It’s become fashionable for virtually every speaker on the rubber chicken circuit, no matter his specific subject, to throw out reference to the emergence of China and India on the world stage as major players. Both countries are often lumped together as the successful globalization Bobsey Twins with not that many distinctions about their differing paths toward modernization.
Leaving aside the billion Chinese for the moment, looking at the billion Indians reveals some bumps on the road to a predicted glorious future.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, noted for his honesty and his perhaps too accommodating personality, is being dealt a death of a thousand cuts. Although momentarily the Indian economy appears more on track than during the long night of “Hindu rates of growth” during more than three decades copying the Soviets, the reform program to privatize and end what C.R. Rajagopalachari called “the Permit-License Raj” goes slowly. Singh’s fragile government depends on the votes of India’s two Communist parties.
And, hypocritically, while the Communists [Marxist] – the pro-Chinese twin creatred after the Moscow-Beijing split -- tries every wile to attract investors, including foreigners, to Kolkata [formerly Calcutta], it sabotages the same effort at the federal level. So Wal-Mart, for example, now buying some $20 billion a year in China, is still kept dawdling over its effort to set up retail in India as part of a similar effort there..
If Singh didn’t have enough troubles, he is also playing a cat and mouse game with Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, widow of Jawaharlal Nehru’s grandson, Rajiv, d son of Nehru’s daughter, Indira.. Ironically, Rajiv, who reluctantly went into politics after a career as a commercial airlines pilot, began the long, slow sticky job of breaking away from India’s “ socialist pattern of society” as the Soviet Union imploded. [He was cut down by a Sri Lankan female suicide bomber of the insurgency, again blossoming on that lovely island.].
Sonia, too, was forced out of widowhood into politics by the Congress dinosaurs, who needed a Nehru to perpetuate their long hold on power. But when last year, she won a telling victory over the Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party, she chose to remain only leader of the Party, turning down the prime ministry because she was under attack as a foreigner. [She was born Italian Catholic.]
Caught in an indiscreet payment earlier this year, she quickly resigned her seat in parliament, ran in the old Nehru constituency and won by a landslide. Her rechristening plus a decisive state elections victory for the Marxists in Bengal [and Kerala] is again pushing the Congress, and Indian politics, generally, left.
Sonia has already come up with a new proposal for a vast guaranteed work income for the countryside. Dreamed up by one of those foreign counterculture economists India has always attracted like flies – several of them wrote the disastrous Second Five Year Plan which started Soviet-style planning -- it is a bad movie of old inoperable, corrupt, and make-work programs we have seen before. But it will waste vast new funds –from the states as well as the center.
It seeks to treat a problem, of course, that does exist. Of India’s 1.1 billion people, more than 700 million live in 600,000 villages. By any standard most live below the so-called poverty line – many in misery known only in Subsaharan Africa. With agriculture employing more than a quarter of the Indian workforce, successive Indian governments have chosen to divert investment. Foodgrains production, at least, has improved since the near-famines of the 50s when only American gifts kept millions alive. But American PL480 also made it possible for New Delhi to ignore the fact the fickle monsoon rains dictated productivity. As late as 2002-3, scant rains cut a percent or two off the gross national product.
Rural India – there are more than twice as many people as there were at independence in 1948 – is at the mercy of the rains. Infrastructure is what is needed, not copies of the old British Indian famine relief offered now in a new packaging. It is no wonder hordes of jobless are crowing into the putrid slums threatening to overwhelm all the major Indian cities. And virtually nowhere is there the pure drinking water which Indian independence leader Mohandas K. Gandhi [no relation] promised as a benefit of freedom.
The information technology cloisters of Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai [former Madras] and New Delhi are as is loudly propagandized something of a miracle, wresting billions in outsourcing contracts at a faster and faster clip from Silicon Valley USA and Europe and Japan. But the pampered few working at Indian call centers, imitating the life of their colleagues in South Dakota, will not avoid the deluge sweeping in from the villages. A few weeks ago when Bangalore rioted after the death of the movie star Raj Kumar, the mob invaded those golden ghettoes for a few hours – a fitting harbinger.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net),
is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent
for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.
