From Goddess Lakshmi to Ration Cards

How the World's Only Democratic Socialist Experiment Turned India's Kaleidoscope into a Queue

This is the fourth in a series exploring India's unique approach to human diversity. We've examined how India manages its kaleidoscope of cultures, how this travels with the diaspora, and how weddings become battlegrounds for tradition. Now we explore the economic context that shapes everything else about modern India — a cautionary tale of what happens when democracy meets socialism, and how it scrambled India's ancient pluralism into one very long, very equal line.

In 1972, while I was six years old and standing in a ration line with my mother to buy our monthly allotment of sugar, India was already practicing what it would officially declare itself to be four years later: "socialist."

The ration shop smelled of kerosene and hopelessness. The sugar, when we finally got it after two hours, was gray and full of tiny stones. My mother would spend another hour at home, cleaning it grain by grain. This was childhood in socialist India — watching your mother perform archaeology on basic groceries.

But here's what I didn't understand then: that ration line was India's great equalizer. The Brahmin bureaucrat's wife stood behind the Dalit laborer's daughter. The Muslim shopkeeper queued with the Sikh farmer. The Tamil engineer waited with the Bengali poet. Socialism had achieved what 5,000 years of philosophy couldn't — it made everyone equally miserable.

"Why are we standing in line at this shop?" I'd ask my mother. She never answered. I understand now it was pure embarrassment — here was a barrister qualified from the august Lincoln's Inn, one of perhaps a few dozen in all of India with such credentials, standing in line with her ration card like everyone else. Even at six, I knew that UK-educated barristers with qualifications from Lincoln's Inn should not be standing in ration queues.

This was socialism's gift to Indian pluralism: it didn't matter if you worshipped Lakshmi or Allah, spoke Tamil or Punjabi, were Brahmin or Dalit. In the ration shop, everyone was equal. Equally poor. Equally humiliated. Equally clutching their government-issued cards that proclaimed their theoretical right to sustenance.

We'd been living this reality since independence, but apparently someone decided in 1976 that we needed to make it official. Because that's what you do during a national emergency — you update your branding.

The Constitutional Comedy of Errors

The constitutional change came during the Emergency — that dark period when the Indian Government and all its officials, in their infinite wisdom, suspended civil liberties, jailed opposition leaders, and forcibly sterilized 8.3 million people. Because nothing says "power to the people" like forced vasectomies administered by an army of government functionaries.

And what was their priority during this suspension of democracy? Amending the constitution's preamble. Because apparently, after jailing the opposition and sterilizing millions, the most urgent task was making poverty official.

On December 18, 1976, through the 42nd Constitutional Amendment, the Preamble was transformed. Two words — "SOCIALIST" and "SECULAR" — were inserted during a period of suspended democracy. The same amendment that gave us socialism also extended the government's power to "prohibit anti-national activities" — which, in practice, meant anything the government didn't like.

The ironies were delicious. A government that had suspended democracy was declaring India democratic. A nation where every second street had a temple, mosque, church, or gurudwara was being declared secular (as if that needed constitutional announcement). And a civilization that literally worshipped wealth — we have a goddess for it! — was being declared socialist.

We were so proud of our poverty, we made it constitutional.

The License-Permit-Quota Raj: An Equal Opportunity Destroyer

India had become, as far as I can tell, history's only genuine attempt at democratic socialism. The Soviet Union had socialism without democracy. Sweden had social democracy with free markets. India alone tried to combine universal suffrage with state control of everything.

And control everything they did. Want to produce one extra toothbrush beyond your licensed capacity? Criminal offense. Want to import a computer? Apply, wait, pray, bribe. Want to start a company? Navigate 80 different permits. Want to fire an incompetent employee? Hahahaha — good luck with that.

The economy puttered along at what economist Raj Krishna mockingly called the "Hindu rate of growth" — 3-4% annually. Only those expecting several cycles of reincarnation, he suggested, would tolerate such dismal progress. The bitter irony? A civilization that worshipped a goddess of wealth was growing at the speed of a bullock cart. Even worse: the poverty rate when India became independent was about 60%. By 1981, after 34 years of socialist planning? Still 60%. All those five-year plans, all that central planning, and the needle hadn't moved. The socialist miracle: keeping hundreds of millions equally poor for decades.

