Patralekha Chatterjee | Several questions as we look back at 2023, ahead to 2024

Like most of the world, I am in the “looking back, looking ahead” mode. And like many, I have more questions than answers. As an Indian, it feels good to read about India’s numerous successes. Irrespective of whether one is within or outside the country, one celebrates India’s glory moments. Last month, I huddled in front of a giant television set in a Bangkok restaurant with fellow Indians to watch the ODI World Cup final. We cheered loudly when India scored, and were depressed when it did not.

A flurry of reports in recent days catalogue India’s successes in multiple fields, with talk about how India engaged the world on its own terms in 2023, how it arrived on the world stage, the victories, the many milestones it crossed. With its Chandrayaan-3 mission on August 23, 2023, India made history as the first country to land near the south pole of the moon -- “a game-changing development that highlights the country’s emergence as a space power as it moves forward with more ambitious missions and opens its space programmes to private investors”, as a report in The Japan Times put it.

But if we want to look back to leap ahead, there is one question we must also ask -- which India are we talking about? As a professional Indian currently spending part of the year in Southeast Asia, one runs into professionals from India and other countries. Many Indians are part of the global tech workforce and quite a few are posted overseas. While India’s increasing visibility on the global stage undoubtedly adds to its clout and makes for a better calling card for those Indians who are equipped to tap into emerging global opportunities, what about others who are still struggling? What about better local opportunities for them? If a country is doing phenomenally well as many tell us repeatedly, why are so many Indians spending enormous amounts of money and taking insane risks to migrate illegally to the rich world? And why has the Narendra Modi government extended its free foodgrain programme for 800 million people by another five years with effect from January 1, 2024?

India’s general election, the world’s largest, is likely to be held sometime in the first half of 2024. It will pit the ruling BJP against a 26-party Opposition coalition and other regional parties. In an election year, we are required to make informed choices. As citizens we need to ask what India’s arrival on the global stage means for each of us -- what problems get sorted out and what lingers?

In an opinion piece titled “2024 outlook: Asia’s historic year of elections is a cause for hope” for Nikkei Asia, Daniel Twining, president of the Washington-based International Republican Institute, made some interesting observations.

“Modi’s government has delivered tangible improvements to India’s infrastructure and digital economy and its prestige on the world stage, even as Opposition forces highlight media intimidation, pressure on civil society and lawfare against leaders of other parties as democratic backsliding. No Indian leader has won a third term at the polls since Jawaharlal Nehru in 1962. A win for the BJP would cement the party's dominance, turning the page decisively on decades of previous Congress Party rule,” writes Mr Twining.

“While a BJP victory would reinforce India’s promising trajectory of reform and growth as a global power, it could also harden internal divisions,” he adds. “The party dominates the country’s poorer, populous northern Hindu heartland, but it is weak in wealthier southern states. Minority rights could also come further into focus should the ruling party pursue a majoritarian agenda.”

Looking ahead necessarily means factoring in the country’s contradictions and working much harder on the problem areas so that quality of life of every Indian, not just a few, improves dramatically.

Consider some of the recent headlines in the global media. “India joins the ranks of stock market superpowers,” was the headline of a recent CNN report. India is also a big player on the world stage, especially when it comes to the Internet. It has the largest number of Facebook, Instagram and YouTube users in the world. In a world going digital at a breathtaking pace, this definitely opens up new opportunities; many Indians who speak English and other foreign languages are now plugged on to the rest of the world and leveraging new vistas that are opening up. Inside the country, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has been instrumental in driving the digital payments revolution. India has witnessed an exceptional surge in UPI transactions, reaching a staggering 8,572 crore by December 11, 2023.

India also figures in the list of countries with the highest number of Internet shutdowns. A gaping digital divide is a stark reality. “India’s connectivity has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, but unequally,” says The State of India’s Digital Economy (SIDE) 2023 brought out by Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations in February 2023. It is true that between 2016 to 2021, while India’s per capita income increased from $1,714 to $2,257 (32 per cent), Internet penetration increased by 50 per cent from 32 to 48 per 100 population. “When compared at purchasing power parity (PPP) levels, India has achieved higher growth in Internet penetration despite lower increase in income levels,” says the report. But it adds that “even among Internet users, not everyone is a smartphone user, limiting the potential for digital dividends. The common challenges include poor infrastructure, low affordability and inadequate literacy.” The report goes on to also point out that “a global comparison of Internet use by women finds that the percentage of female Internet users in India is below the lower-middle income regions and the Asia-Pacific average”.

At present, India is the fifth largest economy in the world behind the United States, China, Germany and Japan. India is set to become the world’s third largest economy by 2030, according to S&P Global Ratings, an American credit rating agency. In a turbulent world, India aspires to play a much larger global role and by all accounts, it has a much more visible and consequential presence due to a host of factors. Looking ahead, in an election year and beyond, we must also zoom in on the country’s per capita income, and the quality of life for the ordinary Indian woman, man and child. We must focus on the here and now, not what happened hundreds of years ago or what might happen hundreds of years later.