by John Elliott
‘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 2001.9 ‘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’.10 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 policies12 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.13
‘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.14 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.16 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.
Aspirational India and corrupt India merged in another very tangible celebration with the fast-paced Twenty-20 cricket matches of the Indian Premier League (IPL) that was launched in 2008, fetching over $1bn for television rights and $723m for regional franchises that were bought by flashy Indian businessmen and film stars. This had grown by 2010 to a massive $4bn wealth-creat
ing brand of sponsorships, broadcasting and other franchises, fees and other takings.17 Apart from the very poor in remote rural areas who had no access to television, everyone seemed to relish the tournament, despite massive allegations of corruption. Never before had a scam been enjoyed and celebrated by such a massive proportion of Indian people.18
The national celebration of the lucky few getting rich in a poor country is one of India’s many curious contradictions. The poor have (up to a point) always admired the massive illicit personal wealth of some politicians because it shows what can be achieved from a deprived background. Similarly, the successes of the IPL organizers, cricketers and team owners were enjoyed as a symbol of hope for what might be. Some of the scams did catch up with the IPL though, and the brand value had dropped to $2.92bn in 2012.19 Its image crashed in 2013 when a huge match-fixing scandal was exposed by a television sting operation that caught players looking for large bribes, generating police investigations and charges.20
‘Exasperation and Exhilaration’
International criticism has hardened in recent years as India’s less favourable systems have come to the fore with the connivance, after 2004, of a somnolent and corrupt coalition government nominally led by Manmohan Singh as prime minister but effectively controlled by Sonia Gandhi as head of the ruling Congress party. Singh had been put on too high a pedestal for his role as finance minister in the 1991 reformist government that was led by Narasimha Rao, the prime minister. The decline of such an icon as Singh has epitomized India’s failure to sustain the potential of the 2000s when growth neared nine or ten per cent.
I wrote a spoof piece on my blog in September 2010 about an un-named country that was obviously India.21 Left-wing rebels controlled a quarter of the country’s districts. There were two tiresome neighbours, one riven with religious extremism and terrorism that the perpetrators wanted to export. The other, far bigger, neighbour had for years been encouraging the smaller neighbour to do its worst. The prime minister was a nice, well-meaning, elderly guy run by a foreign-born lady whose main interest seemed to be making sure her son became prime minister one day. The prime minister could not control many of his ministers, who mainly wanted to make money for themselves and their regional political parties, thus undermining key areas of the economy for which they were responsible – such as airlines and airports, telecoms and mining, and sometimes industrial and other policies relating to foreign direct investment, special economic zones, petroleum, agriculture and food supplies.
In my story, most parliamentarians – a meaningless title since most of them did little constructive parliamentary work – were dynastically getting their sons, daughters, wives and even mistresses into politics, presumably not for the good of parliament or the country. Personal greed seemed to govern sport, ranging from chaotic preparations for some imminent regional games to a lucrative private sector cricket league. Businessmen and politicians were conniving to plunder the country’s mineral wealth with scant regard for the environment or the law. And you could not believe what you read in the newspapers because several newspapers printed what they were paid to print, and at least one of them had got commercially involved with its advertisers by investing in their stocks and managing their advertising budgets. When I told this story at a small business dinner party before it went up on the blog, the first comment, from a foreign executive, was, ‘Yet we keep coming – India takes you to exasperation and to exhilaration at the same time. That’s the way it is.’
This book does not attempt to cover all aspects of this exasperation and exhilaration, but tries to look at how India works and where it goes wrong – and right – by examining how things are done or not done. It mainly focuses on subjects that I have written about on my blog since it started in April 2007, initially on the Fortune magazine website, plus other articles – from 1983 to 1988 in the FT, and after 1995 at various times in The Economist, The New Statesman, India’s Business Standard and Fortune.
In the course of my reporting, I’ve been involved in the creation of two internationally recognized words or phrases, and both are in the book. I’m credited in Bhutan as the first foreign correspondent to be told (for the FT in 1987) by the then King Jigme Singye Wangchuck about his plans for Gross National Happiness or GNH, which later became an international theme. I was also the first journalist (again for the FT but in 1979, before I came to India) to write about privatisation, a word which had not appeared before in a newspaper – it sounded so odd that the newspaper’s features editor refused to put it in the story’s headline, saying no one would understand it!
To some extent, it is easy to write a book pointing out the faults when India is on a downward trend, as it has been for the past few years. Indeed, what I have written here will probably be more acceptable in the current mood than it would have been five or ten years ago when audiences sometimes found my stories too negative.
The word ‘implosion’ has various connotations. It usually conjures up dramatic images of buildings and glass shattering inwards, and of objects collapsing violently. What is happening in India is not that sort of massive one-off event but a more insidious and equally dramatic inward collapse. Internal forces are gradually eating away at institutions, organizational procedures and the functioning of authority that are needed to run a country.22 Contributing to this creeping implosion are self-serving politicians and government officials, plus widespread and endemic corruption, and a lack of interest in tackling problems. When such developments swamp and begin to destroy the political process, the judiciary and the media, implosion has begun.
When I was about to come to India in the early 1980s, friends had suggested I should read V.S. Naipaul’s celebrated books An Area of Darkness and A Wounded Civilisation. I began them but gave up, deciding I did not want to start reporting on a country with such depressing negative introductions. A veteran journalist friend, Geoffrey Goodman, then gave me An Indian Summer by James Cameron, a great reporter and writer whom he knew well. Geoffrey wrote in the book that he hoped it would ‘help nourish your interest in, and love for, a great land’. Well, it did, because I found that Cameron’s mixture of admiration and frustration for all India’s contradictions matched my first instincts and later experiences. To mark that gift and his continuing sound advice and encouragement till he sadly died in September 2013, this book is dedicated to Geoffrey, in memory of one of Britain’s most dedicated and committed industrial correspondents and one of the finest political commentators of his generation.
Notes
1. ‘Brazil’s monetary jeitinho’, Financial Times, 15 January 2013, http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2013/01/15/brazils-monetary-jeitinho/#axzz2idTH2e1O
2. http://www.indiatimes.com/more-from-india/vijay-mallya-donates-3kg-gold-to-tirupati-%5Btwitter-reacts%5D-50681.html
3. Antonio Armellini, If the Elephant Flies: India Confronts the Twenty-first Century, p. 407, Har-Anand Publications, Delhi 2012
4. Thomas L. Friedman, ‘India vs. China vs. Egypt’, The New York Times, 5 February 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/opinion/friedman-india-vs-china-vs-egypt.html?_r=0
5. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2012/11/26/writing-in-the-wild-at-kipling-camp/
6. ‘Madhya Pradesh Lokayukta raids forest official, uncovers assets worth Rs. 40 crore’, Mail Today, 6 February 2013 – with photographs of the raid including a suitcase with bundles of 1,000-rupee notes, http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/madhya-pradesh-lokayukta-raids-forest-official-uncovers-assets/1/249088.html
7. John Elliott (JE), ‘Celebrating the Vested Interest Raj’, ‘Bystander’ column, Business Standard, 29 June 2001, http://www.business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=94193&
8. India and China – Asia’s New Giants: Stepping stones to prosperity by JE, page 3, Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies, Delhi 1995
9. John Elliott (JE), ‘Celebrating the Vested Interest Raj’, ‘Bystander’ column, Business Standard, 29 June 2001, http://www.business-standard.com/i
ndia/storypage.php?autono=94193&
10. ‘Go east, entrepreneurs – with Indian partners’, Financial Times, 14 February 2013, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c24607ac-7689-11e2-8569-0144feabdc0.html#axzz2SKxZeg65
11. K. Shankar Bajpai in conversation with JE, October 2012
12. JE, ‘India and China: Asia’s New Giants: Stepping Stones to Prosperity’, Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies, Delhi, 1995.
13. http://www.secondshaadi.com/
14. ‘Made in India: Contemporary Art in India’, http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/ra-magazine/winter2006/features/made-in-india,49,RAMA.html
15. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/delhi%E2%80%99s-art-summit-a-huge-international-success-with-128000-visitors-and-good-sales/ and http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress. com/2012/10/02/ratan-tata-and-mahatma-gandhi-reflected-in-anamorphic-cylinders/
16. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/incredible-india%E2%80%99s-literary-woodstock/
17. ‘IPL brand value doubles to $4.13bn: Brand Finance’, PTI, http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/ipl-brand-value-doubles-to-4-13-bn-brand-finance-110032200177_1.html
18. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/india% E2%80%99s-scam-ridden-ipl-cricket-is-a-national-celebration/
19. ‘profits still elude some IPL teams’, Mint, 2 April 2013, http://www.livemint.com/Consumer/Vx82Oge7kJ5nYt6rylf5FM/Profits-still-elude-some-IPL-teams.html
20. ‘Betting scandal deepens in India cricket league’, Financial Times, 23 May 2013, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d635c988-c39a-11e2-aa5b-00144feab7de.html