The real genius was how the License Raj managed to oppress every community with perfect equality:

For Hindus: You could worship Lakshmi all you wanted, but creating wealth was criminal. The goddess of prosperity must have been very confused.

For Muslims: Sure, Islamic banking principles were respected — because there were no banks worth speaking of after nationalization turned them into government offices with vaults.

For Sikhs: The entrepreneurial Punjabis were reduced to smuggling VCRs and foreign exchange. The community that built empires now built elaborate schemes to import transistor radios.

For Parsis: The community that gave India the Tatas had to watch their businesses strangle under red tape. Industrial houses that once competed with the British now competed for licenses.

For Christians: Missionary schools could teach English, but their students couldn't use it for anything useful since foreign companies were banned.

For Jains: Non-violence was easy when there was no competition to kill. Everyone was equally moribund.

This was secular socialism at its finest — every community got screwed with perfect impartiality.

The Quality of Leadership (Or: When Your Prime Minister Drinks His Own Urine)

In 1973-74, the top income tax rate hit 97.75%. Yes, you read that right. For every 100 rupees you earned above a threshold, you kept 2.25 rupees. The government took the other 97.75.

Next, we had the incredible Chaudhary Charan Singh as finance minister in 1979. The income tax rate had dropped to a measly 69% by then so, seemingly lacking the ambition of his predecssors, he raised it to 72%.

But Singh's real genius lay in identifying luxury items that needed taxing. Toothpaste? 25% excise duty. Toothbrushes? 25% duty. Soap? 20%. Because nothing says "socialist paradise" like making it expensive to stay clean. As he declared in his 1979 Budget speech: "There will have to be greater readiness on the part of the people who can bear further taxation to shoulder additional burdens... private saving should be raised by a ruthless curbing of luxury expenditure."

Luxury expenditure. Like toothpaste.

India was so impressed with this visionary genius that it later gave him the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honor. Apparently, making Indians choose between eating and brushing their teeth was considered distinguished service to the nation.

But if you think that was the height of leadership, let me introduce you to Prime Minister Morarji Desai. In 1978, with the Indian economy in the toilet (pun intended), Desai went gallivanting around the world. During his US visit, he discovered a unique way to generate media coverage.

As The Economic Times delicately reported:

"The quirk was, of course, his practice of drinking a glass of his own urine every day... Mr Desai was seen taking practically half the time to commend urine therapy."

Barbara Walters was so repulsed that ABC initially refused to air her interview. Only when CBS scooped them with the story did ABC run the footage, creating what Walters called "the network urine wars."

Standing in the aircraft aisle returning from San Francisco, Desai lectured travel-weary reporters on going vegetarian and how "nature-cure" could deal with many diseases. When Dan Rather asked about it on 60 Minutes, the 82-year-old Desai cheerfully revealed he drank "5 to 8 ounces every morning."

This was India's face to the world: a Prime Minister promoting piss while the economy went to shit.

The comedy peaked when President Jimmy Carter visited India in 1979. Carter, you see, had been a peanut farmer. The joke wrote itself: the peanut farmer had come to visit the original "pee-nut" since Desai was still Prime Minister. American diplomats must have loved explaining that one at state dinners.

The Great Indian Workaround: Everyone's an Entrepreneur (Just an Illegal One)

My father, who had to retire early from the Navy after a mid-air collision in Scotland (he landed on a sheep and broke his back in three places — the surgeon only fixed two), decided to start a business in 1971. This meant navigating the socialist maze daily.

One year, he needed video recorders to show presentations to clients. But importing VCRs attracted 350% customs duty — if you could get the foreign exchange, which you couldn't. Enter Sundar Vacchani of Weston Electronics Ltd, who had discovered a magnificent loophole.

He could import Hitachi VCRs as "unfinished goods" at lower duty rates, as long as the Hitachi nameplate was removed before importation. His factory's entire technological contribution? Screwing on a "Weston" nameplate where "Hitachi" used to be.

"It's screwdriver technology!" Sundar told us proudly, beaming as if he'd invented the transistor. The instruction manuals still said "Congratulations on purchasing your Hitachi video deck!" The warranty cards bore Hitachi's logo. Even the remote control had "Hitachi" molded into the plastic.

