In their landmark book "Hunger and Public Action" (1989), Dreze and Sen (a Nobel prize winner), compare independent India and China, and found that "every eight years or so more people die in India because of its higher regular death rate than died in China in the gigantic famine of 1958-61" (pg 214-215). This was because the death rates have diverged so much, despite starting off at similar levels in 1950 (and which had persisted at similar levels pre-1950). Using 2022 UN data suggests the relative death toll of India is somewhere between 130-144m since 1950 (depending on estimated Great Leap Famine (GLF) death rates):
These numbers are likely conservative - data from demographic experts of these two countries (Mukherjee, Bhat, and Dyson for India; Banister, Luo, Calot, and Coale for China) suggests a wider gap in the mortality rates:
This might sound too ridiculous to be true - but it really is. What happened? Why did China’s death rate fall so much faster?
Back then - emerging from the 1940s - both were war-torn/colonized, agrarian, backwards, poor, very populous, with similar death rates
(Desktop: Click the trigger text to make this popup stick; click elsewhere to dismiss) As reviewed here, outside of war conditions and extended famines (with associated heightened death rates), China and India had death rates in the 19th and early 20th century in the 30s‰ range.
and age structures
(Desktop: Click the trigger text to make this popup stick; click elsewhere to dismiss) To get a handle on how demographics compare, we can take the percent of the population that falls in a particular age range; for example, 15% of a population might be 65+ - call this the age fraction. To compare the demographic structure of two countries, we can take the difference of their age fractions, for each age range, and plot this over time. If their age structure is exactly the same, then the difference of their age fractions will all be zero. So the greater the age fraction difference across age fractions, the greater the difference in their age structure. As we will see, differences within 0-5% are pretty similar.
Notice that China’s and India’s demographics are very similar until about 1980. Thus, mortality variations between the two in the first thirty years are not a fluke of age structure (for example, if one country’s population was simply much older overall, it would be more likely to have higher mortality rates as a result). Further, changes after 1980 are a result of trends apparent starting in the mid-1970s. We are seeing the social consequences then, of different political economies, start to manifest.
See here for other comparisons, to get a better handle on this.
(data source)
. Further, both countries suffered relatively little foreign intervention since - differences then are largely a result of internal policy - revolution, or "reform" (ie helping landlords, industrialists, and forward castes
India’s population is often divided into "castes". Really "caste" is a clumsy reference (rooted in early Portuguese observations) to two parallel and entwined systems - varna (four somewhat universal hierarchical sections, plus Dalits ("Untouchables"), based on religious tradition), and jati (thousands of different groups, regionally varied, with local hierarchical rankings, often associated with different occupations). Overall, Adivasis ("tribal") are people who are, well, "tribal", often living in remote forest or mountain regions. Dalits (or "Untouchables") are the lowest broad caste category, facing extreme discrimination. Then there are "Other Backwards Castes" (OBCs), castes not as bad off as Dalits, but still highly disadvantaged. Adivasis, Dalits, and OBCs together account for at least 60-70% of the population. Then there are "forward castes", which are castes that are, relatively speaking, privileged in Indian society. It’s worth noting that overall, about 10-15% of India’s population can be classified as "middle class" income or above - while "caste" and "class" have some correlation, they aren’t exactly the same. , and calling it "socialism" to win elections). As India’s founding PM Nehru puts it:
The most exciting countries for me today [are] India and China. We differ, of course, in our political and economic structures, yet the problems we face are essentially the same. The future will show which country and which structure of government yields greater results in every way - then Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, in a Nov 15, 1954 letter to the Chief Ministers
Chief Ministers are like the "prime ministers" of India’s states (ie like a "governor" of a state in the USA)
(from Frankel (1978/2005), pg 120)
Yet we don’t hear about this as luridly as Mao’s failures. While these problems haunt us today - the World Food Programme estimating hunger alone kills 9m a year (about 1/6 annual deaths) - chronic mortality still doesn't "catch headlines" (unless we’re talking North Korea):
Endemic undernutriction is a less obvious - a less 'loud' - phenomenon than famine. Though it kills many more people in the long run than famines do, it does not get the kind of dramatic media attention that famines generate. But even in terms of sheer mortality, many times more people are killed slowly by regular undernourishment and deprivation than by the rarer and more confined occurrence of famine.
Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze (1989), pg 261
Independent India quickly eliminated famines but did much less to fight chronic hunger, which kills a startlingly large number of the country’s citizens. Each year, between two million and three million fewer Indians would die early deaths if nutrition (and hence life spans) rose across the country to the levels seen in the southwestern state of Kerala. But while the media flaunts the visuals of famine deaths, which enforces political accountability, journalists rarely pay attention to the less conspicuous deaths hunger brings.
Reducing hunger is a long-term and multifaceted task that does not make for easy headlines. Besides food, a hungry child needs good health (parasites and other diseases make food absorption and retention hard). Children and parents need good education to make better-informed decisions. Families need clean water and basic sanitation. For these reasons, improving nutrition requires multiple players who persist with baby steps forward despite suffering repeated setbacks. But politicians see little pay-off in such complex long-haul efforts.
Ashoka Mody (2023), pg 19-20
The fact that a large proportion of the world’s population is malnourished is common knowledge. Organisations like Oxfam and the Save the Children Fund continually make us aware of the problem and appeal for our help in improving the plight of the ‘starving millions’ in third world countries. Recent experience, particularly the situation in Ethiopia, suggests that while the consciences of people in rich countries can be pricked by major famines, they remain largely indifferent to the far more pervasive and ultimately more serious problems of undernutrition and malnutrition. There are many reasons why this might be so, but one of the most important seems to be that famines are necessarily short-term crises with definite origins and limits, whereas chronic malnutrition is seen to be a problem that has been and will always be with us. Such views are in fact mistaken. - Worboys (1988) pg 208
Why is this? There’s a lot of ideological baggage, but Reagan's soon-to-be UN representative Jeanne Kirkpatrick put it succinctly (here, she isn't criticizing traditional autocrats, but praising them):
Traditional autocrats leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status and other resources, which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos. They do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations. Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people who . . . learn to cope, as children born to untouchables in India acquire the skills and attitudes necessary for survival in the miserable roles they are destined to fill. Such societies create no refugees.
Precisely the opposite is true of revolutionary Communist regimes.
If there’s no Communism, [poor] people dying doesn’t shock the conscience - that's "how things work"! In a "free speech" society with huge wealth inequality, of course, the ruling class opinions simply dominate - but fairly, meritocratically! Crimes against the propertied class are the only ones that should concern us - the sort of crime that a "democracy" like India is innocent of.
However, the whole Third World - republican to ML - used much the same development strategies - artificial pricing, trade controls, 5 year plans - but with varying class orientations and political systems (the Asian Tigers on the extreme end (see here for more)), improving life to variable degrees compared to the colonial era. Yet electing anybody aiming for economic independence - let alone Communist - was grounds for Western intervention and coup (see Westad (2005)). Hence why Communists could only take power in elections in Kerala: a state within sovereign India. And it’s the one place in India that kept up w China; see Mody’s remarks above!
In ML countries, bold action resulted in enormous success, but the failures could be big too. As Stephen Wheatcroft puts it regarding the USSR:
I am interested in exploring the period from 1880 to 1955 precisely because it is in this period before modern medicine and urban sanitation could be expected to have been so important when the Soviet population experienced massive short-term demographic crises accompanied by secular improvements. - Stephen Wheatcroft (1999)
The Totalitarian myth exploits this (see Gleason (1997)), obscuring history by fixating on ML failures alone: "Communists killed 50, 100m, and Hitler only 6m" (or 12, 20, but always less). Mao becomes comparable to Hitler, not Nehru, rendering Revolutionary China - and any communist - politically untouchable. The historical context of Third World suffering is wiped from the memory of almost all but its victims; any deviation from the Washington line is marked off as "propaganda" or "whataboutism". Combined w a Hayekian equation of Communism and public action, privatizing public assets (neoliberalism) is erroneously legitimized. To boot, all the successes of postcolonial states in improving wellbeing (ie reducing hunger) are vaguely attributed to the West, or even capitalism!
There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror — that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
Mark Twain (1889), "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court"
Such people [his detractors] claim that some events are so important that they should be outside the area of historical study. They claim that we can write poetry about these events, but that we should not dare to apply objective historical analysis. Let me state quite clearly that I reject this as obscurantism. I believe that it is one of the main tasks of the historian to reduce the area of the unthinkable. I make absolutely no excuses for this. I am trying to see the exceptional Soviet experience in some form of historical and comparative perspective. This is not to diminish its exceptional nature, but to return it to the realm of academic thought.
