India is aiming to become a developed nation, or Viksit Bharat, by 2047, a hundred years after independence. To understand how we should transform ourselves to become a developed country it is necessary to know the gap between us and a developed nation. The idea of a “developed country” is so widely used in public discourses that it often appears as self-evident. But if we probe deeper, we begin to understand the hollowness of its underlying presumptions. Colonial era economists have addressed differences between nations in binary terms: civilised vs uncivilised, advanced vs backward.

Classical economists like Smith, Mill and Marx had treated industrial capitalism as representative of a higher stage of social organisation and a model that all nations should emulate. Colonial administration translated these assumptions into their extractive policies for governing the colonies. The terms “developed” and “underdeveloped” entered the economic lexicon from President Harry Truman’s inaugural address in 1949: “We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.” From this moment, “developed” became the hallmark of the industrialised West, a benchmark that the “underdeveloped” rest of the world should follow.

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The distinction between “developed” and “underdeveloped” countries that treated non-Western societies as laggards in a universal trajectory defined by the West became one of the most enduring and widely used distinctions institutionalised by the global governance structures like the UN, World Bank, IMF, or WTO. The industrialised West became the implicit universal benchmark against which all progress is to be measured in every aspect of social life ~ polity, economy, culture, education, etc. so that the West, now robbed of colonies, can maintain its supremacy. In this new vocabulary, western-style “development” became a universal aspiration and “underdevelopment” represented a transitional state towards its attainment. The language encoded a clear hierarchy that put the West at a higher civilisational stage implicitly emphasising its superiority.

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The Cold War and disintegration of the Soviet Union reinforced this dichotomy, as explicitly expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s Essay on “The End of History” in 1989. The Western model of economic growth was a universal, linear movement through five stages, as proposed by Walt Rostow........

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