Implosion (54 page)

51
. ‘“Raja” of Corruption’,
http://www.telugudesam.org/tdpcms/scams/rajaofcorruption/

52
. ‘Flow of Funds’,
http://telugudesam.org/jagancorruption/?page_id=13

53
. Ibid.

54
. ‘3 mantris cleared Vanpic in a day’, TNN, 6 June 2012
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-06-06/hyderabad/32078329_1_cbi-court-cbi-counsel-vanpic

55
. CAG report for the year ending 31 March 2011; tabled in the Andhra Pradesh Assembly March 2012

56
. The Andhra Pradesh Mineral Development Corporation obtained mining rights because it is a state corporation but a clause in its contract enabled it to bring in the private sector if it lacked the technology, so it joined up with Jindal and RAK. ‘Cancel bauxite mining leases in Vizag: House panel’,
The Hindu
, 9 January 2013,
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/andhra-pradesh/cancel-bauxite-mining-leases-in-vizag-house-panel/article4289962.ece

57
. ‘Nimmagadda roped in RAK to bag Vanpic project: CBI counsel’,
The Times of India
, 21 March 2013,
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-03-21/hyderabad/37901956_1_aj-jagannadham-qatar-massad-nimmagadda-prasad

58
. ‘AP cabinet cancels Rs 16,000 crore port, industrial corridor project’,
Mint
, 19 November 2013,
http://www.livemint.com/Industry/BdV9O249hA3Q6RI0yWJ1MP/AP-cabinet-cancels-Rs16000-crore-port-industrial-corridor.html

59
. ‘Why the big four Andhra Pradesh-based infrastructure companies GMR, GVK, Lanco & IVRCL are in trouble?’,
Economic Times
, 24 June 2012,
http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-06-24/news/32382929_1_gayatri-projects-airport-business-gmr-infrastructure

60
. ‘Top Indian Companies Burdened With Debt’, Forbes.com report on Credit Suisse report, ‘House of Debt–Revisited’, 19 August 2013,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/meghabahree/2013/08/19/top-indian-companies-burdened-with-debt/

61
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2009/01/07/satyam%E2 %80%99s-raju-lifts-the-lid-on-indian-corporate-fraud/

62
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/%E2%80%9C family-silver%E2%80%9D-at-risk-on-hyderabad-metro-project/

63
. ‘Delhi Metro MD smells a scam’,
http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2008-09-21/news/27718987_1_hyderabad-metro-vgf-viability-gap-funding

64
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2008/12/17/markets-kick-satyam-into-line-%E2%80%93-but-india%E2%80%99s-reputation-for-corporate-governance-is-hit/

65
. ‘Text – Satyam chairman Ramalinga Raju’s letter’, Reuters, 7 January 2009,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/01/07/satyam-text-idINBOM36807220090107?rpc=44&sp=true

66
. ‘Ramalinga Raju gets bail after two years, eight months in jail’,
Mint
, 5 November 2011,
http://www.livemint.com/Companies/NbnGDBW3olCdkKtcpHjo2M/Ramalinga-Raju-gets-bail-after-two-years-eight-months-in-ja.html

67
. ‘Enforcement Directorate files charges in Satyam case – Seeks prosecution of Raju brothers, 45 others and 166 alleged front companies for laundering ill-made money’,
Business Standard
, 29 October 2013,
http://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/ed-files-charge-sheet-in-satyam-case-113102800502_1.html

68
. Sanjaya Baru, ‘Breakfast with G.M. Rao – “Runway” success’,
Business Standard
, 6 July 2010,
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/breakfastbs-g-m-rao/400446/

69
. ‘GMR’s Shattered Dreams’,
Forbes India
, 13 June 2011,
http://forbesindia.com/article/boardroom/gmrs-shattered-dreams/25792/0
and ‘GM Rao: Fighting For His Dreams’,
Forbes India
, 23 March 2012,
http://forbesindia.com/article/worlds-billionaires-2012/gm-rao-fighting-for-his-dreams/32570/1

