India Glitters
but Is It All Gold There?
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
India had always been there,
doing what it had to do. Only the West, especially
the USA, discovered it after the tragedy of 9/11.
Before September 11, Washington did not see much
positive happening in India (India’s alignment
with Russia and its non-aligned posture), now it
does not see anything retrogressive there, not even
its 650-700million poor. The West has a habit of
making such discoveries.
Once they saw Iran as the embodiment of progress,
and projected it as the policeman of Asia; today
it stands labeled as the axis of evil! The Economist,
March 3 and June 9), the Newsweek, (March 6), the
Foreign Policy( May-June), and the Time ( June 26)
not once, but repeatedly have rung the bells of
India’s unprecedented economic progress, telling
the world, that India after China is the face of
progress and “all that glitters in India is
gold”.
On the contrary, the Economist of July 8 opens its
10-page indictment on Pakistan with the following
sentence, “Think about Pakistan, and you might
get terrified. Few countries have so much potential
to cause trouble, regionally and worldwide…One-third
of its 165m people live in poverty, and only half
of them are literate…” Is it India’s
luck or its economic policies that have changed
the world perception in its favor so dramatically?
In the words of Harvard professor Richard B. Freeman,
determining which economies have best prospects
for success, “luck seems as key as economic
policies”.
If the data supplied by the economists is more than
mere anecdotes, then Pakistan with all its sins
also deserves a positive mention. At the time of
Independence, no other country started from a mere
scratch, not even any country in Africa, than did
Pakistan. As of today, it is still ahead of India
in its GDP per head by $119 (India at $728 and Pakistan
at $847); India’s GDP growth at 7.7% is just
1% ahead of Pakistan’s 6.6% (and Pakistan
is just behind China, India and Brazil); India’s
foreign reserves at $153.6bn are a little ahead
of Pakistan’s $13bn when viewed in relation
to the population ratio between the two countries
(Pakistan comes close to having $88bn with India’s
population figure of 1.2 b); India’s official
poverty % is at about 19%, while unofficially it
ranges between 38%-58% while Pakistan’s official
poverty rate is 23.5%, unofficially it is between
40%-60%). Such comparisons are meaningless because
they cannot blindfold any honest observer of both
the societies to the naked ground realities that
in the pie of economic progress taking place on
both sides, the poor simply have no share. They
are just an abandoned specie.
There is no denying the fact that today India has
the largest movie and TV watching audience in the
world. India today can afford spending some 14 billion
on luxury items. 80 million Indians carry cellular
phones and some 2-5 million are lined up to have
one. Nokia’s $39,000 worth Vertu Signature,
studded with white platinum, is specially aimed
at Indians. India is no more the “Bunia corner-shop”
country. If in the year 2001 it had only 3 shopping
malls, in 2005 it had 100, and by the end of year
2007 it will have more than 345.
In the words of Farid Zakaria, India “is a
wonder to behold”. It has tactfully defused
its differences with China. There was a time when
China looked at India with apathy and suspicion,
and India at China with distrust. Now both view
each other as partners. According to Mr. Wen, India
is willing to end its opposition to Chinese control
over Tibet, and China is willing to tacitly recognize
India’s claim to the Himalayan state of Sikkim.
Both have become flexible in their attitudes. China
is willing to remain neutral on the Kashmir issue,
and is supportive of India’s claim to a permanent
seat on the UN Security Council. The real motivator
behind all this love-lost is trade and commerce.
The results are obvious. The Mandarins and the Brahmans,
otherwise hard to budge an inch, are now somersaulting.
Why Kashmir and not commerce are still a bone of
contention between India and Pakistan?
The genii that has rubbed the Aladdin’s lamp
in favor of India’s image, is not exclusively
Manmohan Singh (he undoubtedly is an economic wizard,
impeccable and matchless); it is India’s well-organized
propaganda, its timely change in foreign policy
after 9/11; its liberal economic policies and above
all, its Bollywood songs, its gift of Pashmina shawls,
and its bevy of mini-skirted beauties who dumped
saris in the Indian ocean, and are now dancing to
the pulsating Hindi tunes at places like Davos.
