western Tamil Nadu.

60.
Lok Sabha Debates, 10 March 1986.

61.
Planning Commission,
Fifth Five Year Plan 1974–79
, New Delhi, 1976. The revised Fifth Five Year Plan outlay for social welfare was $104.7m (Rs.86.1 crore) and for nutritional programmes $140.6m (Rs.115.7 crore). Both totalled $245.3m (Rs.201.8 crore), still less than $257.9m (Rs.212.2 crore).

62.
See C. D. Bhattacharya,
Public Sector Enterprises in India
, New Delhi, 1990, pp. 164–70.

63.
Bhattacharya,
Public Sector Enterprises in India
, p. 167.

64.
See Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction website,
www.bifr.nic.in
.

65.
The subsidiary is now making a healthy profit.
Business Standard
, 10 April 2008.

66.
S. S. Chattopadhyay, “Technological Strides,”
Frontline
, 7–20 November 2009.

67.
See Richard Orange, “The Dark Heart of India’s Economic Rise,” Spectator.co.uk, 9 September 2009.