Don’t get swayed by the Royist line

The whisperers admit that the “imperialist overtures” have led to the reduction of killings in Sudan, kept the Tamil Tigers in check and encouraged the chief executives of India and Pakistan to meet.

The way Roy and Co see it, there is an urgent need to stop these whispers from becoming a din. Therefore, people need to be told that the Americans are in Iraq to steal oil without paying for it. Does anyone remember the ‘‘socially beneficial’’ use to which Saddam Hussain put Iraq’s oil?

If Roy and Co could have it their way, they would stop markets from expanding. Indians who are hired at $ 5 a day should not be allowed to take away jobs that would fetch an American $ 100 a day. The ‘‘worker brothers’’ of America — and the supporters of the World Social Forum — need to be protected, you see.

Cheap Chinese goods must be prevented from flooding the American and Indian markets. Beware of the Chinese, the cry goes out; when all others were in the streets of Seattle, they were in the boardrooms of the WTO, negotiating.

In fact, many of the respected comrades of the G-22, including Brazil, (the home of the WSF) cannot be relied upon. They might well sign convenient bilateral treaties even as others are making hard-hitting speeches about how Indians could lead the war against ‘‘trade imperialists’’.

The urge to expand markets is apparently an imperialist plot. Well, how wonderful Roy’s and my small patch in Kerala would have been if the Romans had not been interested in pepper, if those interfering missionaries had not started schools and if the British who set up plantations in the 19th century had not been interested in hiring Malayali supervisors.

Kerala would have been unspoilt if those colonialists had not brought in foreign plants like rubber, tapioca, coffee, tea, chilli and cashew. There would have been happiness all around if, in the past 50 years, there had been no exports of shrimp or migration of Malayali men and women to the deserts of Arabia.

As someone who passionately practices the much-maligned science of neo-classical economics and confronts the nitty-gritty issues of governance as a colluding consultant, there are many disturbing questions latent in Roy’s bewitching prose.

Is it not true that a majority of the Muslim people (especially their women) in Kashmir, Palestine and Pakistan are unable to aspire for a better life because of a small group of fundamentalists? Are the struggles of men and women in societies trapped by terrorism not a concern for the social forum?

Is it mere coincidence that the people responsible for killing Muslims in India, which she indirectly attributes to US imperialism, speak in the same tones as Roy and the Left parties about globalisation?

Why have the beneficiaries of state interventions in the past (which the neo-liberals criticise) become adversaries of Dalits and tribals? Why do they work against the re-orientation of governmental support to these marginal but electorally powerless sections?

Isn’t it troubling that the political patronage of the organised working class, comprising but 10 per cent of the population in this country, works against the interests of 80 per cent in the unorganised sector? A discussion with a few of Roy’s fellow Keralites would reveal the darker sides of the clout of the organised working class and the tyranny of their strikes.

Roy seems to be worried about a few gaining and many others losing in their struggle to be part of a global market. Statistics clearly show that the number of people living in absolute poverty has come down drastically, implying that even if many cannot become the managers of Wipro or Infosys or get jobs in the IMF, they can make enough to get by, which, previously was but a distant dream.

What would have been the situation if India, growing at the Hindu rate, were not participating actively in the global economy? Those with privileges (based on family, caste, political power, and so on) would obviously get ahead. But aren’t there millions of Indians today who have been able to make significant improvements in their life, without having any of these privileges?

Regarding WTO, there is a question that needs to be asked: where would a player gain more, in a state of lawlessness or in a legal regime where almost all the players have some voice?

Why should the US take the trouble of coercing a reluctant India to accept WTO agreements, which anyway takes so much effort to arrive at, when it can get most of the markets and products through bilateral agreements with countries that are more than willing to negotiate?

Is an India outside the WTO any better for its people than an India that is part of the global trade regime?

These questions may seem esoteric to many in WSF, but are very important to any importer, exporter and supplier of services or skills in the global market, and there are many Indians among the latter.

Roy seemed to be a supporter of electricity subsidy. Is she aware that nearly 40 per cent of Indian households do not have electricity connections? Considering the established relationship between income and access to electricity connections, it is not difficult to see that the majority of poor do not have connections.

Who then gets all the subsidised power in India? The answer is the middle class. The higher the income level of the middle class, the greater the subsidy.

For example, if a lower middle class family gets Rs 400 as subsidy for domestic consumption in Kerala, a family of two professors getting UGC scales of pay (with an annual income of Rs 4 lakh) gets Rs 1,200. This holds true for farmers, too, because the bigger the landholding, the more the subsidy.

Is Roy not glossing over the fact that electricity subsidy encourages farmers not only to overuse ground water, to waste surface water and demand Narmada-like schemes without bearing the cost of compensation?

Be careful, Arundhati Roy, some of your comrades have already dispossessed others in your bandwagon.

It is comforting that neo-classical economics is not alone in the set of disciplines deemed harmful but has the fellowship of genetics, anthropology, and even modern medicine and modern agricultural science.

Rational self-interest driven behaviour is visible not only in Lula or Nelson Mandela once they come to power. It is there in my own backyard too, where firebrand Left leaders ensure their children have access to courses in information technology in self-financing colleges, which they otherwise oppose.

Filling up US visa applications for their children in the forenoon and making anti-globalisation speeches in the evenings are acceptable practices of the Left intellectuals in Kerala. It is the same logic that dictates that WSF organisers use an Arundhati Roy and not a Medha Patkar or an M.P. Parameswaran to maximise media coverage.

The author is associate professor at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram