Pankaj Mishra's observations are not wrong but he is emphasizing the negatives while playing down the positives. By playing with words no one can deny the fact that Indian economy has improved. It is also a fact that the wealth made in India is not well distributed. Yes there is stark poverty in India but it is not as bad as it was in the fifties and sixties.
It needs a few business pioneers to ignite the fire and passion in an emerging economy, as was the case in USA in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Others follow and participate with more ideas and innovations. The same is happening in some of the urban centers in India. The pioneers are making a lot of money and they are also providing employment, some very well paying, to thousands. Is Pankaj Mishra jealous of their success? It is true the focus is not on agriculture or heavy industrials.
If Mishra is cautioning India not to gloat over temporary
capitalistic success, then he deserves some credit. Unless more of the Indian population gains the benefits of the emerging economy, the perceived success is not a success at all. More of India must move to the middle class by earning more in order to avoid a social upheaval.
When the poor has access to the means of modern communication, sees what their brothers are enjoying just a thousand kilometers away and knows they can't have it because there is no money to buy them, mass revolution is inevitable.
Dilip
===============================================================================
Chan Mahanta <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Chan Mahanta <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Note to Netters:
Please--no need to attack Pankaj Mishra and call
him names. We have heard them all already! If it
gives anyone heartburn,just tell us why and where
or how he is wrong, misinformed, or otherwise
missing the point.
cm :-)
Op-Ed Contributor
The Myth of the New India
By PANKAJ MISHRA
Published: July 6, 2006
London
INDIA is a roaring capitalist success story." So
says the latest issue of Foreign Affairs; and
last week many leading business executives and
politicians in India celebrated as Lakshmi
Mittal, the fifth richest man in the world,
finally succeeded in his hostile takeover of the
Luxembourgian steel company Arcelor. India's
leading business newspaper, The Economic Times,
summed up the general euphoria over the event in
its regular feature, "The Global Indian
Takeover": "For India, it is a harbinger of
things to come - economic superstardom."
This sounds persuasive as long as you don't know
that Mr. Mittal, who lives in Britain, announced
his first investment in India only last year. He
is as much an Indian success story as Sergey
Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, is
proof of Russia's imminent economic superstardom.
In recent weeks, India seemed an unlikely
capitalist success story as communist parties
decisively won elections to state legislatures,
and the stock market, which had enjoyed record
growth in the last two years, fell nearly 20
percent in two weeks, wiping out some $2.4
billion in investor wealth in just four days.
This week India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh,
made it clear that only a small minority of
Indians will enjoy "Western standards of living
and high consumption."
There is, however, no denying many Indians their
conviction that the 21st century will be the
Indian Century just as the 20th was American. The
exuberant self-confidence of a tiny Indian elite
now increasingly infects the news media and
foreign policy establishment in the United States.
Encouraged by a powerful lobby of rich
Indian-Americans who seek to expand their
political influence within both their home and
adopted countries, President Bush recently agreed
to assist India's nuclear program, even at the
risk of undermining his efforts to check the
nuclear ambitions of Iran. As if on cue, special
reports and covers hailing the rise of India in
Time, Foreign Affairs and The Economist have
appeared in the last month.
It was not so long ago that India appeared in the
American press as a poor, backward and often
violent nation, saddled with an inefficient
bureaucracy and, though officially nonaligned,
friendly to the Soviet Union. Suddenly the
country seems to be not only a "roaring
capitalist success story" but also, according to
Foreign Affairs, an "emerging strategic partner
of the United States." To what extent is this
wishful thinking rather than an accurate estimate
of India's strengths?
Looking for new friends and partners in a rapidly
changing world, the Bush administration clearly
hopes that India, a fellow democracy, will be a
reliable counterweight against China as well as
Iran. But trade and cooperation between India and
China is growing; and, though grateful for
American generosity on the nuclear issue, India
is too dependent on Iran for oil (it is also
exploring developing a gas pipeline to Iran) to
wholeheartedly support the United States in its
efforts to prevent the Islamic Republic from
acquiring a nuclear weapon. The world, more
interdependent now than during the cold war, may
no longer be divided up into strategic blocs and
alliances.
