Imagining India

I have never felt unsafe in an Indian city, including Mumbai, despite its traumatic past. It may have something to do with our democracy – as citizens, we feel despite such unrest, that we have a semblance of control over the systems that govern and protect us. But as I watched the live feed on Mumbai’s carnage on television, I considered how fragile this sense of control and security can be. And once citizens lose this collective faith that they have some power and that they are secure, the demand for change is resounding. 

The consequences of this were immediately clear – political calculations were fast-changing in the glare of the television cameras and in the hours of the standoff. Several states are up for elections, and most of the ads I witnessed as I recently travelled about the country centred on inflation or spiralling costs – one opposition ad was a cartoon that showed the state government playing the flute while the ‘snake of inflation’ rose and danced. I guess that after this week, these ads have lost a bit of their sting. The focus has turned dramatically to security. 

What does that mean for us? In the past seventy-two hours, we witnessed an event that has transformed the psyche of a nation. Since the bomb blasts that ripped through our cities and towns three months ago, there have been familiar remarks of how stoic our urban citizens are – echoes of comments Mumbaikars received after the train explosions in July 2006 and the bomb blasts in 1993. 

 Again, as the day waned and the situation began to stabilise, there were comments on our ability to move past disaster, and how people would simply pick up the pieces and go on with their lives. But this time around, these statements have a hollow feel – we have been struck so many times that one must eventually wonder if what we see in the aftermath is stoicism or helplessness.

Unfortunately though, the actions governments take during times of fear are often not ideal ones. Indian politicians have since the blasts in July, mostly debated bringing back draconian laws resembling the repealed Prevention of Terrorism Act and the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act. The BJP leader Venkaiah Naidu noted that ‘an extraordinary situation needs an extraordinary law,’ an opinion that the UPA government has come around to holding themselves. This recent attack will likely speed the passage of such a law.  

We’ve seen the impact such laws can have in the US and Britain, following the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war. Massive powers of detention and interrogation that such laws allow cast the net too far and wide – what you end up with is a disproportionate amount of false positives and captured innocents, which muddies the efforts against terrorism. The record of POTA and TADA in India has been dismal – they have been used to target particular communities, and as tools for revenge. The violations of human rights that result are unacceptable. These laws become all the more dangerous when we consider the terrorists who led the recent bombings. These were not easily identifiable men. They looked like us— like any of the millions of young men in our cities, dressed in jeans and t-shirts, yuppie-like down to their hair-cuts and their glasses.  And such laws make democracies less so, and by hurting innocent civilians, serve as powerful recruiting tools for terrorists. 

There is no question that we face dangerous times, and our governments are going to react in ways that will demonstrate to the public, concrete action and strict enforcement.  Our impulses will be to strike back with force, and with hard, draconian measures. But our weaknesses unfortunately, lie not in the lack of a terrorism law, but within the core of our institutions – our police forces, the effectiveness of our intelligence agencies, the surveillance work we carry out. Since the 1970s, all these once reputable institutions have become deeply politicised, to the point that they have not been allowed to work without interference. Today, the frozen systems of our judiciary ensure that nearly half a million people are languishing in our jails without trials. Our cities are weak and ineffectual, unable to deal with any crisis. Unfortunately, given our talent for workarounds, these are issues that governments will shy away from. But without facing these challenges boldly, the prevention of terror attacks will be elusive, and we will continue to be vulnerable.

Calm – that emotion that seems so distant and unnecessary in such moments of crisis, will be critical to get us through this difficult time. The danger of thoughtless retaliation comes not just from our governments, but also from our citizens. Our country has large numbers of minority religious communities, and there will be enough demagogues eager to whip up anger against convenient targets. We can choose at this critical moment to let divides like religion dominate and frighten us, sidelining our real concerns, or we can adopt the reforms and policy ideas we need to win the battle against militants. Terrorism is fundamentally about igniting terror – about overwhelming us with fear. We have to resist this fear rather than be subjugated by it.

When I attempted to chart the ideas and policies India needs to ensure stable, long-term growth, I was keenly aware that we have always responded best in crisis. Indian economists and policy analysts remarked to me time and again, of our lethargy unless we are faced with economic disaster. Our 1991 reforms were pushed through as the country teetered at bankruptcy, and after we had mortgaged our family jewels – our gold reserves – for emergency loans.

Since the global financial meltdown that began in September this year, there has certainly been a keen sense of urgency to frame better, smarter policy and regulation – an urgency that is visible both globally and in India. I am not happy about the meltdown – the world is almost certainly headed for a rocky, tumultuous  period. But this now widespread sense of urgency might be the  one silver lining during these  turbulent times .

For India, this does not come a moment too soon. Our reluctance to push a reform agenda  of expanding access has resulted in large and growing disparities when it comes to the opportunities available in India’s  economy. Good education for example, is  only accessible to the children whose families can afford private schools, and coaching classes to get into the top institutes. Public-funded education that the rest of India’s children rely on, on the other hand, is a miserable failure, with dropout rates over 90% despite initiatives such as the mid - day meal and the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. The result of this are children and teenagers who make their living as street hawkers, construction workers and factory labour. The unfairness of this is overwhelming. 

