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A RISING POWER CALLED INDIA
By EHSAN AHRARI
Visiting India is always an experience, especially now that everyone
talks about that country as a rising power. At least from my
perspective, the real test of a rising power is how much that country
has been able to improve the standard of living of its people, how
much poverty has been reduced, whether there is discernible evidence
of improvement in that country's infrastructure, and whether there is
a noticeable improvement in environmental pollution, which has
remained a sustained curse of all developing countries, including
India and China - another rising power. An interesting aspect of a
rising power is the way it utilizes its economic wealth for force
modernization. For India, that has been a massive undertaking since
its emergence as a declared nuclear power in May 1998.
I was also interested in looking at the nature of debate among Muslims
over Islam in India. Even though India's majority is Hindu, Muslims
form between 12% and 18% of the population. As such, India has the
world's largest Muslim population of any non-Muslim country.
In the realm of improved standard of living, India is definitely going
through revolutionary changes. Clyde Prestowitz, in his excellent book
Three Billion New Capitalists, presents a fascinating case of India's
emergence as a world-class center for information technology. He
states that, at one point in the past decade and a half or so, India
became the focus of outsourcing for jobs that were cheaper to carry
out in that country than in the United States. Now, it is increasingly
becoming a country where multinational conglomerates are gathering for
lucrative returns on their investments and a leading hub for highly
sophisticated research and development. The statistics on foreign
direct investment regularly portray India as a more attractive place
for global entrepreneurs than even the US.
India's economy can sustain 7-8% annual GDP [gross domestic product]
growth for the indefinite future. In the past two years it has grown
faster than China, and some believe that with its legacy of capitalist
institutions, rule of law, and democratic processes it may well
outstrip China over the long term. At those rates of growth India
would have a GDP over [US]$2 trillion, making India the world's
third-largest economy and perhaps on the way to becoming the biggest.
According to another source, India's economy is likely to be larger
than Japan's or Germany's within the next 30 years. India also has the
advantage of being one of the countries with the youngest population.
And according to statistics cited by Steve Sjuggerud, president of
Investment U ("Investing in India: Sizing up its opportunities"), "25%
of people in the world under the age of 25 are in India, and a full
80% of the population is under 45 years old".
How does this translate in terms of India's emerging patterns of
conspicuous consumerism? If one is looking for new US-style shopping
malls, the number of cars and motorcycles, and highly visible changes
in buying habits, the country is changing in a big way. The
personalized aspects of shopping - ie, going to small shops and
establishing personal ties with small shopkeepers over a period of
years, indeed decades - is going through discernible changes.
I am convinced that small shopkeepers will disappear from Indian
cities just as they have pretty much disappeared from US cities.
Mega-malls will eat them up. Chain department stores are becoming a
sine qua non of Indian consumerism. People in their daily
conversations about progress made by a particular city, or when
comparing urban centers, increasingly measure it by the number of
newer malls or even new "strip malls" that each city is developing.
Now, people are going to shopping malls that have Wal-Mart-like
department stores containing cheap goods from India, China and
elsewhere. They are going to various sections of such stores and
loading up their shopping carts. One wonders whether most of the
shopping being done is to satisfy personal needs, or merely to satisfy
the desire of being seen in trendy shopping centers.
Globalization has arrived with full force. Whether that is good or bad
depends upon one's perspective. The entire debate on globalization is
marred with confusing arguments and counter-arguments from its
supporters and opponents. At least for now, it is difficult to judge
whether increased globalization will be harmful for India. But a
number of changes are in the making, and they are increasingly
appearing inexorable. I was reminded of a brilliant observation that
Mike LeVine made in his book Why They Don't Hate Us about the effects
of globalization in developing countries:
In the era of contemporary globalization the changing cultural
preferences and economic trends of the world's richest countries
profoundly shape expectations among policymakers and citizens alike in
the Global South. Changes in what and how people consume in wealthier
countries don't just influence the tastes and desires of people in
poorer ones, they help shape an international economic agenda in which
poor people are told that they should be consuming services or other
essentially cultural products they don't necessarily need and can't
really afford in order for their economies to "grow" and because they
"should" be able to afford them, they are no longer considered as poor
as before.
Unlike US shopping malls, Indian malls also contain huge showrooms for
cars that are being manufactured in that country through mushrooming
programs of joint ventures between Indian and foreign car
manufactures. The idea of opening such showrooms in malls is an
ingenious one, since they become a gathering place for seriously
interested as well as merely curious consumers. They get elaborate
briefings from representatives about getting a variety of loans. Such
programs were responsible for flooding Indian roads with motorcycles
and scooters between the 1970s and 1980s.
Within less than a decade, Indian roads will be flooded with mostly
locally manufactured cars. Traffic jams are clogging narrow roads of
Indian cities, which were never meant for endless streams of cycles,
rickshaws, motorcycles, and now cars. I had the feeling that India's
march toward a capitalist economy - which started in 1991 - is in the
process of becoming irreversible.
