Number Fetish: Middle-class India's Obsession with the GDP

India has been fixated on the annual growth rate of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This number averaged about 3.5% per annum from independence to the early 1980s, leaped to twice that in recent decades before falling off in the last five years to about 5% per annum. The GDP emerged at a specific moment in the evolution of capitalism and was never intended to be a measure of the quality of life of people. Gross Domestic Product discussions reveal a desperate desire on the part of many in India to be seen as having arrived into the first world. In a context marked by the paradox of electoral democracy alongside mass poverty and rising inequality, focusing on the GDP legitimizes an unjust social order. The GDP number seeks to transform politics in a technical and asocial direction, and the obsession with it powerfully undergirds the hegemony of a neoliberal vision of India.