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Notes -
45% of Indians are agricultural workers. In England, that threshold was last fallen beneath around 1675. In America, it happened around 1880. In India, it obviously has yet to happen.
Everything is downstream of this. In the aftermath of independence, the Congress regime (and that is what it was) decided that adopting state-driven industrial policy in the socialist mould was necessary to overcome this. The result was chaos and food insecurity, because the huge mass of rural Indians still had extremely high birth rates. The response, because in a democracy every peasant farmer had a vote, was to invest a huge proportion of the state's resources into incentivizing those peasant farmers with agricultural price floors while also implementing a highly protectionist policy regime that prevented farm consolidation and agricultural efficiency, which in turn prevented urbanization at the degree necessary for the industrial transition.
The % of agricultural workers is the most important metric for understanding India. You can understand nothing without it and understand everything with it. India has a space program and tech outsourcers, but these are the equivalent of the royal astronomer or the imperial library circa 1237; they have not undergone the industrial revolution, let alone anything after that. Imagine a Western country in which peasants obtained universal suffrage around 1400, but which was too large and well-armed to be invaded. This is India. The masses vote themselves the most generous affirmative action policy in the world, with 60% of all government jobs and college places reserved for lower castes and tribes. They vote a huge percentage of the state budget to be devoted to minimum agricultural prices, which make staple crops more expensive in India than they are in the West, and halt mechanization, which further disincentivizes urbanization (because urban workers rely on cheap food). Interstate commerce is guarded by labyrinthine protectionism, all of which leads to the inevitable corruption.
Modi attempted some tiny, granular reforms. Tens of thousand of haggard peasant smallholders marched on Delhi. The Supreme Court, the only true authority in India, stayed and then forced the repeal of the laws (which the government happily accepted) for reasons of social order and societal stability. But India's problems aren't a result of any allegiance with America, which is limited enough as it is (it is if anything closer to Russia).
We are, of course, in agreement here.
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