Stephen Wheatcroft (1999), "Toward an Objective Evaluation of the Complexities of Soviet Social Reality under Stalin"
Slides:(1) suppose over several years, the red and dark red lines correspond to the crude death rates (CDRs) per thousand people (‰) in two different countries (call them CDR₁ and CDR₂ respectively). (2) Suppose over those same years, the population for country 1 looks like this (call this population₁). (3) The total deaths in country 1 can be computed as CDR₁‰ × (population₁/1000); for example, for year 1, CDR₁ = 25‰, and population₁ = 40,000,000 ("40m"); so total deaths = 25*(40,000,000/1000) = 1,000,000 ("1 million"). This is shown on the bar graph as purple segments, although this is just for scale (and not to imply the population falls by that much per year, because it also gains a certain amount from births). (4) Let’s zoom in, and plot those total deaths per year for country 1. (5) If we take CDR₂ as our baseline, then we can compute the excess deaths based on the difference of the two CDRs (ΔCDR = CDR₁ - CDR₂, where "Δ" typically denotes "difference" or "change"). So, for example, in year 1, ΔCDR = 13.8‰, and CDR₁ = 25‰. So then "excess deaths" account for 13.8/25 = 55.2% of total deaths for country 1. The difference ΔCDR is much smaller for year 2, so then the excess deaths in that year are much smaller. (6) Over the period of interest, take the sum of these excess deaths for the total or "cumulative" excess deaths over that time interval.
Death is a part of life - but different factors make death more likely. For example, if country 1 has a much older population than country 2, that could explain the higher CDR. However, if two countries have a similar age structure, other factors must explain the difference in death rate, such as food shortage, disease, and so on.
If we think two countries are comparable, we would expect their death rates to stay similar. If they begin to diverge (ie ΔCDR ≠ 0), that indicates that something serious has happened in one of the countries - perhaps a more humane social policy, or perhaps an acute crisis. Either way, we can estimate how many people died in one country, due to this divergence in death rate.
Note this is the same method used to calculate excess death tolls in general. For example, during the Sars-CoV19 pandemic, we frequently heard about this, except the baseline used is a death rate from prior years in the same country.
(Back to Spot) In short, no. Here are some suggestive excerpts:
In the following, economist John Kenneth Galbraith - who served in the administrations of FDR, Truman, JFK, and LBJ, as well as ambassador to India under Kennedy, offers comments on India. Here he is interviewed by right-wing polemicist William ("Bill") F. Buckley in 1981, on the show "Firing Line".
Buckley: Well, of course your manifest common sense lead you to despair in your book about India, over the endemic poverty which not surprisingly continues to obtain in a country that is explicitly socialist.
Galbraith: uh, no no no. I must correct you. India combines a certain overtures to socialist rhetoric with some of the most rapacious capitalists to be found anywhere in the world. And uh, after all it is a society of 70% small farmers who have no disposition to socialism whatever. You musn’t argue with me on India.
Buckley: Why do they elect socialists?
Galbraith: You made a polemical mistake in going to India, because I know so much more about India than you do, even though you know more about uh, the technique of...
Buckley: ...
Galbraith: There are times, I don’t want to say unlike you, I retreat into realism. And the poverty of India is one great realistic fact. But it has nothing to do, I promise you Bill, nothing to do with ideology. It has an enormous amount to do with the concentration of vast millions of people on very limited primitive land resources, and that that is the cause of poverty.
Here are a few excerpts from former IMF economist Ashoka Mody, in his book "India is Broken" (2023):
Socialism means the creation of equal opportunity for all. In this sense, India never implemented socialist policies. A common mistake is to identify central planning or big government as socialism, but these are tools of economic policy, not socialism. Even if assessed narrowly by these tools, Indian planning and size of government have been similar to those in a broad range of Western capitalist economies and a far cry from the former Soviet Union. 17 Governments large and small can be distinctly anti-socialist when they promote the powerful and the elite, as was true under both Nehru and Mrs. Gandhi. Public policy did not work for the general welfare during the so-called socialist years or later. Modern India’s propellant force then and ever since has been its deeply unequal development process.
