Implosion (2 page)

It is difficult to live in India for long without becoming deeply sceptical and even cynical about the future of the country, and its leaders and society. I travelled to a jungle camp near Kanha National Park in the middle of India, to write part of this book.
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As I was driven from Jabalpur, an old city that has been an important military and regional centre since before independence, I wondered whether the great rolling countryside would change my basic views and moderate my criticisms. I needn’t have worried. Over the next few days, the local newspaper,
The Hitavada
, kept me on track. One day, a senior forestry official’s residence had been raided and ‘disproportionate property’ worth over Rs 40 crore had been discovered.
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Two days later, police wielding lathis charged at a crowd in the state’s capital city, beating people who were protesting against the killing and alleged rape of an eight-year-old girl.

Inspiration in the ’80s

India’s massive potential captured me when I first came to the country in 1982, writing articles on industry for the
Financial Times
. I had been reporting Britain’s industrial decline for 15 years and I was struck, as I travelled from Bengaluru northwards to Bombay, Pune and Delhi, by the contrast with India’s economy that was just beginning to open up, albeit extremely slowly.
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Black-and-white televisions were beginning to appear in rural villages, though urban markets sold video players, not recorders, because nothing was being broadcast that was worth recording. A government-owned company, Maruti Udyog, was looking for a foreign partner to make cars (it eventually linked up with Suzuki) to run on roads crowded with 30-year-old derivatives of British Morris Oxfords and Fiat 1100s alongside the bullock carts and auto-rickshaws. Japanese two-wheeler and light commercial vehicle companies were setting up joint ventures. Operation Flood was building a network of thousands of milk cooperatives that would make India self-sufficient in milk. Indira Gandhi, the prime minister, had just begun to decontrol cement prices, an arcane but seminal initiative.

A couple of years later, after I had come to live in Delhi, there was a young prime minister who had dreams of opening people’s eyes to the potential of a new India. Rajiv Gandhi gave business a much needed sense of respectability and inspired interest among the young in the stock market. He started initiatives to loosen up industrial controls, introducing high technology and entrepreneurial drive into a government-dominated economy. Pepsi Cola was soon demonstrating how a foreign company could help agriculture by pulping and exporting tomatoes as well as selling its cola. Opponents of reform were regularly pushing Gandhi off course, but the foundations of new India were being prepared. The potential was already visible.

Hopes were pinned on what were seen as India’s acclaimed advantages as an investment destination – notably its stable parliamentary democracy, deep-rooted cultural and social traditions in a free and open society, with established legal, accounting, and financial systems and institutions, and a respect for private property. One could also include a firmly based private sector, high quality technicians with good analytical brains, a strong base of competent managers, and English as the main language of business and government’.
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Together, that gave India a distinct edge over China though, even then, India was frequently regarded as a problem, and suffered internationally from “a bad image as an ‘unpredictable, unreliable, and even difficult place to do business’.

The
Financial Times
posted me to Hong Kong in 1988 at the end of five years based in Delhi, so I did not report on the economic reforms introduced in 1991 that opened up the economy and sharpened the focus on developing a modern India. I returned in 1995, expecting to find an even greater sense of the enormous potential that I had felt in the 1980s. Instead, I found a society and a government that were unsure about the benefits and political viability of economic liberalization. Leaders at all levels had found new ways to milk the country of its riches, encouraged by greedy foreign as well as big Indian companies and banks that were only too willing to pay for out-of-turn contracts, mandates and licences.

There was even a new willingness to gossip openly about corruption, which had not been evident in the 1980s. The names of top officials in some ministries (even the finance ministry, as I had heard in Hong Kong) were being attached to major projects and financial mandates. India was emerging into what it has now become – a place where many deals have an illicit price, and where politicians and bureaucrats link with businessmen to plunder the country’s wealth, deprive the poor of sustenance and aid, steal natural resources that range from land and coal to wildlife, and secure future wealth through layers of political dynasties.

The March of Corruption

Corruption plays a vital role in the country’s failings. It prevents central and state governments adequately addressing key issues, and leads both the public and private sector to assume that they can buy their way into contracts and out of problems. It oils the wheels for businessmen and politicians, and helped create a pre- 2011 economic boom by exploiting the country’s natural resources, while also greasing the wheels of inefficiency and poor performance. Until recently, society knew it was happening but did little to stop it. The fraud and extortion are now beginning to unravel though, partly because of India’s right to information (RTI) laws that are publicizing widespread corruption, and partly because of public anger and protest movements, aided by hyperactive and inquisitive television and the growing power of social media.

‘Everyone seems to assume that advancement – whether it is admission to a college for a child who has failed its exams, the award of a contract for mending a road, fixing a court case, or winning a top public sector job – can be bought,’ I wrote in 2001.
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‘State chief ministers regard state electricity boards as their personal fiefdom, and the rich and powerful – plus the poor – steal electricity and refuse to pay bills. Politicians regard India’s forests as places to be plundered for their personal and party finances. Public sector projects are commissioned to create both kickbacks for officials and over-invoiced work for contractors. Inevitably, the people who benefit from this illicit wealth do not want economic reform.’

These problems must however be seen in the context of the massive economic, political and social changes since independence, and especially the most dramatic period of transition and adjustment in the past 10 to 15 years. This was when the 1991 reforms fed through into the lives of at least a third of the population, triggering unimagined consumerism and availability of jobs. New technologies brought satellite television, 24-hour TV news and the internet, opening the eyes of rural as well as urban communities to lifestyles they had never seen. All this led to a breakdown of old family bonds and awakened new social attitudes, ambitions and awareness, plus an impatience with corrupt and ineffective politicians – all coming together in three decades instead of sequentially, over the far longer periods that it took other developed economies.

