india

Until it hit the headlines after the Mumbai attacks, India did not tend to receive much attention in the international press - at least not as much attention as China, Asia's other major rising power. Even with the Olympics over, China has been the subject of innumerable recent news stories and feature pieces. In noting this, I am not trying to suggest that China gets too much attention; my point is only that India could use a little more. (To this end, openDemocracy has just launched a new editorial section on India, which had been planned for some time.) In the absence of detailed reporting on India, three images of the country have tended to coexist (somewhat uneasily) in Westerners' imaginations.

(This article was first published on 27 November 2008)

The dust has yet to settle on the unfolding tragedy in Mumbai. At the time of writing, hostage situations persist in the Oberoi Hotel and the Nariman House, and commandos are still clearing the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. Officials have not fully agreed on the chronology of events that have left at least one hundred people dead (including the city's anti-terrorist chief Hemant Karkare) and injured hundreds others, but the verdict is already in: this is the worst attack India has ever seen.

Amongst the big countries of the Asian continent, the nation is back. It was the foreign ministers of Russia, China, and India, after all, who met last year to affirm their vision of "multipolar world system", founded on the hallowed ground of respect for national sovereignty and territorial integrity. The Russia-Georgia crisis reminds Ivan Krastev that the 19th century lives on, while the ominous grandeur of the Beijing Olympics has lifted burgeoning nationalism in China from anachronism to global force. India - the continent's other "waking giant" - also rides the nationalist tide. Its recent economic successes and growing international influence have been matched by a swelling belief in national purpose.

Yet where grassroots jingoism throttled dissent in China during this year's Tibet crisis (see Ivy Wang, "China's netizens and Tibet: a Guangzhou report") and in Russia overwhelmingly supported state-propaganda during this month's clash with Georgia (see Evgeny Morozov, "Russia/Georgia: war of the web"), no such consensus can be easily found in India with its buzzing civil society and vast and varied media landscape. Antara Dev Sen, editor of the indispensable Little Magazine, offers a timely corrective to the Indian nationalist narrative. In the wake of India's 61st birthday, the country's problems remain immense and its dreams of superpower-dom all the more ungainly.

On the South Asian group blog, Sepia Mutiny, blogger and Duke University professor, Amardeep Singh, wonders whether Republican presidential candidate John McCain might seriously be considering Indian-American Louisiana governor, Bobby Jindal as his running mate.

"I know it's crazy, but maybe it isn't as crazy as it sounds," wrote the blogger when he first suggested the idea in February. The New York Times now seems to think it's a possibility in an article this week, and American radio host Rush Limbaugh has also echoed the idea.

Jindal was born in Lousiana to Punjabi Indian parents. He used to be a Hindu, but converted to Catholicism after high school.

In his post, Singh argues that if Barack Obama wins the nomination of the Democratic Party, John McCain will end up looking "very old and very white".

Barack Obama's unprecedented rise up the political ladder has turned heads the world over. Writing in the Times of India, A.G. Noorani suggests that Indian Muslims - themselves a significant minority in India - must learn from Obama's model of political engagement, eschewing sectarianism for consensus building. Just as Obama's politics include and transcend narrow identities, Muslim political leaders must adopt a secular approach in repairing the "social contract" between majority and minority communities.

It can be easy to forget that the hot air spewed in America has real consequences elsewhere. While Obama and Clinton wrestle over lapel pins, policy-makers in New Delhi and Tehran are calculating the future of their bilateral relations in large part on the outcome of the US elections. Indian and Iranian efforts to build a joint 2,775 km gas pipeline (through Pakistan), which would bring much-needed energy to India, remain in the doldrums, with the Bush administration running interference. So, too, has the White House driven a fissure between Iran and India on nuclear energy; the US-Indo nuclear deal not only soured India's domestic politics - with the government's Left allies making a fuss - but broke New Delhi's age-old solidarity with developing countries in last year's IAEA Board of Governors' vote on Iran's nuclear program.

As Afghan and foreign troops continue to battle the Taliban in the plains and hills of Afghanistan, another battle is being waged – and lost – in the country's legislature. The Taliban don't need to recapture Kabul for their puritan and parochial values to recapture the public stage. Afghan lawmakers – part and parcel of the new, democratic government installed since the toppling of the Taliban in 2001 – are edging towards reintroducing strict bans on supposedly un-Islamic cultural forms. After six years of uncertainty, corruption, carnage and waning confidence, Afghanistan may be sliding right back to where it didn't want to be.

New Delhi this week played host to a summit of African leaders, lured to India by the promise of strengthened economic ties with the rising "Asian giant". The event was smaller than its counterpart two years earlier in Beijing, when China wined and dined fifty African countries. But the signal is clear: Indian ambitions are as global as Chinese ones. New Delhi knows it cannot afford to cede further "strategic space" to Beijing. And Africa, which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh acclaimed as the "land of awakening" and "our mother continent", is a growing arena for the contest of Asia's duelling realpolitiks.