Nevertheless, there are much better reasons to
expect that India will in fact vindicate the twin
American ideals of free markets and democracy
that neither Latin America nor post-communist
countries - nor, indeed, Iraq - have fulfilled.
Since the early 1990's, when the Indian economy
was liberalized, India has emerged as the world
leader in information technology and business
outsourcing, with an average growth of about 6
percent a year. Growing foreign investment and
easy credit have fueled a consumer revolution in
urban areas. With their Starbucks-style coffee
bars, Blackberry-wielding young professionals,
and shopping malls selling luxury brand names,
large parts of Indian cities strive to resemble
Manhattan.
Indian business tycoons are increasingly trying
to control marquee names like Taittinger
Champagne and the Carlyle Hotel in New York.
"India Everywhere" was the slogan of the Indian
business leaders at the World Economic Forum in
Davos, Switzerland, this year.
But the increasingly common, business-centric
view of India suppresses more facts than it
reveals. Recent accounts of the alleged rise of
India barely mention the fact that the country's
$728 per capita gross domestic product is just
slightly higher than that of sub-Saharan Africa
and that, as the 2005 United Nations Human
Development Report puts it, even if it sustains
its current high growth rates, India will not
catch up with high-income countries until 2106.
Nor is India rising very fast on the report's
Human Development index, where it ranks 127, just
two rungs above Myanmar and more than 70 below
Cuba and Mexico. Despite a recent reduction in
poverty levels, nearly 380 million Indians still
live on less than a dollar a day.
Malnutrition affects half of all children in
India, and there is little sign that they are
being helped by the country's market reforms,
which have focused on creating private wealth
rather than expanding access to health care and
education. Despite the country's growing economy,
2.5 million Indian children die annually,
accounting for one out of every five child deaths
worldwide; and facilities for primary education
have collapsed in large parts of the country (the
official literacy rate of 61 percent includes
many who can barely write their names). In the
countryside, where 70 percent of India's
population lives, the government has reported
that about 100,000 farmers committed suicide
between 1993 and 2003.
Feeding on the resentment of those left behind by
the urban-oriented economic growth, communist
insurgencies (unrelated to India's parliamentary
communist parties) have erupted in some of the
most populous and poorest parts of north and
central India. The Indian government no longer
effectively controls many of the districts where
communists battle landlords and police, imposing
a harsh form of justice on a largely hapless
rural population.
The potential for conflict - among castes as well
as classes - also grows in urban areas, where
India's cruel social and economic disparities are
as evident as its new prosperity. The main reason
for this is that India's economic growth has been
largely jobless. Only 1.3 million out of a
working population of 400 million are employed in
the information technology and business
processing industries that make up the so-called
new economy.
No labor-intensive manufacturing boom of the kind
that powered the economic growth of almost every
developed and developing country in the world has
yet occurred in India. Unlike China, India still
imports more than it exports. This means that as
70 million more people enter the work force in
the next five years, most of them without the
skills required for the new economy, unemployment
and inequality could provoke even more social
instability than they have already.
For decades now, India's underprivileged have
used elections to register their protests against
joblessness, inequality and corruption. In the
2004 general elections, they voted out a central
government that claimed that India was "shining,"
bewildering not only most foreign journalists but
also those in India who had predicted an easy
victory for the ruling coalition.
Among the politicians whom voters rejected was
Chandrababu Naidu, the technocratic chief
minister of one of India's poorest states, whose
forward-sounding policies, like providing
Internet access to villages, prompted Time
magazine to declare him "South Asian of The Year"
and a "beacon of hope."
But the anti-India insurgency in Kashmir, which
has claimed some 80,000 lives in the last decade
and a half, and the strength of violent communist
militants across India, hint that regular
elections may not be enough to contain the
frustration and rage of millions of have-nots, or
to shield them from the temptations of religious
and ideological extremism.
Many serious problems confront India. They are
unlikely to be solved as long as the wealthy,
both inside and outside the country, choose to
believe their own complacent myths.
Pankaj Mishra is the author of "Temptations of
the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan,
Tibet and Beyond."
More Articles in Opinion ยป
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