I have recently been revisiting Walter Crocker’s 1966 book, Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate . This book remains the best single-volume stu...
I have recently been revisiting Walter Crocker’s 1966 book, Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate. This book remains the best single-volume study of the life and legacy of India’s first prime minister, and it says many interesting things about Nehru’s country too.
Consider these remarks about the part of India I myself live in: “South India has counted for too little in the Indian Republic. This is a waste for India as well as an unfairness to south India, because the south has a superiority in certain important things – in its relative lack of violence, its lack of anti-Muslim intolerance, its lack of indiscipline and delinquency in the Universities; in its better educational standards, its better government, and its cleanliness; in its far lesser practice of corruption and its little taste for Hindu revivalism.”
Half a century after Crocker wrote these words, the economists, Samuel Paul and Kala Seetharam Sridhar, published a book called The Paradox of India’s North-South Divide (Sage, 2015). Using a wide array of statistics, mostly from official sources, the book argued that South India has done much better than North India in terms of economic development.
Paul and Sridhar undertook two sorts of comparisons. First, they conducted a head-to-head comparison of a major South Indian...
