Hindu Rate of Growth: Raghuram Rajan has again come up with a new prediction for India. According to him, the possibility of India’s GDP growing at a 4 percent rate is quite high. Rajan’s prognosis is based on two numbers. The first is India’s October-December quarterly growth rate of 4.4 percent, and the second is the RBI’s prediction of next quarter’s growth of 4.2 percent.
“At this point, the average annual growth of the October-December quarter relative to the similar pre-pandemic quarter 3 years ago is 3.7%. This is dangerously close to our old Hindu rate of growth! We must do better,” said Rajan.
Rajan is a renowned economist, and his reasons for making those kinds of predictions are also partially true. Rajan is worried about the RBI rate hike, the global slowdown, and the unwillingness of the private sector. In fact, the private sector’s indifference towards their own country is a concern that has been raised in the past by ministers like Piyush Goyal and Nirmala Sitharaman too. Meanwhile, economists contacted by The New Indian Express have asked to look at the annual growth rate rather than the quarterly slowdown.
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Why defame Hinduism?
But the problem is not the accuracy or inaccuracy of Rajan’s concerns. There is a cultural problem underneath. On the face of it, the term ‘Hindu rate of growth’ reeks of Hinduphobia. A fact associated with this term is derogatory. It was coined by economist Raj Krishna in 1978. It is used to refer to the perilously slow economic growth of India, registered between the 1950s and 1980s. It was the era of socialism, and the growth rate rarely crossed 4 percent. Somehow, economists thought that it was appropriate to associate the word ‘Hindu’ with a slow rate of growth.
Of course, the rationale behind it is that India’s population is mostly Hindu. And the majority of any place decides the cultural, political, and finally economic trajectory of that place. Therefore, the logical conclusion is that Hindu culture is responsible for it.
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Can we please call it the “secular rate of growth”?
This belies common sense in two ways. Firstly, the Hindu way of life has been entrepreneurial and industrious from time immemorial. Numerous kingdoms have been built and rebuilt by Hindus. Books like Bhagwad Geeta, Ramayan, Mahabharat, the Vedas, and Upanishads that pass down the mantras of hard work have outlived kingdoms and civilizations.
It is not just morally and ethically wrong but even factually incorrect to pin the blame for slow economic growth on the Hindu way of life. One may argue that economists don’t intend to insult Hindus, but the majority of the population is not expert enough to go deep into that argument. We are living in a 1-minute news culture in which more and more people just pick the headline.
The second problem with it is that at the time when the term was coined, the word secularism had already entered the constitutional lexicon. In a way, if Hindus of the country would want to put blame on any culture for it, then the gates of calling it the “secular rate of growth” are always open. Somehow, that won’t cross people’s minds.
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