Sundar was a character — he smoked in alternate years, claiming it "intensified the pleasure." When we asked why alternate years, he explained with the seriousness of a philosopher: "Anticipation enhances satisfaction. Also, my wife only complains every other year this way."

As a gift for being early customers of his high-tech screwdriver operation, he gave us bootlegged VHS tapes of "Mind Your Language" recorded directly off British TV, complete with ITV watermarks and British commercials for products we couldn't buy. This was Indian entrepreneurship at its finest: import Japanese technology, slap on an Indian nameplate, throw in pirated British comedy featuring immigrants mangling English, and navigate the entire transaction through a fog of legally-gray ingenuity.

This was how business worked in socialist India. Everyone was an entrepreneur — just an illegal one. In a country where regulations made everything criminal, everyone became a criminal. It was the ultimate secular achievement: Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian — all united in their need to break the law just to function.

Waiting for Godot (and Phones and Cars and Scooters and...)

The infrastructure was so bad it seemed designed to humiliate every community equally. We waited eight years for a telephone connection. Eight. Years. The day it finally arrived, the whole neighborhood came to see it — Hindus, Muslims, Christians, all united in their awe at functioning technology.

The phone, a heavy black Bakelite monster, worked about half the time. When it did work, the "trunk lines" were so bad that my father routed calls to Bombay via a re-dialer in London. Yes, to call from Delhi to Bombay, the signal went Delhi-London-Bombay.

Cars were even worse. The Ambassador — a 1950s Morris Oxford that India kept producing unchanged for 40 years — came in one color: white. One year, the Premier Padmini (a rebadged early 1960s Fiat 1100D) created genuine excitement with its revolutionary new feature: a glove box light. A GLOVE BOX LIGHT. This was innovation in socialist India.

The Bajaj scooter had a waiting list so long that middle-class fathers would book one when their daughter was born, hoping it would arrive by her wedding. A popular joke: "Why did the father look sad at his daughter's wedding?" "The scooter still hadn't been delivered."

The trains? The toilets opened directly onto the tracks below — you could see the rails rushing past through the hole. This was Indian Railways' environmental policy: the entire subcontinent was our septic system.

When Animals Go to Jail: Peak Socialist Absurdity Still Continues To This Day!

But nothing — nothing — captures the absurdity of socialist India better than our criminal justice system's approach to animals, even now in post-socialist India because the system is essentially unchanged.

In 2017, eight donkeys were arrested and jailed for four days in Uttar Pradesh. Their crime? Eating expensive plants outside a prison. The "four-legged criminals" munched their way through ₹60,000 worth of saplings. The local jail authorities, following proper procedure, detained the animals until a politician posted bail for them.

Let that sink in. Donkeys. Were arrested. And jailed. And needed bail.

The previous year, police in Chhattisgarh arrested a goat for repeatedly trespassing into a judge's garden. The goat, described in official documents as a "repeat offender," was booked under serious charges that technically carried a 2-7 year jail term. Thankfully, the goat was released on bail the next day — likely unaware of its brush with the law.

Then there's the case of Hariyal the parrot in Maharashtra. An elderly woman filed a police complaint accusing her stepson's pet parrot of hurling curses at her. The police, following procedure, summoned all three parties — the woman, the stepson, and the parrot — to the station. The parrot exercised its right to remain silent.

But my favorite involves India's paranoia about Pakistani spies. On multiple occasions, Indian authorities have detained pigeons suspected of espionage. In 2020, a pigeon was captured in Kashmir with a coded note and held on suspicion of being a Pakistani spy. In 2023, Mumbai police incarcerated a pigeon for eight months after finding rings and Chinese characters on it. It turned out to be a Taiwanese racing bird that got lost.

This is what happens when, due to socialist government control of everything, you create 7,305 crimes at the national level. Eventually, you run out of humans to arrest and start prosecuting the animal kingdom.

The Geniuses We Wasted

The real tragedy wasn't the shortages or the queues. It was the criminal waste of human potential — a uniquely Indian tragedy where genius from every community was squandered equally.

