Socialism, Capitalism And India's Muslim Middle-Class

When Partition happened in 1947, most of our middle-class Muslims moved to Pakistan. So post-Partition India's Muslim community consisted mainly of lower-class Muslims. Then in 1947, Nehru adopted inefficient government-controlled socialism as our economic system. As a result, our economy grew at a rate of 3% per year. And our population grew at a rate of 2% per year - so our per capita income grew at a rate of 1% per year. But the East Asian and South East Asian countries adopted efficient free-market capitalism as their economic system - and grew at a rate of 10% per year.

Fast economic growth creates a big middle-class. Due to our slow economic growth under socialism, we were not able to create a Muslim middle-class (that we had lost in Partition). Finally in 1991, Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao changed our economic system from socialism to capitalism - and our economy started growing at the rate of 7-8% per year. This fast economic growth created a big Indian middle-class. Specifically: It created a small Muslim middle-class - for the first time since 1947.

So our Muslim middle-class is small and recent (only since 1991). Thus Nehru's socialism delayed the formation of a Muslim middle-class by almost 50 years - and therefore also delayed the modernisation of the Muslim community.