The bogeyman of the alleged socialist legacy has given India’s market- friendly “liberalizers” license to pursue an economic path that generates ever more inequality while continuing the neglect of public goods neces- sary for shared progress. Leaders and public intellectuals—irrespective of their rhetoric and professed ideologies—have always paid only lip service to public goods. Particularly worrisome, they have pursued a mythical “development” that causes possibly irreparable damage to the environ- ment, a public good essential for current and future generations of Indians. (pg 11)
...
Nehru would have agreed that he was not a socialist. In his own words, socialism meant “equality of opportunity” and provision of basic necessities of life—“food, clothing, houses to live in, healthcare and educational facilities”—to everyone. Whether he was inspired by Fabian socialism, Soviet ideology, or his own professed commitment to equality and fairness, he practiced none of them. As Sujatha Rao, a former health secretary (the Indian government’s senior-most health official) writes, “It is inexplicable why Nehru did not pay any attention to education
and health.”31 (pg 63)
...
Although many Indians recognized Nehru’s socialist rhetoric as empty, the narrative of Nehruvian socialism stuck because of the severe import controls instituted by the Indian government to stem the drain on for- eign exchange reserves. Such draconian controls were new to India. Even subsequent critics of Indian economic policy, including the economists Jagadish Bhagwati and Padma Desai, recognized that India was liberal- izing imports before the start of the Second Five-Year Plan. The IMF dated the events more precisely. In the second half of 1956 when foreign exchange reserves were in their initial free fall, Indian import policy was only modestly restrictive, with some controls on the import of consumer goods while allowing liberal imports of raw materials and machinery. But, by early 1957, “Severe import restrictions [had] affected supplies of raw materials and component parts.”47
The imposition of import controls in late 1956/early 1957 was decid- edly not a moment of socialist conversion, as many have since insisted. As Indraprasad Gordhanbhai (“I. G.”) Patel, perhaps India’s most distin- guished economic policymaker in the post-independence era and one of the authors of the Second Plan, later made clear: “No one consciously initiated the policy.” Import controls were based on “no theory or phi- losophy,” Patel added emphatically. The simple truth, he explained, was that “everyone was surprised by the severity of the exchange crisis which hit us in 1956.” Controls were a panicked defensive reaction to looming national bankruptcy. In Patel’s words, “Necessity was the mother of in- vention of import controls.”48 (pg 69)
...
The resulting capricious import protection of domestic industry was not designed—as in many now-industrialized economies—to give chosen industries breathing space to learn and grow. Even the “leftist” economist Prabhat Patnaik concluded that the controls and their knock- on consequences “flouted all cannons of economic efficiency.”50
The effects were distinctly anti-socialist. Large Indian businesses, especially the House of the Birlas, gained a disproportionate share of the production and import licenses. “It is well known,” wrote an official inquiry into licensing practices, “Large Industrial Houses maintain liaison officers in Delhi [for] business and social contacts with senior persons in the Government and [they thus] seek to influence the exercise of dis- cretionary power in their favour.” These business houses preempted the available licenses, leaving little room for potential competitors. The top executives of big business houses sat on the boards of government-owned or -controlled financial institutions, helping them corner a disproportion- ate share of (especially foreign currency) lending.51
Nehru continued in public appearances and writings to assert his com- mitment to a “socialistic” path of economic development. His ministers demonstrated their allegiance to the same mystical socialism. In May 1956, at the start of the foreign exchange crisis, the brilliant political cartoonist Shankar Pillai showed Nehru looking on indulgently as his flock of reli- able geese (cabinet ministers and senior Congress Party leaders) cackled, “Socialism.” The rhetoric, as Myrdal noted, led many Western and South Asian pundits to the conclusion that “reliance on operational controls of an administrative discretionary type imposes a ‘socialist’ pattern on the economy.” Myrdal placed the word “socialist” within inverted commas, as if in exasperation. Surely, he wearily added, socialism is “a misnomer for a system of policies that broadly tends to give oligopoly power and very high profits to established big business.” Pakistan had very similar controls, Myrdal noted, but absent the rhetoric, no one called Pakistan “socialist.”52 (pg 70-71)
...
Democracy also betrayed Indians citizens because Nehru’s policies had little connection with the rights and aspirations of the majority of Indi- ans. Nehru could pursue his policies because he faced no opposition, either from within the Congress Party and the government or from any other party. He won elections because people idolized him, often be- lieving in his socialist rhetoric. (pg 102)