Take Sant Ram, our mechanic. To call him a wasted engineering mind would be to massively understate the case. In a country where spare parts rarely fit even when they were supposedly made for your exact car model, most mechanics reached for hammers. Not Sant Ram. He would maneuver, chip, turn, scrape — creating precise solutions from whatever he had. When everything rattled (as everything did in Indian cars), he'd fashion exact shims from scrap metal, placing them in precise spots to eliminate every sound. He had an intuitive understanding of harmonics, metallurgy, and engineering that would have impressed MIT.

In another life, Sant Ram would be leading Ferrari's pit crew at Monza. In socialist India, he fixed Ambassador cars that hadn't changed since 1958.

Then there was Giani Ji, our electronics fixer, who operated on another plane of existence entirely. His shop in Delhi had retail below, and you crawled up through a hatch into his workshop — a wizard's lair of circuit boards and soldering irons. There was nothing electronic the man couldn't fix, including things he'd never seen before. Remember, this was pre-internet. No YouTube tutorials. No PDF manuals. Just pure understanding of how electrons flow.

In 1982, he outdid himself. I'd somehow acquired a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, one of the first personal computers in the world, along with its thermal printer (probably 30 dpi). When the printer broke, I took it glumly to Giani Ji. This was British technology so new that maybe two other people in India had one.

"Come back in a few days," he said.

I returned expecting nothing. Giani Ji had disassembled it completely, reverse-engineered the principles by which it worked, fabricated a replacement part from scratch, and reassembled it. Perfect working condition. He'd essentially recreated British computer engineering from first principles in a Delhi rooftop.

In another life, Giani Ji would be in Silicon Valley, building the future. In socialist India, he fixed radios in a Delhi rooftop.

Now multiply Sant Ram and Giani Ji by a billion. Hindu geniuses, Muslim prodigies, Sikh innovators, Parsi entrepreneurs, Christian educators — all reduced to working around a system designed to waste human potential. Socialism's greatest achievement: it made mediocrity mandatory for everyone.

The Economics of Humiliation

When my father retired in 1971 with his broken back, the government awarded him a pension of $10 per month — "enhanced" because he'd won a gallantry medal for landing a burning aircraft on a carrier deck. My mother, a junior lawyer, made about $6 per month. Combined monthly income for a decorated naval officer and a barrister from Lincoln's Inn: $16.

The socialist system created an entire class with a chip on their shoulder visible from space. My parents' generation had returned to India post-independence to "build the new nation." How did the motherland repay them? By making them stand in ration lines.

The psychological contortions were Olympic-level. In 1980, at a dinner in Singapore with my father's English friend, I complained about havign to study Sanskrit being a waste of my time since I intended to be a scientist. My parents erupted: "It's a wonderful language! You should study it!"

All bullshit. My grandfather was an ancient Indian historian who read Sanskrit fluently. He never once cared whether I learned it. The sin wasn't criticizing Sanskrit — it was criticizing anything Indian in front of a foreigner.

This schizophrenia infected everything. Here was a nation where people literally starved due to government policies, yet it lectured the world on everything from nuclear weapons to human rights. The Non-Aligned Movement was essentially poor countries telling rich countries how to behave while begging them for food aid.

Television in a Coma

Indian television made Soviet TV look like HBO. The crown jewel of programming was "Rukavat ke liye khed hai" — "We apologize for the interruption." This message appeared so frequently it should have had its own time slot.

Color TV arrived around 1980, but only for Asian Games and special occasions. Regular programming featured "Krishi Darshan" — farming television that explained how to dig tube wells and spread urea. Starved of anything scientific, I watched it avidly. People assumed I wanted to be a farmer. No — I just wanted to learn ANY chemistry, even if it came as fertilizer instructions.

Bill Bryson explained in his hilarious, Neither Here Nor There, that "Norwegian Television gave you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience." He should have come to India: Indian television would have given him the sensation of an even deeper coma with plenty of worry and inconvenience. [By the way, his description of the Dutch language in that book is one of the funniest passages I've ever read by any author. But I digress. Back to India.]

The slogan was "Garibi Hatao" (Remove Poverty). The joke was that they removed the poor instead — through starvation.

The Great Escape: When Breaking the Law Became Necessary

When I decided to apply to American universities in 1983, I became a criminal. Indians were originally allowed $8 for foreign travel. Eight dollars. Later magnanimously raised to $500. But you couldn't get foreign currency for "non-essential" purposes like education.

Each $55 application fee required black market transactions. The SAT fee? Impossible legally. Prep books? Smuggled from Hong Kong. I relied on an underground network — people discussed needing "shirts" when they meant dollars. My uncle in Hong Kong paid Columbia's fee. Another, more distant uncle in London handled Stanford's. My mother's friend in New Jersey paid Brown's. And so on.

The absurdity peaked when someone told my father that Columbia was "such a bad university it was going to be kicked out of the Ivy League" and replaced by Temple University. This gin-soaked guidance came from a Delhi Gymkhana Club regular. Based on this, I applied to Temple too, using more black market dollars.

I was seventeen and already a criminal by necessity, part of a foreign exchange racket that included students from every community — Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh — all united in their need to escape.

By 1984, I'd had enough. The India I was leaving was a country where train toilets opened directly onto the tracks, where the only public transportation in Delhi was ancient buses belching diesel smoke, where infrastructure seemed designed to humiliate. I left for Columbia University with two suitcases and a head full of Milton Friedman. India's socialist experiment had turned me into a libertarian before I knew the word existed.

The infrastructure humiliation persisted for decades. As late as 2008, Delhi airport was so horrific — disgusting, dirty, with the most foul bathrooms imaginable — that even with explosive diarrhea, I couldn't use them. The stench was overwhelming, the toilets were clogged, there was no toilet paper, and the floors were covered in unmentionable fluids. I waited in agony until I boarded the plane, clenching with superhuman determination. Socialism, you see — the airport hadn't yet been upgraded after its privatization in 2006. The same system that made toothpaste a luxury couldn't manage a decent toilet in the national capital.

1991: When Even God Gave Up

Seven years after I left, it all came crashing down. By 1991, India had $600 million in reserves — three weeks of imports. In the ultimate humiliation, India had to physically airlift 67 tons of gold to London as collateral for an IMF loan.

The image was perfect: a nation that worshipped gold, where every wedding featured kilos of it, where Lakshmi herself was depicted with gold coins... shipping its treasure to its former colonizer to avoid bankruptcy.

The crisis forced reality upon India. Suddenly, after 44 years, Indians could start businesses without begging. Foreign companies could invest. The rupee became partially convertible. Import licenses were abolished.

The results were immediate. GDP growth accelerated. Hundreds of millions escaped poverty — more in two decades than in the previous four. The IT revolution began. The same culture that had celebrated wealth for 5,000 years was finally allowed to create it.

This vindicated everything the diaspora had been screaming from abroad. Those desperate Indian parents in New Jersey pushing their kids toward medicine and engineering? They weren't being irrational — they were having flashbacks to when anything else meant poverty. The uncle hoarding gold in London? He remembered when currency could be invalidated overnight. The auntie in Toronto with seventeen backup plans? She grew up where even toothpaste required government permission.

The Ghost in the Machine

But old habits die hard. Look at today's India:

• Mumbai residents break the law every time they drink beer without a permit — yes, really, section 40 of the Bombay Prohibition Act 1949 is still in force

• Live-in couples in Uttarakhand must register or face jail

• Nearly 800 products require government certification

• Cities build fancy elevated roads then set speed limits at 30km/h (18mph)

• Authorities brick up entrances to public spaces for "safety reasons"

• Airport security confiscates packets of spice mixes but allows packets of noodles that contain packets of spice mixes

• During my last visit, I had a portable electric guitar. It has a truss rod screw. To turn that screw requires a tiny tool, approximately 1 inch long. I had taken that guitar with me on innumerable trips without any issue. But, not in India. Confiscated! A 1 inch piece of metal, about the thickness of a paper clip, is dangerous you see

• Demonetization in 2016 invalidated 86% of currency overnight, achieving nothing — 99% of the notes came back

According to a government official who spoke to The Economist: "We think the state must have a say in every aspect of an individual's life. Everything is game for legislation." Another complained that "the state sets impossibly high standards and then claims Indians are lawless. You have made it impossible for them to follow the law."

It's like the License Raj developed AI — artificially idiotic.

What Socialist India Taught the World (Or Should Have)

So what's the lesson for a series on Indian pluralism? Simple: Economic systems shape social relationships more powerfully than any philosophy.