Sticking to the official line, Singh refused to brook the notion that China and India are squaring up for a "Great Game" in Africa. "We are not in any race or competition with China or any other country," he insisted at the summit's closing press conference. "The desire of India and Africa to work together is not new." In at least one respect, Singh is correct. India's history of supporting anti-colonial movements and its prominent role in the Non-Aligned Movement do instil a political ballast and pre-history to India's relations with African nations that China lacks. While Chinese commentators invoke the Middle Kingdom's ancient 15^th century ties to Africa through the voyages of Zheng He, India boasts a contemporary 20^th century history of support of and involvement in struggles across Africa.

Nevertheless, the focus of this week's conference was very much on the bottom line. No analyst looking at India's dealings with Africa can help but gauge them against China's. Trade between China and Africa far outstrips that between the latter and India: $73.3 billion to India's paltry $30 billion. The massive industrial zone of the Pearl River Delta teems with African distributors sourcing goods back across the Indian Ocean. Chinese companies and workers scour the breadth of Africa, braving hotspots like Sudan, Nigeria and Ogaden in Ethiopia in their quest for resources and construction contracts.

As much as India also hungers for markets and resources, Singh was meticulous in glossing the deals cemented at the summit with the sheen of good intentions. "We share a colonial past," he said. "We don't seek to impose any pattern in Africa... India wishes to see the 21st century as the century of Asia and Africa with the people of the two continents working together to promote inclusive globalisation."

Since embarking on a program of systematic liberalising reform, Indian ties with Africa were undermined by a re-orientation towards Europe and the United States. Keen not to lose further ground, India has now pledged to strengthen economic ties with the continent. New Delhi announced a preferential duty-free scheme for the world's fifty least developed countries (34 of them in Africa), shredding over 94% of India's notoriously arcane tariffs.

India has inflated its line of credit to Africa from $2.15 billion to over $9.7 billion. Much of that extra capital will go to building technology training centres, electrical grids, railways and other projects designed to boost the continent's physical and professional infrastructure. New Delhi is placing heavy emphasis on building technological and human capacity. Drawing on India's reputation for IT excellence and know-how, the African Union is using a $1 billion of Indian funds to set up the Pan-African E-network Project to develop internet infrastructure across the continent, particularly in the arena of promoting "telemedicine" and "tele-education" programs.

Cooperative ambitions extend from the lofty plane of the fibre-optic to the soil. The majority of Indians and Africans still till the earth, and development programs will have to include serious efforts to make their agricultural sectors more efficient and productive. Indian and African leaders both recognise the potential of their countries to be the "granaries of the world", particularly at a time of growing food crisis.

While African leaders were drawn to New Delhi for its new found wealth, the challenges shared by both India and Africa - with their vast underbellies of poverty and lack - make Indian involvement in the continent more credible. Alpha Oumar Konare, the former president of the African Union, urged India not to treat Africa as a "mere market for raw materials, purchased at low prices with no advantage to us... We want to deal with equality, mutual respect and mutual benefit... We want to deal with other countries on an equal footing." With its commitment to democracy and human rights, India will face particular scrutiny in Africa as it tries to chart a principled course in stormy seas.

 

With forests of skyscrapers rising in Shanghai, fantastical contents emerging off the coast of Dubai, and fibre-optic arteries pumping knowledge from the heart of India's IT boom, it is difficult not to be impressed by the pace of transformation across Asia. Tremendous change is afoot in much of the region, greased in places by growing oil revenues and elsewhere by decade-old programs of liberal reform that now seem to be bearing fruit. This goes beyond the putative "Asian giants" of India and China; with many smaller countries also sharing in the economic success, a whole continent seems to be on the rise.

In the glow of heady financial statistics, many analysts see an epochal shift of power from the west to Asia. Some scholars, like the Singaporean diplomat and writer Kishore Mahbubani (author of The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East), have described the pendulum swing in civilisational terms. "Asian values" of harmony, commitment to education, and stability all speed the east's ascendancy (and the west's decline).

Others, like Clyde Prestowitz (author of Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East) reaffirm their faith in liberalisation in Asia's example. With stagnation and protectionist moods gripping many western countries, capitalist success stories in the east restore belief in the ultimate logic of the free market.

Both these views come together in Roger Cohen's recent column in the New York Times, "The Baton Passes to Asia". Gloomy about the slump in the American economy, Cohen grandiosely heralds "the end of the era of the white man". "The West's moment", he says, "is passing. Money and might are increasingly elsewhere. America's little dose of socialism from Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson might stave off the worst but cannot halt the trend." He then trots out the familiar statistics that accompany such prognostications - there are 450 million cellphones in China; 300 million Indians will move into cities in the next 20 years; by 2030, the Indian and Chinese economies will sit only behind the United States in terms of size.

But the difference, he insists, is not simply statistical.

It's about the mind. Come to Asia and fear drains away. It's replaced by confidence and a burning desire to succeed. Asian business leaders are rock stars. The culture of education and achievement is fierce. China is bent on beating the U.S.A.