Such disparities in access are all too visible across the country, and have greatly limited class and income mobility across India. While infrastructure in urban India has begun to show tentative progress, farmers lacking roads connecting them from their villages to markets have to rely on corrupt networks of middlemen to sell their crops. Transporting their produce across vast distances without cold chains means that they lose over a third of what they grow due to spoilage. Across rural India, caste relationships still hold sway, limiting the opportunities for backward castes and Dalits to own land and start businesses – to date, India has not seen a single major Dalit entrepreneur. Migrants who leave these harsh livelihoods and come into cities find that finding a home is a distant dream outside the slums that form urban India’s fringes, its messy and chaotic boundaries. Most of the poor in both the slums and in rural India lack reliable electricity and water supply, and the people who can afford it resort to private solutions in the face of such shortages – they buy their own generators, live in gated communities with private security, and use private sources for water. 

When our markets seem ineffective in terms of providing widespread access, people turn to other solutions. As a result, India’s markets exist alongside a complicated structure of subsidies, loan waivers, hand-outs, tax exemptions and government sponsored jobs and reservations. And people who have watched the economic boom from the sidelines, see these concessions as their best options, and  are hostile towards markets. 

In fact, the global financial crisis that has erupted underlines why our issues of access may be our most critical challenge. Across countries, we have seen a populist backlash against markets when they have failed to address crises around access – such as in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, and more recently in large parts of Latin America. Even the US, a country that supposedly holds the values of the free market close to its heart, is seeing a new rhetoric and anger against big business as income inequalities and unemployment rise across the country. It shows how easily a country’s economic mood can change – since the financial crisis has required  over one trillion dollars of US taxpayer money to bail out American banks even as millions of houses across the US are foreclosed, even the staunchest free-market believers are expressing hostility against Wall Street. Governments clearly ignore such challenges of inequality at their peril. Without more reforms to create access, India’s entire  progress will totter.  For those Indian leaders ambivalent about reforms and who believe that they have only led to creating rich businessmen, now is the time to catch the bull by the horns and promote the reforms that drastically expand access to opportunity in education, jobs, incomes and markets for all.

When I first told people that I was writing a book, most assumed that it was a memoir of my years at Infosys. There was some bemusement, even consternation, when I told them that I was writing a book on India.

Could someone like me contribute to the discussions and debates on India’s future? In retrospect, I can say that I had some advantages. As an entrepreneur from a ‘new economy’ company, which largely lay outside the state’s complex regulatory system, I was a bit of an outsider to Indian industry when it came to the challenges of doing business in the country. Neither of course, did I belong in government, although I had participated in various task forces and policy committees. This, I like to believe, gave me a unique perspective on both markets and the state in India.

I was also fortunate in being able to talk to a variety of people – economists, policy experts, NGO activists, bureaucrats, politicians, entrepreneurs, journalists – about their various ideas for India. And what struck me time and again, is the vibrancy of ideas and solutions that exist for sustainable growth. There is no dearth of new, interesting answers for our problems.

Why then, do our challenges seem so intractable? We are an emerging economy, making waves in the global market, but the numbers of our poor are still staggering. We struggle to provide our citizens with basic levels of education and healthcare. In many parts of rural India, infrastructure is nothing more than a distant hope – we have villages with no roads leading out, and villages with mobile connectivity but without electricity, where people have to walk miles to the nearest town just to charge their phones.

I believe that much of India’s challenges come from our divisions. The Indian state has long championed the country’s ‘unity in diversity’, but in reality, our diversity has also meant that we are a fractured society, split along the lines of caste, religion, region and class. As a result, our politics have long been a politics of our divides rather than one driven by ideas or solutions.

However, there is a chance that this has begun to change. I think that the most effective answer to such politics is creating a ’safety net of ideas’ that can weather political storms and divisive rhetoric. If such ideas become popular across large numbers of voters, no government can survive by simply mining our resentments, and without addressing these issues.

Already, we can see a set of such core ideas that have gained traction in India post-reform. The English language for instance, was once a favourite target among politicians who wanted to whip up regional passions, and some state governments even banned the teaching of English in schools in the 1970s and 1980s. But with the rise of India’s markets and the growth of our outsourcing sector, the tongue has become a language of aspiration, and political parties have found that a hostile stance towards English is deeply unpopular with voters. We have seen a similar shift in how Indians view our population – once seen as a burden, now viewed as a strength – our entrepreneurs, and the role of technology, globalisation, and democracy. These ideas have arrived in India, and have helped drive the story of our growth.

There are other ideas however, that remain in limbo – such as education and infrastructure reform, which despite their popularity among voters, are difficult to implement thanks to weak systems and ineffective governments. And at the same time, ideas such as labour and university reforms are still deeply divisive, with no clear answers in sight. And finally, there are the issues that are critical to our future, but we haven’t yet begun to debate – such as our health, environmental and energy issues.

I discuss these various kinds of ideas in the book, and intend to do the same on this blog – I believe that an open, involved debate on these issues that will provide us some clarity on India’s future, and help us shape an effective, sustainable path for growth. Do join me in this debate.