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Journalism of Courage
The problem with us Indians is not that we love and admire ourselves. We also believe that the rest of the world does so and if it doesn8217;t, it8217;s being so bloody-minded. That is why we have failed to understand the real message from the distinguished gathering of international businessmen at the World Economic Forum8217;s India Economic Summit that concluded in New Delhi this Tuesday.
The self-congratulatory speech-making on reform in the era of instability by the caretakers, including the Prime Minister, and unquestioning adulation from the pink Press can barely conceal the deep sense of disappointment that came across from most of the foreign investors. quot;You have the finest minds in this country and know exactly what needs to be donequot;, said legendary ABB Chairman Percy Barnevik. What is frustrating, says the Swede, somewhat bitterly, quot;is that you guys know exactly what has to be done to fix the economy but you don8217;t do it.quot; By comparison, he points out, the East Europeans didn8217;t know what to do and yet their quot;economies have done a lot more reform than you.quot;
The world is turning around and telling us they don8217;t care where we were in 1991 when the reform process began and what a long way we have come because the other countries have not exactly been static meanwhile. The other emerging markets have all grown faster than us, some as much as ten times faster. We are so thrilled that our Foreign Direct Investment FDI may cross the 2.5 billion-mark this year and are likely to be so irritated if someone pointed out to us that that figure is chickenfeed 8212; that indeed is the amount Harvard University is targeting to collect this year in its fundraising drive. This is no more than a fraction of the total FDI of 129 billion that has gone into the emerging markets this year. China has collected exactly 20 times as much as us.
But why must we listen to the world? Culturally and historically, we Indians loathe competing with foreigners. We are so smugly insular, so inward-looking, we believe this: India is the universe, there is no world beyond it and as long as we are doing better than we were in the past, the world must appreciate that.
The disease is more complex than mere xenophobia. We don8217;t so much fear the foreigner as we admire ourselves to the exclusion of the world. Perhaps this comes from our innate sense of eastern cultural superiority laced with the post-independence indoctrination. Ours, we believe, is the perfect path and if the world has done better, it must have done something wrong or immoral.
As Barnevik acknowledged, we are not short of intellect or ideas. We love to think, dream, and lecture self-righteously. But we are too lazy to actually get down to sculpting our ideas into realities. We are forever the pioneers who lose our way chasing our own tales. In the early sixties, our experts went to Korea to teach them how to make steel. A decade later our railway engineers went there to teach them how to build a metro rail. Today we buy their cars, washing machines, televisions and terry-cottons. They are also building our highways and bridges. But we are still selling them iron ore, and lecturing them.
The world is getting bored with us, the sentiment that came across in the admonitions of the WEF chairman Klaus Schwabe and Managing Director Claude Smadja that got our leaders and leader writers so indignant. There is a growing sense of exasperation at our failure to understand that in a globalised situation we are competing not against ourselves but against faster-paced economies.
Change takes time in India, so be patient, Gujral lectures the WEF huddle. The businessmen point out that India8217;s idea of patience is a bit outdated. Countries, economies, particularly companies, now do not have years to change. If they don8217;t change fast enough, they will perish. In India, we have globalised in some areas while failing through sheer laziness and ineptitude to relax controls or modernise our laws and regulations in others. The irresponsibility of our politician has ensured that even so innocuous a reform as the new Companies Act on which there is almost total consensus has failed to break out of the procedural trap. The Money Launering Act, FEMA, Central Electricity Regulatory Commission Bill and the Insurance Regulatory Authority Bill have all been put on the back-burner.
Without these India8217;s own companies are doubly disadvantaged when handling the global competition at their doors now. Now they haven8217;t got domestic deregulation, because we always think we have plenty of time and patience to match, but they have got foreign competition which they would dread in the best of times. This could result in some dangerously embarrassing failures. Our smugness at the failure of the Reeboks and Levis, Pepsis and Gillettes to make money in our markets so far may soon be short-lived as some of our mega-corporations, taking their own time with change, may not survive the global challenge. Can we, as a nation and a society, survive the collapse of a Telco, a Tisco or even a SAIL or Larsen and Toubro?
Gujral, in his spirited lambasting of Schwabe, asserted somewhat grandly that the Indian economy was close to take off. That it would soon be quot;cruisingquot; and quot;may I invite all of you on board.quot; If India thinks it is cruising, what business does the world have to complain?
There was a chilling story from the pre-perestroika Soviet Union that talked of Lenin, Stalin and Brezhnev going out together on the inaugural run of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The train stops abruptly as the track ends somewhere in the middle of the icy wilderness. Each one of the great leaders has a solution. Stalin wants to round up a couple of hundred people from nearby villages and shoot them so the rest would come and lay the track. Lenin thinks just singing revolutionary songs would be able to motivate them sufficiently. Brezhnev, as usual, is smug and stoical: quot;Just sit in the salon, sip vodka and pretend the train is moving.quot; We are not quite on the half-way train through Siberia yet. But if we go on pretending we have already taken off quot;on a high trajectory growth pathquot;, let8217;s not complain if the world laughs at us. At least those at the World Economic Forum did.
