The Penguin History of the World

India, like China, did not at once share the violent financial and economic cycles of many East Asian countries. In this respect, undeniably, past policies favoured her. Congress governments, though moving away somewhat from the socialism of the early years of independence, had long been strongly influenced by protectionist, managed, nationally self-sufficient, even autarkic ideas. The price had been low rates of growth and social conservatism, but with them came also a lower degree of vulnerability to international capital flows than other countries.

In 1996 the Hindu and nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) inflicted a major defeat on the Congress Party and became the largest single party in the lower house of parliament. It was not able to sustain its own government, though, and a coalition government emerged, which did not survive another (very violent) general election in 1998. This election, too, was inconclusive in that no clear parliamentary majority emerged, but the BJP and its allies formed the biggest single group in it. Another coalition government was the outcome, whose Janata supporters soon published an ominously nationalist agenda that announced that ‘India should be built by Indians’. Some found this alarming in a country where nationalism, though encouraged by Congress for a century or so, had usually been offset by prudent recognition of the real fissiparousness and latent violence of the subcontinent. Eventually, though, the new government surprised many by avoiding Hindu-nationalist excesses domestically and by stepping up the liberalization of the economy, leading to increased economic growth in some parts of the country.

This growth continued under the new Congress-led government that – in another example of India’s functioning democracy – surprisingly was voted into office in 2004. The new prime minister, Manmohan Singh – an economist of Sikh origin – stepped up the attempts at opening India’s economy and making it more competitive internationally. By the mid-2000s, India seemed to be at the beginning of rapid economic expansion.

Though it seemed consistent with a determination to win domestic kudos by playing the nationalist card, it was none the less in the context of the running sore of the old quarrel with Pakistan that the world had to strive to understand the BJP government’s decision to proceed with a series of nuclear test explosions in May and June 1998. They provoked the Pakistan government to follow suit with similar tests of its own; both governments were now members of the club of nations acknowledged to have deployable nuclear weapons. Yet larger contexts in which to set this fact (the Indian prime minister pointed out) were those of Indian fears of China, already a nuclear power and remembered by Indians as the victor of the Himalayan fighting of 1962, and a growing sympathy shown by the Pakistan government to Islamic fundamentalist agitation in other countries – notably, Afghanistan, where 1996 had seen the establishment of an intensely reactionary government in Kabul, under a Pakistani-supported faction named Taliban. Some gloomily pondered the notion that a Pakistani bomb might also be an Islamic bomb. In any case, India’s actions had been a huge setback to the curbing of nuclear proliferation so far achieved; there was universal alarm, ambassadors were withdrawn from Delhi and some countries followed the lead of the United States in cutting off or holding up aid to India. Such action, though, did nothing to deter Pakistan from following India’s example. The world, evidently, had not rid itself of the danger of nuclear warfare by ending the Cold War. That danger, too, had now to be understood in a world that some thought much less stable than the 1960s had been, and with India–Pakistan relations still bedevilled by the Kashmir issue.

Russia, the biggest and most important of the CIS states, elected Boris Yeltsin president of the republic in June 1991 with 57 per cent of the votes cast in the country’s first free election since 1917. In November the Soviet Communist Party was dissolved by presidential decree. In January 1992, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a programme of radical economic reform was launched which in one bold stroke led to an almost complete liberation of the economy from previous controls. The economic result of this was, for almost all citizens, an unmitigated disaster. While a few insiders got very rich, most people lost their savings, their pensions, or their jobs. Energy consumption fell by a third, accompanied by rapidly rising unemployment, falls in national income and real wages, a drop in industrial output by half, huge corruption in government organs and widespread crime. To many Russians, these abstractions were brought home in the savage detail of personal misery. Public health deteriorated and life expectancy declined to less than sixty years for males in the early 2000s, a drop of five years in less than a decade.