A critical question can be asked, however, whether an exaggerated focus on trade of commodities, and related to that, an excessive emphasis on the role of the Silk Road, may result in the neglect of intellectual influences—in religion, science, mathematics, art, and architecture—that were not dependent on trade. If trade is a big influence in getting people to take an interest in one another, as David Hume famously noted, so is the sheer pursuit of human curiosity, as Hume also observed. The “Nalanda trail” is, in this sense, a kind of rival to the Silk Road.
Has Narendra Modi cleaned up India?
Next year it will surpass China, becoming the world’s fastest-growing emerging market. Its international position has improved too, with Modi’s vigorous diplomacy earning him a place alongside China’s Xi Jinping and Shinzo Abe of Japan in a new troika of strongman Asian nationalists whose interplay will define the continent’s future.
.. But India has also suffered from a wider and equally depressing interplay between politics and criminality, in which those with links to illegal activity have sought elected office, often simply to protect their business affairs. Around one third of the members of India’s parliament now have criminal cases pending against them.
.. India’s vast election are notoriously expensive—one estimate suggested that last year’s poll cost political parties in the region of $5bn. Almost all of this is given covertly, the majority from wealthy businesses.
.. Losses to the public purse were easier to calculate, however. On coal, for instance, Rai produced a report in 2012 estimating that India could have raised more than $30bn, had it auctioned mining rights, rather than gifting them to the private sector.
.. Many of these figures and those working for them prospered in what Harvard academic Michael Walton describes as “rent thick” sectors of India’s economy such as real estate, infrastructure or mining—meaning those in which income (or “rent”) often comes via influence-peddling, rather than fair competition.
.. India probably now has a higher proportion of national wealth in the hands of its billionaire class than any other major emerging economy, with the exception of Russia.
.. the country’s system of agricultural support allows nearly $5bn worth of food grains to rot in government warehouses each year, while also encouraging widespread graft.
.. Modi’s main aim is to get India’s economy moving, an area where picking fights with industrialists, for instance, could prove disruptive, in the short term at least. Yet the suspicion remains that Modi’s caution stems from an unwillingness to disturb powerful, entrenched interests. Put more simply, India’s Prime Minister wants to win re-election in 2019, in what is certain to be the most expensive campaign in Indian history. That will require money. Lots of money. Any action that might affect political funding, in particular, is likely to be avoided.
.. India is the world’s largest democracy, and perhaps its most unlikely. No country has sustained democratic rule while being as poor.
Modi Calls on China to Rethink Stances That Strain Ties to India
India has remained reticent on one of Mr. Xi’s central initiatives, an ambitious network of roads, railways and ports intended to link China to Asia and Europe, known as “One Belt, One Road.”
India’s Influence in Asia: 4th – 12th Centuries
For it is now increasingly clear that between the fourth and twelfth centuries the influence of India in both Southeast and Central Asia, and to some degree also China, was comparable to the influence of Greece in Aegean Turkey and Rome, and then in the rest of Europe in the early centuries BC. From the empire of the Gupta dynasty in the north and that of the Pallava dynasty in the south, India during this period radiated its philosophies, political ideas, and architectural forms out over an entire continent not by conquest but by sheer cultural sophistication.