The Opposite Is True

India has its own form of logic and many contradictions so that virtually everything and its opposite are true. Indian people are kind and generous, but it is often a cruel, ruthless society. They can be honest but without conventional Western-style ethics, proud of an established rule of law but with scant interest in abiding by it, hard-working yet indolent in a laissez faire way, with clean homes yet without concern about filthy environments. There is enormous energy and creativity, yet the influence of chalta hai is pervasive. There is a respect for animals from the sacred cow to the revered tiger, yet the natural heritage is plundered, and there is reverence for frugal lives, yet tolerance of arrogant displays of wealth and huge waste. Perhaps the biggest and most important contradiction of all is the failure to rise to the expectations that stem from the combination of a rich, deep culture with an apparent openness and accessibility, plus an unrealized potential in terms of people and natural resources.

Realism is now setting in as people see that many things cannot be taken at face value, especially when cultural factors affect openness and honesty. As Kris Gopalakrishnan, co-chairman and one of the founders of Infosys, a leading Indian information technology company, said in a newspaper interview, ‘In Indian culture, people often leave important things unsaid, while people from abroad are more transparent. So they assume that if something is not said, it doesn’t matter. But in India if something isn’t said, it really does not mean it doesn’t matter’.
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That rhymes with what a neighbour in Delhi said when I asked a question about Indian politics: ‘What are you to me that I should tell you the truth?’ He was probably half joking, and was enjoying teasing a foreign journalist, but there was a revealing undercurrent of reality. K. Shankar Bajpai,
¹¹
a veteran diplomat, once told me, ‘Hinduism does not believe in conversion, so we make assertions without trying to persuade anyone else to our point of view.’ Namita Gokhale, a novelist and publisher, explained that ‘The Hindu religion leads you to seek individual salvation, so you have little place for community and ethical values, and that leads to a moral ambivalence and acceptance of corruption in one’s mindset.’ A former top official in the defence services had this to offer: ‘We are a feudal society, so if a minister says, “Do something in five years”, we will say, “No sir, we’ll do it in three years” and then we will not do it at all.’

In 1995, I wrote a comparative study of India and China’s liberalization policies
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and searched for a way of explaining why China always seemed to be given the benefit of the doubt, whereas India would be quickly criticized. ‘The problem for India is that foreigners expect more of it than China,’ I wrote. ‘Its apparent openness, with the English language and a suave elite, make it look easy, westernised and welcoming – though noisy. Only later does it emerge as a complex and often difficult challenge. China, on the other hand, is shrouded in mystery and looks intriguingly remote and orientally challenging, though in reality it is more orderly than India. China is therefore almost always given the benefit of the doubt. Whatever businessmen manage to achieve in China is notched up as a success. Whatever they don’t quickly achieve in India is a black mark.’ Foreigners still continue to expect more of India, not only because of the English language and apparent similarities with their own countries, but because of the hopes released in the 1980s, and especially after 1991.

Aspirational India

Despite the criticisms, it is the upside of a new aspirational India that gives the country hope. New generations of ambitious young people, ranging from the poor to the elite, have been freed from many of the social and economic restrictions and shortages of earlier generations. Urban India is now almost unrecognizable from 30 years ago in terms of transport, consumer goods, entertainment and lifestyles, though there is still widespread hardship and poverty, and the chaotic and dangerous clutter of unauthorized construction and urban decay. Mobile telephones have transformed communications – there are over 700m active connections (though many people have more than one) compared with less than 30m mostly land line (and inefficient) telephones 10 to 20 years earlier.

Aspirational India has emerged in other ways too, affecting traditional values. Arranged marriages continue, for example, but those looking for partners no longer focus on the safety of caste and community links but look for educational and business qualifications and possibly the opportunity to live abroad. In the 1980s, matrimonial advertisements in newspapers focused on complexion, caste and education, but now it is ‘MNC’ for multinational corporations and ‘MBA’ for a business degree, demonstrating a growing concern for material success. Instead of just advertising in the classified pages of weekend newspapers, the hunt for a partner happens on the internet too, and there is even a website for second marriages that demonstrates an acceptance of divorce that would have been unthinkable when I first came to India.
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‘Every successful economy needs a tangible celebration,’ Rajeev Sethi, a veteran promoter of India’s arts and artists, said a few years ago when I was writing an article on the then booming Indian modern art market for London’s
Royal Academy
magazine.
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He was referring to the huge success being enjoyed by Indian artists, famous and not-yet-famous, who were slowly generating interest abroad. International art fairs and auctions were being staged in Delhi and Mumbai,
¹⁵
opening up access to art for people young and old, many of whom would have been reluctant to walk into the forbidding arena of the formal art gallery.

The market has since slumped, partly because prices for contemporary art rose irrationally high, but mainly because – rather revealingly – buyers were looking at their purchases primarily as financial investments rather than works of art.

Another tangible celebration that would have been unthinkable in the 1980s is an annual literature festival in the Rajasthani city of Jaipur that has grown haphazardly from a few hundred people in 2006 to one of the world’s biggest such events, spawning other festivals across India and in neighbouring Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan and Myanmar.
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In January 2012, there were 15,000–20,000 people at Jaipur every day for four or five days, with 260 writers, including famous Indian and foreign literary names, mixing with masses of book lovers and schoolchildren.