New tech trickle down

They almost certainly won8217;t and nobody is complaining about it. This is the new India where the politician is increasingly realising that his future lies not so much in the mere algebra of caste and the trigonometry of alliances but in what kind of image of modernism and growth he projects.

Chandrababu Naidu was the first to discover this route to popularity. S.M. Krishna, a bit late off the blocks, was quick to catch up. Now chief ministers ranging from Keshubhai to Badal, Gehlot to Chautala and Ram Prakash Gupta to Vilasrao Deshmukh are joining this new competition for a growth-oriented image.

Many of these leaders will be embarrassed to be reminded of some of the stuff they may themselves have said about MNCs and globalisation in the past. Nor should it be necessary for us to remind them of it now, for consistency is never the virtue of politicians; and if they are willing to abandon old socialist, pseudo-nationalistic notions now in their old age, it is something to celebrate, not snigger at. Thus if a Chautala invites Gates to Gurgaon, offering not only the quickest, shortest approach to an international airport, but even a law-and-order situation quot;far better than that prevailing generally in the regionquot;, the change in paradigm is more important than the irony of that statement. If the man responsible for the historic mayhem in Meham now sees a stake in a clean law-and-order situation in the heart of jatland so Bill Gates and other infotech czars would come and invest there, it isn8217;t something you or I can complain about.

Between Bill and Babu, this is the new, and happy, transformation in Indian politics. In the past chief ministers came to Delhi with this kind of enthusiasm for the National Development Council or other forums where they could canvass for more Central funds and grants. Now they not only come with well-prepared briefs for Bill Gates but also follow up with announcements aimed at achieving that sexy new tag, the cyber savvy politician. So please do not laugh when Ram Prakash Gupta promises to buy laptops for all his MLAs and many of them do not even know what it means. It is much better than his demanding that their constituency allowances be doubled so they could buy more votes with them.

For the first time since Manmohan Singh initiated the reforms we now have clear evidence of Bharat reaching out to this new, post-Socialism India, and the credit for hastening that process goes to information technology. Much more than any other industry or profession, it is infotech that has produced so many internationally acknowledged wealthy Indians. Until now, Indians abroad were rich doctors, lawyers, stock-brokers, merchant bankers, engineers. They were respected, but not held in awe or written about in upper crust journals. Infotech has changed all that. It has turned ordinary engineers, finance whiz-kids into mega entrepreneurs. It has enabled the Premjis and Narayanamurthys, Deshpandes and Kanwal Rekhis to break through the glass ceiling in international business in a way the Tatas and the Birlas were never able to in spite of their total dominance of Indian industry. The old-economy industrialist in India kowtowed to the politicians, contributed to their election campaigns, paid their foreigntravel bills, picked up the tab for their children8217;s wedding parties. The new-economy entrepreneur has the politicians lining up for his attention.

You could argue that we can exaggerate the difference the new economy has made. That if we still worked in the old, licence-quota system, the Murthys and the Premjis would have also had to line up before the politicians, or if enterprise was free in post-Independence India even the traditional businessmen would have enjoyed the same respect instead of just being treated as effete moneybags. But it goes a bit deeper into our psyche than that. For too long, making money was seen to be a bad thing in India. A popular parliamentary curse for nearly four decades was blood-sucking capitalists, moneybags, the Birla-Tatas, or variations of the same theme.

It was because making money was seen, by a society resigned to poverty, as the preserve of a predetermined, privileged few. The new economy has ch-anged all that, internationally as well as in India. Making wealth, enjoying it, even distributing it, is no longer an inherited privilege. From Gates to Murthy, infotech has created a whole new world of self-made billionaires who started out with nothing except their creativity and enterprise. They needed no genes, no licences and quotas, no connections.

Sometimes they could also be dropouts. They have made it possible for the rest of us, particularly those in the right age groups, to believe that we could do it too. Or maybe our children could do it if we are too old.

Except, then, that my politicians have to build the infrastructure, attract the right kind of attention and investments where I live, so I am not deprived of this opportunity. Hence this new competition among the chief ministers.

There are of course states that are still not warming up to this new opportunity. West Bengal and Bihar, for example. But it is perhaps only a matter of time. Or, as Narayanamurthy says, it is for the infotech entrepreneurs now to reach out to those who hold political power, to convince them on how technology can be liberating, democratising, empowering.

Seven years after he initiated the reforms, Manmohan Singh could now begin to savour its success. When Chautala meets Gates with a request to invest in Gurgaon, it is nothing but the trickle-down effect at work. When Parkash Singh Badal, who blew hundreds of crores on allegedly free power to his farmers and extravagant memorials to commemorate the tercentenary of the Khalsa, now pleads with Gates and other infotech czars to come to Punjab which needs clean, green industry, it is a transformation in our politics we need to celebrate. And when newspapers give less space on front pages when Putin comes calling than they gave to Bill and Jack, it would underline the maturing of a new Indian capitalism and, hopefully, the final burial for the curse of Nehruvian socialism.