The information revolution, which has affected both India and China,
is definitely enlarging the size of India's middle class. But these
changes in size of the middle class are not necessarily reducing the
level of abject poverty in India. The type and scope of social
policies that are needed to reduce the level of poverty have not yet
been implemented. Pranab Bardhan, an economics professor with the
University of California at Berkeley, states in a comparative study of
poverty rates in India and China published online by the Yale Center
for the Study of Globalization:
Both China and India are still desperately poor countries. Of the
total of 2.3 billion people in these two countries, nearly 1.5 billion
earn less than US$2 a day, according to World Bank calculations. Of
course, the lifting of hundreds of millions of people above poverty in
China has been historic. Thanks to repeated assertions in the
international financial press, conventional wisdom now suggests that
globalization is responsible for this feat. Yet a substantial part of
China's decline in poverty since 1980 already happened by [the]
mid-1980s (largely as a result of agricultural growth), before the big
strides in foreign trade and investment in the 1990s. Assertions about
Indian poverty reduction primarily through trade liberalization are
even shakier. In the '90s, the decade of major trade liberalization,
the rate of decline in poverty by some aggregative estimates has, if
anything, slowed down. In any case, India is as yet a minor player in
world trade, contributing less than 1% of world exports. (China's
share is about 6%.)
The reasons for this lack of progress in alleviating poverty in India
are too complicated to be explained fully here. Suffice it to note
that right now India's priorities are misplaced. As its economic
progress was gathering momentum in the mid to late 1990s, India's top
decision-makers decided to make it a world-class military power. As
much as it has become a rising economic power, it still has to
determine whether it will focus on creating a just and fair society by
eradicating poverty, or assign higher significance to becoming a
regional, and then a global, military power. It cannot do both with
equal emphasis. The average Indian may not understand the intricacies
of judging whether his country should become a stable economic place
first, and then opt for building military muscle. However, Indians
take discernible pride in watching the progress made by their country
in space technology, in ballistic-missile development, and in
developing a blue-water navy.
Becoming a world-class military power requires enormous expenditures
in facilitating training programs, in building a highly intricate
support infrastructure, in concluding capital-intensive contracts
facilitating transfer of technology to manufacture high-tech military
platforms indigenously, and in purchasing other high-tech platforms
from the established major powers that cannot be covered under such
contracts or produced under joint ventures.
To that end, India is making tremendous investments. It is focused on
acquiring military technology from the United States as well as
Russia. It has recently signed a "safeguard agreement that will pave
the way for Indian defense companies to obtain US technology". Since
the US administration's decision in 2001 to lift sanctions against
India, "the US government has approved more than 700 export licenses
for direct commercial defense sales to India. US defense sales to
India tripled from $5.6 million in 2003 to $17.7 million in 2004, and
are projected to nearly quadruple again to $64 million in 2005",
Defense News reported last month. At the same time, India on December
6 signed "a much-awaited agreement on intellectual property rights"
with Russia "to regulate joint defense research and development work
between those two countries". According to Russian Defense Minister
Sergei Ivanov, India has imported more than $9 billion worth of
Russian arms since 1998. In 2004, India purchased more than $1 billion
in Russian arms, said the Defense News report.
Despite its tremendous economic prosperity, India's Achilles' heel
remains its weak and very backward civilian infrastructure. Last
August, the World Bank granted it a loan of more than $9 billion for
rural development over the next three years. Even though these "loans
are earmarked for roads, drinking water and irrigation facilities in
rural areas", there is not much evidence of progress in those realms
at this point.
To be fair, however, the largely rural nature of the Indian society
makes development-related problems highly obdurate. As a study
published by Maurizio d'Orlando in AsiaNews.it noted in August,
"Nearly 70% of India's more than 1 billion people live in more than
500,000 villages connected largely by dusty tracks, dependent on
agriculture and forced to endure acute shortages of drinking water and
electricity." Still, the aforementioned misplaced priorities also
remain a major obstacle to rapid progress.
In addition, India's major affliction hurting its ability to solve
development-related problems is the highly entrenched corruption at
all levels of government - central, state and local. Developmental
funds are allocated in each constituency of a member of parliament
(MP). From those funds, he or she gets about 20% as a share of his or
her cut before any work is initiated. While the projects start, the
contractors take a series of illegal shortcuts and cost-saving
measures that doom the projects from the get-go. Politicians and
bureaucrats at all levels and in all walks of life are on the take on
a daily basis in India. That is how most workers in the public sectors
make their ends meet. Thus all development projects become financial
sinkholes that require constant expenditures of capital benefiting the
corrupt politicians and fraudulent contractors.