What you feel in Asia, said Claude Smadja, a prominent global strategist, is "a burst of energy, of new dreams, and the end of the era of Western domination and the white man."

Some of the above is, of course, indisputable. The mood of the business elites in India, China and elsewhere in Asia is indeed bullish and optimistic, in marked contrast to the anxiety in Wall Street and the City. While European and north American strategists plot the revival of their economies, their Asian counterparts just want the good times to keep on rolling.

At the same time, Cohen and Co. miss much of the larger picture of what's happening in "the East" by looking simply from the top, simply through business. He glowingly describes "Asians and Arabs spending their way" through Dubai's glitzy airport. This is the view of the airport lounge, the sleek hotel, the limousine, the conference centre. Not only is it limited, it's predetermined to see what it wants to see.

Asia's problems remain as great as its prospects. Without recapitulating the Berkeley economist Pranab Bardhan's masterful critique of Chinese and Indian superpower aspirations, the depth of change in India and China and elsewhere is easily overstated. The rate of poverty reduction in India has actually slowed in the last decade; China has lost tens of millions of manufacturing jobs since the mid-1990s; staggering gulfs of inequality widen in both countries. India's crippling paucity of infrastructure and of at least the inklings of social safety net remain its major stumbling blocks; in the long-run, the unimaginative authoritarianism of the Chinese system may ensure instability, rather than stability; even the astronomical prosperity of the Gulf rests on the unsustainable and problematic lucre of oil.

Beyond these material limitations, there is a willful simplicity in the portrayal of Asia (and Asians) that seems to borrow from the hackneyed stereotypes of "model Asians" - single-minded, ambitious, over-achieving, automaton-like. Commentary on the transformations afoot in the east needs more flesh than the dry bones of statistics. Asian countries are as messy, as lively as any other country. They deserve probing interrogation and analysis, not Roger Cohen's vacuous attempts at provocation.

All politics are local, according to the cliché. If the saying needed much more in its ballast of truth, one need only look at a recent spat in the Indian parliament. The main opposition parties in the Lok Sabha – the lower house – walked out today in furious protest over the government's refusal to take a firmer line on unrest in Tibet. Violent demonstrations in the capital Lhasa over the weekend had brought the Himalayan region once again beneath the global spotlight. Opposition politicians wanted the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to clearly condemn China's actions in Tibet and push for United Nations intervention in resolving the demands of Tibetan dissidents. The ruling coalition only managed to "express its concern", prompting the exodus of MPs. It would be a bit too hopeful, however, to read in today's parliamentary histrionics much more than domestic point-scoring.

After all, as one foreign ministry representative pointed out, India's Tibet policy has changed little since the failed uprising of 1959 which brought the Dalai Lama and tens of thousands of Tibetan refugees into ongoing exile in India. While supporting the Dalai Lama and backing "non-violent" and "peaceful" political transformation in Tibet, New Delhi has done little to internationalise the Tibetan cause (with one eye, of course, on the lingering crisis in Kashmir) or to bring the force of international institutions to bear on China.

Ever since its humiliating losses to China in the 1962 war (the countries' only major clash), India has treated its looming neighbour gingerly, even as Beijing equipped Pakistan with military and scientific hardware and continuously undermined India's position within south Asia. This is even more unlikely to change now that China and India both harbour global ambitions and are wary of "balancing" each other to the west's advantage.

Why, then, did opposition MPs beat their chests about Tibet when their parties, if in power, would have done little different? Why did members of the Bharatiya Janata Party – a party linked to pogroms targeting India's minority Muslims – rail against the "cultural genocide" of minority peoples in China? The answer is local. Conspicuous in its relative silence in today's discussions was the Left Front, a bloc of communist and other leftist parties that give external support to India's ruling coalition, the United Progressive Alliance. All is not well with the Left-UPA fraternity, with a serious feud threatening to scupper the Indo-US nuclear deal. The Left accused the UPA of selling India short and pandering to the United States, still disparaged as "imperialist" in many quarters of Indian public opinion. Yet, the Left is seen by many as happy to lean towards China. Many of its parties maintain strong links with Beijing and, upon occasion, attempt to ape China's heavy-handed development strategies (as occurred recently with such controversial effect in the prospective establishment of a Chinese-style "special economic zone" in Nandigram in communist-ruled West Bengal). Some members of the Left dismiss their UPA counterparts as "pro-American", while the latter brand the former "pro-China". Such rhetorical tags matter less in their substance than in their power to firm the impression of ideological fissures between the Left and the UPA.

Thus the issue of Indian policy on Tibet has fallen into the opposition's lap as a crowbar to pry the Left and the UPA apart. If the opposition succeeds in making Tibet a serious issue in parliament, further strain will be placed on the Left-UPA alliance, as the stubborn silence of the communists will wrestle with the reluctant, moralising concessions of UPA MPs. Instead of directing outwards, debate about Tibet in India is pointed inward.