In Ved Mehtaโs The New India, there is a curious dualityโof a blind man sketching a nation he cannot physically see, yet seeing it with a clarity few others manage. In the era of unicorn startups, billion-dollar valuations, and reel-length attention spans, the notion of scarcity feels distant, almost an abstract concept. Our collective lexiconโinfused with phrases like โease of doing businessโ and โinclusive growth,โ and the inevitable yada yadaโhas moved on.
But rewind to the 1970s, and one encounters a country suffocating under the weight of its aspirationsโensnared in a web of dirigisme, ration cards, and the licence-permit raj bureaucracy. This is the India Ved Mehta dissects in The New India. Written in the immediate aftermath of the 1977 electionsโwhen the Janata Party temporarily ousted Indira Gandhiโs Congress in an interruption to the Gandhian dynasty ruleโthe book performs an autopsy on the corpse of Indiaโs socialist experiment while the body was still warm.
I came to this book seeking refuge from what one might call the LinkedIn school of Indian historiography, where history begins in 1991 and everything before is dismissed as a sort of developmental dark age. Itโs the kind of narrative that would have you believe India sprouted fully formed from Manmohan Singhโs briefcase one summer morning, bearing gifts of IT services and nuclear ambitions. I needed something that peeled back the layers and showed me the mess we crawled out of.
The book explores the awkward adolescence of post-independence India making it an indispensable resource for understanding how institutions growโor falterโunder the weight of expectations. Mehtaโs narrative shows the competing interests of leaders, industrialists, and the common citizen each vying for attention in the new republic. Mehtaโs depiction of 1970s India is almost absurd. The setting is Kafka meets Krishna Menon: telephone connections that take longer than pregnancies, sugar rationed as if it were gold dust, and clerks wielding permits with the authority of kings. But it was the absurdity of lived experience. The state, armed with Nehruvian paternalism and Indiraโs garibi hatao sloganeering, installed itself at the centre of everything. The so-called socialist experiment mutated into a nexus of rent-seeking elites, industrial stagnation, and crushing poverty. The state, instead of being a force for development, became a flailing behemoth.
Mehtaโs approach is deceptively simpleโconversations, observations, dated excerpts, and anecdotes. He is neither a nationalist apologist nor a colonial nostalgist. He refrains from deifying or demonising his subjects. What elevates his narrative beyond reportage is his grasp of powerโs intimate grammar. His portraits of Nehru and Indira are incisive, capturing both Nehruโs visionary zeal and human failings. Indiraโs populism is portrayed as both a response to and a betrayal of her fatherโs legacy.
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What makes Mehtaโs book vital for business and policy education is its multidisciplinary resonance. It touches on economics, sociology, political science, and management. Mehtaโs work offers something even more valuable: perspective. In an age where narratives often swing between white pill-ism and black pill-ism, The New India serves as a reminder that neither growth nor decline happens in a vacuum. Economic policies are inseparable from the political contexts that birth them, and the human stories that animate Mehtaโs prose give texture to what might otherwise be a dry recitation of journalistic reportage.
Most of the high-adrenaline youngsters in the policy space often fail to truly grasp the why of Indiaโs reforms. Policy professionals tend to chatter about urbanisation and climate change, punctuate sentences with acronyms like ESG and AI, and dream of HSR. Itโs all admirably forward-looking but detached from the lived history of a nation that until relatively recently was paralysed by shortages and systemic dysfunction. Mehtaโs book reminds us that todayโs India, with its sprawling expressways and smartphone-toting masses, was not preordained.
Yet The New India is not without its blind spots (the metaphor feels unavoidable). Rural India appears more as mood lighting than landscape, and women exist primarily as absence. But perhaps these omissions serve their purpose, reminding us that every account of India is necessarily incomplete.
In an age where every policy document promises transformation and every consultant peddles paradigm shifts, Mehtaโs work reminds us that amnesia is a poor foundation for analysis. India might be racing towards something big, but itโs not inevitable. Itโs a fragile thing, as fragile as a country that once seemed to stumble its way into the modern world. Indiaโs narrative has always been one of resilience, of fighting against the odds to emerge stronger. However, thereโs a troubling trend towards quick fixes and populist policies that offer instant gratification without considering long-term effectsโakin to distributing freebies for votes, which acts like a slow poison. Mehtaโs Indiaโbureaucratic, inefficient, maddeningly complexโis not just a cautionary tale; itโs a mirror, reflecting who we were and if weโre not careful, who we might become again if we confuse movement for progress.
Janak Pandya is a consultant and analyst keen on socio-economic dynamics, writing on topics ranging from historical undercurrents to modern campaign strategies.