To understand fully the entrenched level of corruption and how it
constantly undermines the civilian infrastructure of India, one has to
take a car trip from Delhi to Agra (about 130 kilometers), where the
world-famous Taj Mahal is located. The so-called highway from Delhi to
Agra is in very poor condition, with scores of cows and pedestrians
roaming among cars and trucks speeding along at 120-130km/h. Once you
enter Agra, you had better slow down to avoid a serious accident or
even overturning your car because of an unending series of large
potholes. Once again, the aforementioned nexus between corrupt
politicians and contractors is responsible for this sorry of state of
affairs. (While I was there, the Indian newspapers were running
articles on the arrest of a number of MPs who were caught on camera
demanding and accepting bribes.) That the shoddy state of roads inside
Agra is not getting the attention of the central government is
especially annoying given the fact that tourists from all over the
world regularly visit there to experience the fading glamor of the
Taj, which is another tragic story related to India.
In the realm of environmental pollution, India has made some progress.
However, I remain unimpressed. Spending much of my time in Lucknow
(about 500km southeast of New Delhi), which is the capital of India's
largest state, Uttar Pradesh, I have only noticed minor progress. The
auto-rickshaws that used to spew deadly black smoke along the roads of
that town are now banned. Those who reside in Lucknow also assure me
that their town has made tremendous progress in improving the quality
of air. I do notice improvement in the quality of air, however, when I
go to New Delhi. Still, my lungs and sinuses take a severe beating
every time I visit either Lucknow or New Delhi.
Islam is a highly developed religion in India. There have been at
least two major centers of Islamic learning - Hyderabad (560km
southeast of Mumbai) and Lucknow - and at least three major schools of
Islamic thoughts - Nadwat ul-Ulama (or Nadwa) in Lucknow and Barelvi
and Deobandi schools, named after the cities where they are located,
Bareli and Deoband. Deoband is about 145km northeast of New Delhi.
Westerners have not heard much, if anything at all, about the Barelvi
and Nadwa schools, while they have might have seen several references
to the Deobandi School, especially since September 11, 2001.
The Barelvi and Deobandi schools are of Sunni origin and belong to the
Hanafi Mazhab (school of thought). The Barelvi School is influenced by
Sufism and reveres the role of Sufis in spreading Islam across the
subcontinent as well as in Afghanistan and Central Asia. Its followers
assign superhuman qualities to the Sufis and believe they have the
authority to intercede on their behalf on the Day of Judgment. The
Deobandi School emphasizes theological purity and considers the
influence of Sufis as a practice of polytheism, and thus blatantly
anti-Islamic. Followers of both the Barelvi and Deobandi schools spend
a lot of time calling each other kafir (infidel).
The Deobandi schools of the Northwestern Frontier Province of Pakistan
were offshoots of the Deobandi School of India, but came under heavy
influence of the religious puritanism advocated by Mohammad Ben Abdel
Wahhab of Saudi Arabia. In reality, the theological differences
between the Deobandi School of India and Wahhabism have been matters
of degree. In the Pakistani Deobandi schools, the difference virtually
disappeared, with the militant doctrine of jihad becoming the driving
force. The United States, with the enthusiastic support and
participation of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, promoted the militant
jihadi doctrine to liberate Afghanistan from the Soviet subjugation in
the 1980s. In the 1990s and on, the very same doctrine of militant
jihad envisaged the US as a major target, the chief "enemy" of Islam.
As much as a number of debates are taking place in the Middle East and
elsewhere in Europe and even in North America over redefining the
notion of jihad, I saw only limited, but still important, evidence of
such a debate in Indian-administered Kashmir. It seems that the
Wahhabi/Deobandi forces are gaining an upper hand in their struggle to
end India's rule over Kashmir. They regard the Sufi element of that
region as too diffident about accepting India's suzerainty. Thus the
doctrine of militant jihad - not the peaceful practices of Sufism - is
being viewed as a panacea for ending India's "occupation".
Given that India has maintained a large military force in its portion
of Kashmir, no amount of increased clout of the Wahhabi/Deobandi
forces is likely to end Indian rule. What is certain is that Kashmir
will remain a powder keg, and may even come close to blowing up, as it
did during the late 1990s when India and Pakistan nearly went to war
over the Kargil conflict. The US played a crucial role in defusing
that conflict. It is likely to play a similar role if India and
Pakistan come close to getting entangled in a military skirmish in the
future. As much as Pakistan wishes to resolve the Kashmir conflict in
its favor, one wonders when President General Pervez Musharraf will
realize that, as far as India is concerned, the so-called Line of
Control is the final international border between the two countries.
As many times as I have gone back to the subcontinent, I never
experienced as much optimism inside India about its future as a rising
economic and military power as I did this time. India is becoming
increasingly confident in its new role. It appears no longer worried
or even slightly concerned about its traditional rivalry with China.
Indeed, India and China are increasingly cooperating in seeking joint
energy ventures in the Middle East and Africa.
India's ties with its arch rival Pakistan also seem to be steadily
improving. Unless there is an unfortunate development related to
al-Qaeda activities in Pakistan, it appears that ties between the two
major countries of the subcontinent will remain free of major mishaps.
India is finally getting the recognition and respect it always rightly
thought that it deserved.
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