Opinion India disappears from Davos
Not since that long ago year when Deve Gowda came to Davos as prime minister has India seemed more irrelevant in this gathering of the rich and powerful
Not since that long ago year when Deve Gowda came to Davos as prime minister has India seemed more irrelevant in this gathering of the rich and powerful. Deve Gowda went totally unnoticed that year. And,I only noticed when I spotted a platoon of his children and grandchildren lounging about in the finest hotel in Klosters. They seemed to have been brought along for a winter holiday at taxpayers expense. This was 1996 and India was just beginning to emerge from the socialist cocoon that shielded it from prosperity,change and economic growth for forty years. A handful of Indian businessmen came here that year and they were almost as irrelevant to the World Economic Forums annual meeting as the Indian prime minister was.
Then things changed and they changed spectacularly. The Indian economy began to grow at such a pace that we became a BRIC and the rest of the world suddenly sat up and discovered that India was not just a land of snake charmers and sadhus. As someone who believes firmly that Nehruvian socialism and the mindset it created have been Indias ruin,I have often celebrated this spectacular change in this column. I loved it when India began to be taken seriously at Davos. I loved it when Indian industrialists became so rich that they started buying up big international companies and I loved it when 800 million Indians became rich enough to afford mobile phones. But,there were unhappy Indians too. They were all Leftist intellectuals and politicians who sulked and lurked in the shadows waiting for their chance to return to their glory days.
They flocked to alternative Davos conferences and denounced Davos. They denounced economic reforms and I am happy to say that they even included me in their denunciations. A bitter,failed old commie recently denounced me as someone who came to Davos every year as if this were some major disqualification for the column writing business.
My opinion of Leftists is lower than theirs of me,so I take every such attack as an accolade. I will continue to come to Davos because it helps my punditry. And,I love cross country skiing and the snowy winter weather. Davos has been for me an excellent barometer not just for the economic and political changes in the world but for how the world viewed India.
This year,I have to sadly report that it was as if India had vanished completely from the worlds radar screen. A much smaller contingent of Indian businessmen arrived than last year and an even smaller contingent of officials. Some high officials cancelled coming at the last minute possibly because they were relegated to unimportant sessions. So what has changed? Why has India once again begun to reek of those earlier times when India was not even a small cog in the economic machine of the world?
Well,I have to admit that the Leftists have won. When they noticed that Sonia Gandhi was one of their own,they emerged from the shadows and forced her to go back to spending all of our money on massive,unworkable anti-poverty schemes that usually serve only to keep poor people in permanent poverty. They infiltrated her kitchen Cabinet and banged on endlessly about the poor and even ensured that major projects like Vedanta in Orissa were closed down on environmental grounds. When N C Saxena was asked at this newspapers Idea Exchange why he had forced the closure of a project that could have made Orissa the worlds aluminum producing centre,he said he had done it because 500 Adivasi families had not benefited from the project. If they had,he admitted,he would not have advised closure of a project in which Rs 11,000 crores had already been spent.
It was not just one project that was closed in this casual way. It was many,many more so it did not take long for India to start conveying to the world that it was once more closed for business. By next year things could get so bad that there may not even be any point in India having any presence in Davos at all. The Leftists have won. And,they will be happy to know that our most visible presence here this year was something called the Indian Adda. A small corner of a Swiss café was converted into an Indian snack bar. It was empty most of the time but for Indians,homesick for spicy food,it was possible to stop by on the way to the Congress Centre and eat a samosa or a kathi roll. I stopped by for an après-ski samosa and can report that there was about this adda the smell of those old government hotels that always had about them,a squalid sort of reek.
Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter @ Tavleen_Singh
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