India’s vote: Globalisation fine, but not local enough

‘‘Every time an Indian villager watches the community TV and sees an ad for soap or shampoo, what they notice are not the soap and shampoo but the lifestyle of the people using them, the kind of motorbikes they ride, their dress and their homes,’’ says Nayan Chanda, the Indian-born editor of the invaluable YaleGlobal online magazine. ‘‘This election was about envy, anger and aspirations. It was a classic case of revolutions happening when things are getting better but not fast enough for many people.’’

Indeed, Indian villagers and farmers are just like all other consumers today — better informed. And they seemed to know, at a gut level, exactly why the BJP’s stress on information technology was not delivering for them. It was because local governments in India have become so eaten away by corruption and mismanagement they cannot deliver for the poor the schools and infrastructure they need to get a fair share of the pie. The Indian masses didn’t vote for an antiglobalisation strategy, they voted for (among other things) an effective globalisation strategy. Sonia Gandhi, the Congress party leader, seemed to understand this when she chose as prime minister Manmohan Singh, the former Congress finance minister, who first put the Indian economy onto a globalisation track in the 1990s. His task now is to make globalisation work for more Indians by making government work for more Indians.

‘‘Both the Congress and its Left allies would be risking India’s future if they draw the wrong conclusion from this election,’’ said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, an Indian professor of government, writing in The Hindu. ‘‘The revolt against holders of power is not a revolt of the poor against the rich: ordinary people are far less prone to resent other people’s success, than intellectuals suppose. It is rather an expression of the fact that the reform of the state has not gone far enough.’’

My own recent travels to India have left me convinced that the most important forces combating poverty there today are those activists who are fighting for better local governance. The world doesn’t need the antiglobalisation movement to go away now — it just needs for the movement to grow up. It had a lot of energy and a lot of mobilising capacity. What it lacked was a real agenda for helping the poor.

Here’s what its agenda should be: Helping the poor by improving governance — accountability, transparency, education and the rule of law — at the local level, using the Internet and other tools to spotlight corruption, mismanagement and tax avoidance. It may not be as sexy as protesting against world leaders on CNN, but it is a lot more important. Ask any Indian villager.