People who want a more “Chinese” economic model actually mean they want workers who have less rights and for businessmen to get richer while neglecting/exploiting their workers.

I was referring to the development model, not labour unionization. Chinese style (strong state) development model policies –> exacerbation of social and political divisions because of a lack of state capacity to manage the level of conflict that would create –> centrifugal forces (e.g. relatively wealthy states attempt to escape a downward spiraling situation).

Just one hypothetical scenario – not really worth much more than any other hypothetical, but the point being that India’s political orgqanisation is highly heterogeneous and fragmented and remaking that in a heavyhanded way is like to either fail or have an extremely heavy cost in human lives. Development models and industrial polciy regimes have to ‘fit’ and/or remake political economies – they don’t exist in the abstract.

the almost inevitable and rapid mass slaughter that this would entail

Dr. A, Would you care to elaborate on this? How exactly would a weakening of labor unions result in “inevitable and rapid mass slaughter”? And what does this have to do with Punjabi secession?

I’m curious how many people who support such a thing would support the almost inevitable and rapid mass slaughter that this would entail (on all sides). That’s not to say that there isn’t constant violence in India already, but comparing bandhs and police abuse and the frequent but periodic flaring up of larger bouts of state violence to, say, Partition level violence, is a different matter. Moreover, from a development standpoint, it poses important questions for basic political and social stability that the Indian state needs to preserve a semblance of social consent.

but hey – if people want gujarat and punjab to secede and have a massive social civil war in which many people we know woudl probably get killed – by all means, go for it

Economics (and indeed all attempts to describe the world) is all about telling stories and trying to figure out which ones fit the evidence best, given that in any given scenario, people with different preconceptions will have different stories. Hence, that’s why ignoring the rest of my sentence is to the detriment of your argument if you’re trying to convince. What I said was:

Please articulate a cause and effect and back it up with evidence about on-the ground realities in India (using labour laws to look at labour conditions is like looking at tax rates to determine how much people actually pay in taxes).

For example, a hotelier in India told me that the labour unions serve a useful function for him because instead of having industrial disputes with workers, the labour union takes care of it for them. Just one example – and anecdotal at that – but it at least makes a nod to looking at the real world of India. Similarly, an economist has told me that India’s pharmaceutical industry has suffered because of the elimination of their reverse engineering capabilities by virtue of intellectual property laws.

Isn’t it possible, just possible, that manufacturing hasn’t grown because the state does not have an adequate industrial policy, because having industrial policy – as an idea – have gone out of vogue? Or because the Indian government has focused so extensively on the SPZ model that it has lost sight of the need to develop a broadbased manufacturing industry and require foreign investors to provide backwards linkages where they do invest? Just sayin – there are a lot of stories one could come up with in the absence of any reliable and relatively consensus based evidence.

To some extent people with different paradigms will always speak past each other, but the only way that it can even be said to be social analysis rather than ideological combat is if they bother to root their analyses on the basis of real world evidence, analyse the accuracy of that evidence, root out biases where possible, and accept at the e4nd of that that it will still be flawed.

Wow. That really says it all. China has upto 100 million and the US even after a steep decline in manufacturing has upto 20 million (with a fraction of India’s population). Things look very bleak for India.