Why India Needs A Sovereign Pivot: Dismantling Ajay Shah's Delusions Of Liberal Democracy

In his quaintly optimistic piece for the Business Standard on September 1, 2025, titled "This Does Not Seem to Be Useful: A Pivot to China?", the economist Ajay Shah mounts a defence of India's liberal democratic experiment with the fervour of a Pentecostal pastor guarding his flock from the friendly neighbourhood Mormon missionary.

He extols the supposed virtues of individual liberties, innovation unfettered by state oversight, and the rule of law. These, in his view, safeguard against the perils of China's authoritarian efficiency. Shah warns that emulating Beijing's model would erode India's soul, pointing to China's recent economic deceleration as proof of its unsustainability.

Yet, from a perspective unclouded by progressive pieties, one sees Ajay Shah's argument for what it is: a nostalgic paean to a failed governance paradigm.

India's per capita income languishes at approximately $2,878 (nominal, 2025 IMF estimate), a figure that mocks the pretensions of a nation aspiring to greatness while shackled to democratic rituals. Liberal democracy has not elevated India. It has ensnared the country in a grotesque hybrid of mob rule and elite solipsism.

For stark contrast, China's per capita income stands at $13,687, nearly 4.8 times higher, built on decades of decisive growth that outpaced India in every metric.

Far better to contemplate a sovereign realignment, drawing selectively from China's centralised prowess, than to persist in this farce where the masses vote for an ever-expanding Ladki Bahin while the anointed class daydreams of Scandinavian utopias and gender fluidity. All this happens while the Prime Minister must persuade citizens and the government must pay for our citizens not to defecate on our streets.

The Democratic Mirage: India's Economic Debacle

Let us be frank. Not one major nation has transitioned from a poor to middle-income or rich country without either having an illiberal democracy or an autocracy of some form.

The smart alecks that Independent India’s early leaders were, decided to thrust universal adult franchise upon a barely literate and barely fed populace. This original sin continues to haunt the Indian state in its ability to develop any form of ‘Sovereign Clarity’.

From 1961 to 2024, China achieved over 10 per cent annual growth in 22 years, while India never once hit that mark. We did have plenty of democracy, enough to fill our hearts and minds with all kinds of progressive nonsense while ignoring the only way that makes countries wealthier and more powerful: relentless execution, investment in productive capacity, and sound governance.

Ajay Shah's faith in democracy's innovative spark is particularly risible, given how electoral pandering devours resources. Every rupee spent on Ladki Bahin (literally a hafta to prevent actual communists from coming to power) is a rupee not spent on urban infrastructure and subsidising productive investment. Random rabble-rousers can enter and paralyse our most important cities, while the Indian state had to wait 70-odd years and the political genius of Modi-Shah to stamp out a Maoist insurgency in the heart of India.

Remember, every malcontent in India has a veto, with the state rendered powerless due to our democratic-progressive piety. Naxals in and out of our forests have an equal day in court because their lawyers or priests can sing the appropriate progressive hymns in front of the right (or left) kind of black-robed democratic demigods. All the while, the same demigods think that the economic impact of their random diktats is not their concern at all.

To top it, a good portion of our power elites are downright delusional. Many of them actually believe that they should have been living somewhere in the West and, by an accident of the gods, landed up in India. The interlocking web of elites in academia, media, and officialdom think that every first-world fantasy of theirs is halal: environmental regulation fit for advanced economies, degrowth policies, restrictive labour regulation, gender fluidity fads, liberal fundamental rights to Islamists and Naxals.

Shah's paean to liberal values presupposes institutions robust enough to sustain them. In India, they merely enable a parasitic class to persist and the elites to virtue-signal while the productive portions of India are stuck with a mediocre present and future.

Liberal Indian democracy empowers our "riff-raff", granting veto power to the least informed and the most intransigent malcontents, while elites play at enlightened despotism without the despot's efficacy.

Take My Rights. Give Me 15k PCI

India's burgeoning middle class, estimated at around 432 million in 2020–21, seethes with frustration at this charade. It pays directly for the hafta given to our riff-raff, and indirectly due to the delusional liberal fantasies of our power elite.

Though surveys like Pew Research (2023) reveal widespread unfavourable views of China itself, 67 per cent negative, fuelled by border tensions, anecdotal undercurrents especially among young Indians betray admiration for its operational prowess. Young Indians, weary of electoral theatre, crave jobs and infrastructure and a higher quality of living over platitudes about pluralism and rights.

China's approach, derided by Shah as a soulless autocracy, is in truth a model of sovereign clarity, doing what it takes to drag a country into middle-income status while recovering national pride. India need not adopt China's one-party rule wholesale. We can settle for a Singapore-style democracy which limits the power of malcontents of every form.

Shah's hand-wringing over freedoms ignores the trade-off. In a low-income state, abstract liberties often mean little without material security.

True sovereignty demands a singular, accountable authority, not the diffused irresponsibility of democratic committees. For India to have a true sovereign, we need to build consensus around politically castrating India’s malcontents. Aspirational India will gladly sacrifice the rights of India’s malcontents at the altar of economic growth. I, for one, hope that this happens sooner rather than later.