70
. ‘GMR Infra to sell road toll projects to pare Rs 33k cr debt’, MoneyControl.com, 6 August 2013,
http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/cnbc-tv18-comments/gmr-infra-to-sell-road-toll-projects-to-pare-rs-33k-cr-debt_931375.html

71
. ‘Implementation of Public Private Partnership at Indira Gandhi International Airport’, CAG Performance Audit Summary, 21 August 2012,
http://www.prsindia.org/administrator/uploads/general/1345638508~~CAG%20Report%20on%20the%20Indira%20Gandhi%20International%20Airport.pdf

VI
INDIA ABROAD

19
Uncertain Convictions

India has never recovered from its devastating defeat by China in a brief 1962 border war, which shattered its significant role on the international stage and still affects its overall stance on foreign policy. There have, of course, been moments when it has successfully reasserted itself internationally since then, notably with its nuclear tests in May 1998 and its growing economic importance in the 2000s, plus a new constructive relationship with the US. These positive developments, however, have been offset by other events, and India has never rebuilt anything near the international self-confidence and presence that Jawaharlal Nehru displayed immediately after independence in 1947.

Pakistan matched India’s nuclear capability by testing weapons (developed with China’s help) two weeks after India’s tests in 1998. This diluted the regional significance of what India had done, although, on a broader international front, the tests did lead to the new interest from the US. Predictably, this did not lift India’s international clout for long, and indeed it complicated relations with China. India’s economic ebullience of the 2000s then floundered by 2011 in a morass of corruption scandals, populist politics, weak government leadership, and declining rates of economic growth. Corrupt and democracy-fettered decision-making had by this time also dashed any hope of matching China as an international economic power.

Here then is a country rich in culture, history, natural resources and brains, which has experienced the prospects of increasing economic importance but has not attempted to assert itself internationally since Nehru’s idealism was crushed. Overall, its self-esteem is diminished by the extent of its poverty – it accounts for one-third of the world’s poor. Its power is also restricted by limited economic and financial clout. Nevertheless, it is failing to rise to the potential that it does have, and it does not perform the international role that many outsiders, and some Indian experts, believe that it should be doing. Nor does it equip a desperately under-resourced external affairs ministry with the ability to do so. The Indian Foreign Service has only about 700 officers, which is ludicrously inadequate. (The number is being doubled over the next 10 years, but it probably needs to be nearer 3,000, with broader expertise and less elitist disdain for other government departments.)

Internationally, India’s voice is rarely heard on major issues and was not even taken significantly into account when the country had a two-year term from 2011 to 2013 as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council. Humphrey Hawksley, a BBC correspondent, emailed me during that period saying, ‘Just come out of a half hour editorial meeting on Syrian crisis. India not mentioned – despite being on the UN – India doesn’t have a voice’. That fits with an often-heard view that India is more focused on the prestige and the glory of joining clubs than what to do when it gets there – ‘it has no apparent strategy at the UN except intervene less,’ said another journalist.

President Obama tried, and largely failed, to get India to abandon some of its reticence when he addressed the Indian parliament in November 2010.
¹
In a powerful speech, he came down firmly on India’s side in relation to Pakistan terrorism and involvement in Afghanistan, and broadly backed its ambition to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
²
But as soon as he had drawn applause from the assembled members of India’s two houses of parliament, he bluntly stated: ‘Now, let me suggest that with increased power comes increased responsibility’
³
for those (implicitly, like India) ‘that seek to lead in the 21st century’. He was, however, knocking on a closed door.