For 5,000 years, India managed diversity through segmented coexistence — different communities living "together separately," each with their own economic niches. The Parsis in industry, Marwaris in trade, Brahmins in administration, Sikhs in transport. It wasn't perfect, but it worked.

Socialism destroyed this organic pluralism and replaced it with enforced equality — equally poor, equally constrained, equally criminal. When everyone needs to break the law to survive, traditional distinctions become meaningless. The ration line doesn't care about your caste.

This is actually India's gift to the world: we ran the experiment so you don't have to. We proved definitively that democratic socialism equals democratic poverty. We showed what happens when you worship a goddess of wealth while criminalizing wealth creation.

Most importantly, we demonstrated that pluralism needs economic freedom to flourish. You can't celebrate diversity while forcing everyone into the same queue. You can't have unity in diversity when the only unity is in misery.

The Paradox Persists

Today's India is schizophrenic — startup unicorns coexist with socialist hangovers. The same country that sends missions to Mars charges 18% GST on puffed rice. Politicians tweet about Digital India while maintaining analog regulations.

But here's what gives me hope: Indians never really bought into socialism. Even in the darkest days, everyone from the driver to the diplomat was running some side business. The culture that celebrates Lakshmi was just waiting for permission to be itself.

When that permission finally came, Indians from every community — Hindu tech entrepreneurs, Muslim traders, Sikh industrialists, Parsi venture capitalists, Christian educators — exploded into action. The IT revolution wasn't led by any one group. It was India's pluralism finally unleashed.

My mother's funeral, where the pandit took a call to arrange another funeral, wasn't rude — it was Indian. Ancient rituals, modern business, socialist-era phones, all colliding in one moment. That's India: holding contradictions until they make sense.

Sometimes I dream I'm back in that ration shop, six years old again, four years before India would officially declare what we were already living. In the dream, the sugar is white, the shopkeeper is smiling, and nobody needs a ration card because the shops are full. Then I wake up and remember: we actually did it. We escaped. Not completely — the ghost of socialism still haunts every regulation — but enough.

Enough that my mother, who once stood humiliated in ration lines, lived to see younger Indians take prosperity for granted. Enough that Sant Ram's son probably works in Germany, designing cars his father could only dream of fixing. Enough that some kid in Delhi is building the next unicorn without having to bribe anyone (much).

The goddess won. Eventually. But we gave socialism a hell of a run first, and collected every absurdity along the way. From donkeys in jail to prime ministers drinking piss, from 97.75% tax rates to eight-year waits for phones — we did it all.

We turned a civilization built on diversity into a queue built on equality. Then we discovered that the queue led nowhere. So we jumped it, all of us together — Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Parsi, Jain, Buddhist, atheist — and ran like hell toward the future.

Some of us are still running. The finish line keeps moving. But at least we're not in line anymore.

From absymal to utterly awful (But there really is hope)

As I tell everyone that asks about India, it has an almost guaranteed 50 years of economic growth in front of it. Why? Because the economic system it ditched in 1991 was so bad, so ridiculous, so insane, so kafkaesque that merely by exchanging the original abysmal economic policy for today's utterly awful economic policy is enough to generate 6-8% growth! The needed "reforms" are such incredibly low hanging fruit, and in India will take so long to implement, that the runway is long. And this explains many things about modern India.

For example, late at night, when I see WhatsApp forwards from uncles back home — wild claims about ancient Indian science, desperate get-rich-quick schemes, paranoid political theories — I understand. These are men who grew up in a system where the government drinking your wealth was normal but drinking your own urine was visionary leadership. Where donkeys could be jailed but ideas couldn't be free. Where every success had to be hidden and every rule had to be broken.

No wonder they forward everything marked "important" with such urgency. For forty years, the actually important was illegal, and the absurd was policy. Their filters are broken because the system that built them was broken first. They're still jumping at shadows, still hoarding opportunities, still convinced that prosperity might be snatched away by the next constitutional amendment.

They're the psychological refugees of socialism, forwarding their trauma one WhatsApp message at a time.

But that's a story for next time.

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Next in the series: "WhatsApp Uncles vs. Wisdom Aunties: How Technology is Disrupting 5,000 Years of Segmented Coexistence"