Sir, I think comparing the UK with India over time on the bases you’ve used is a misleading exercise. The politics of both places have changed so much over this period, with Britain shifting from mercantilist to capitalist to socialist. Britain, like a few other European countries, were imperialist powers with overseas possessions, which India was not. Even a unified Indian nation state on modern lines is a relatively recent phenomenon. The historical experiences of the two countries have little parallel. It would be more apt to compare India’s, or at a granular level, any of the states’ performance with other similar countries with similar histories.

The seminal event of the 20th century for much of Asia was decolonization and the formation of modern nation states. Many of the economies started from zero; those that had industrialized previously such as Japan were brought back to zero thanks to war. Most of Asia’s leading centers today such as the Asian tigers had their seminal moments in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Comparing India’s own performance as a free republic to its own past as a colony is really pointless. As you can see, it is a stagnant line until after freedom. It is like comparing the heartbeat of a baby before and after its birth - what’s the point? It would make sense to compare India’s economic performance with that of countries such as Japan, China, Thailand, Korea, Singapore etc; its contemporaries. And on that count, you don’t have to dig in much to say India has been a chronic laggard for most of its 70 years as a nation state, only beginning to be in the race now, let alone catch up. Even Pakistan had an economy galloping faster until the 1970s. You could also compare India’s performance to that of West Germany, which was also a zero economy after WW2 and became a new state only in 1949. Most of the modern wealth of nations is a product of the events after 1945.

The real divergence between even India and China started only in the 1980s, when China opened up after realizing socialism there wasn’t really doing anything. Had the Soviet Union never ended in 1991, chances are India would still have been socialist in practice. Thank God the moral argument for socialism really met an end with that. Or it hasn’t, judging by EMR’s posts. There are still some socialist geniuses like Maduro doing the rounds. Laughable.

At any rate, with a per capita GDP of less than USD 2,000 in 2017, a real exercise would be to compare India’s GDP per capita to other leading Asian countries to get a real sense of where India has got it wrong. It is convenient but pointless to blame the British, 70 whole years after they left. You don’t hear Japan lamenting about the US for their economic condition - the latter nuked them twice. The official Japanese poverty line, announced in 2011, is USD 22,000 - for a country that was nuked twice two years before India became free. You don’t hear the Koreans lamenting about the oppression of the Japanese for their economic predicament. I only hope the current and future generations of Indians look more into self-improvement rather than playing these silly blame games.