Such an approach does not fit precisely into the jugaad concept of turning shortages, chaos and adversity into some sort of order and success, nor precisely the chalta hai attitude of ‘anything goes’. But, though few in India’s foreign policy establishment would agree, there is a chalta hai sense that India’s foreign relations will somehow fall into place, whatever is said or done. ‘We have to change the absurdity that is our foreign service if we are to help shape the world rather than merely fend the world off,’ says Kanti Bajpai, a leading policy analyst.
⁴

Nehru’s Vision

It all looked so different in 1947, when Nehru led India into an idealistic vision of non-alignment that was based on each country’s right to decide issues as it saw fit and not because of commitment to either bloc. This was in tune with Mahatma Gandhi’s approach of passive resistance and non-cooperation in India’s independence movement, but was developed separately to handle the foreign policy realities of the time. It caught the mood of the world’s ‘whiff of idealism’ after the 1939–45 war and led to the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), with India as prime mover of independence for all countries, which Nehru felt could only be fully achieved if decisions were taken independently and not under pressure.

‘We were accused of putting ourselves on a high moral plane, but we weren’t trying to be better than anyone else – we were groping our way in a world we didn’t understand,’ says K. Shankar Bajpai, who was ambassador to Pakistan, China and the US between 1976 and 1986 and chairman of the prime minister’s National Security Advisory Board in 2008–11.
⁵
‘Nehru felt that the greater the polarisation of states between the two blocs, the greater the risk of war. Nonalignment was thus an ancillary to his search for preventing war, with the United Nations as the real forum for sorting out conflicts. It was this faith in, or at least an urge for, a set of multilateral institutions and the development of international laws as the basis for a new world order, that coincided with the ‘whiff of idealism,’ says Bajpai, who was a young Ministry of External Affairs official in the 1950s and so is reflecting the view of diplomats at the time.

Nehru shunned a ‘quest for dominance’ – a phrase that prime minister Rajiv Gandhi used in the 1980s to illustrate India’s limited ambitions, according to Mani Shankar Aiyar. ‘Such an India was not content to merely not be non-partisan in the Cold War. It also had something different to tell the world. And it was precisely because India had something to say which no one else was saying that the world paused to listen. Thus, an asymmetrical foreign policy gave an asymmetric influence hugely disproportionate to the material strength of an India which, in conventional terms, would have been paid little heed to if it were merely parroting the words and postures of others,’ Aiyar said in a foreign affairs lecture in Melbourne in 2011.
⁶

Jaswant Singh, who held three top portfolios as external affairs, finance and defence minister in the 1998–2004 NDA government, talks about a ‘mentality of separateness’ that existed from the time of independence.
⁷
It was this that led Nehru to reject an informal suggestion from America in the mid-1950s that India should join the United Nations Security Council when it was formed. In practical terms, Nehru’s reply avoided India upstaging and upsetting China, which was being left out in favour of Taiwan, but it also fitted with his approach, especially at a time when the world was splitting into two Cold War camps. The result, of course, was that India was excluded from the inner workings of the UN, which it is now trying to rectify with embarrassingly persistent cries to become a permanent member of the Security Council.

Nehru did not want an alliance with any single country or power block, but he did want India to play a leading role in a large constituency, which NAM provided when it was founded in 1961. For a time Nehru’s voice was heard, and India had a significant influence on major international issues in the first decade of independence. Aiyar summed this up in his Melbourne lecture: ‘On the major international issues of the first decade of India’s independence – Palestine, Korea, Indo-China, Suez – so influential was the differential Indian voice that India was included in both the UN committees set up in 1947 to bring about the transition in Palestine from Mandate to Partition... In Korea,
⁸
precisely because India asymmetrically refused to see right as belonging only to one side or the other, she was invited to become the chairman of the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission without which the Korean War could not have been brought to an end.’

Although not invited to the Geneva Conference on Indo-China in 1954, writes Aiyar, Krishna Menon installed himself in the Hotel Beau Rivage on the banks of Lake Leman and played such a crucial role brokering accords between the principals
⁹
that the former French premier, Pierre Mendes-France, referred to the Geneva Conference as ‘this ten-power conference – nine at the table