A merry, raucous, boisterous, and democratic India
is dreaming of becoming a partner with the world’s
richest democracy, namely America. If the trend
stays, as it seems it will, India may soon earn
the same measure of confidence in the inner circles
of America as Israel and Britain have. Besides,
India has better chances of success because it is
not a Muslim state.
Mian Nawaz Sharif, (not even 2% of what Manmohan
Singh is), was the first, even before Mexico’s
Salina, and India’s present PM, to introduce
the concept of opening up the country’s economy,
leading to free market and to the privatization
of major industries. Where Salina and Nawaz Sharif
failed, due to bad governance, inaptness, and personal
corruption, Manmohan Singh succeeded. His character
and honesty defeated all the charms of power. The
question is, “Has Manmohan Singh succeeded
even partially to wage and win the battle against
poverty?” On the assumption of the office
of PM, he had vowed, “We need reforms but
with a human face”. Has the lot of those 650-700
million Indians living off the land in utter poverty
improved by any measure?
In Andra Pradesh, according to Mr. C. S. Reddy,
a welfare worker, “Marriages are breaking
down, many farmers are turning to begging, and some
are selling their children as domestic servants”.
According to BBC of June 25, “More than 700
million live below poverty line, though the number
of millionaires has arisen from 70,000 in 2005 to
83,000”. In the ranking of 155 countries,
India still is at number 116, two places below the
war-torn Iraq, and 56 below Pakistan. Its most populated
state of Utter Pradesh (UP), with its 170m plus
people would make it number six in the world if
it were a separate country, includes 8% of the world’s
poor; India’s 61% official literacy rate includes
many who are barely able to write their names, and
functionally are illiterate; Andra Pradesh which
boasts of its 100% literacy, in fact includes in
this figure those 45%, between the age of 14-45,
who are illiterate by any definition. (By the way,
this is true of Pakistan as well).
India is big and thirsty; so is Pakistan. In both
countries, places of worship outnumber schools,
colleges and hospitals. In India only 52% live in
pakka houses and 39% live in one-room houses; in
its total 249m houses, only 35% have a cemented
floor; free supply of water means no water at all
and some 60% families just don’t get water
at home; and 32m households don’t have a source
of water near their homes.
The Western magazines cited above say that while
China would be rich and old; India would be rich
and young. The statement is half true. India’s
402m are in the working age group, but are poor.
So logically, India’s some would be awesomely
rich; but its most would remain trapped in poverty.
65% Indians still do not have a bank account and
its 44% don’t have electricity, reported India
Today in 2003.
Shankar Aiyar in the June 9, 2003 edition of India
Today reports: “Water is the biggest crisis
facing India in terms of spread and severity…
100m people in 35 big cities face a 30% cut in water
supply… water now precedes Roti, Kapra and
Makaan… in cities which are the hub of progress,
namely Chennai, Bangalore and Delhi, water is being
rationed…the lives and livelihood of millions
is at risk, and the nightmare has only just begun”.
The Khapres leave their homes at dawn and spend
most of the day looking for water… tubewell
depths have plunged tenfold to 1,000ft to 1,200ft,
and people borrow money on 36% -120% interest rate
in water-thirsty states and finally are constrained
to commit suicide, says Adavayya, a farmer in the
village of Boppapura in Andhra Pradesh. Money lenders
are minting money as banks are too busy dealing
with Mittels, Ambanis and Amitabhs. India like Pakistan
is basically rural, and no place better exposes
the true face of India than Bihar (Southern Punjab,
interior Sindh and Baluchistan in Pakistan are the
litmus tests on our side). Just a visit to any rural
dispensary and primary school will illustrate the
emptiness of the economic boom taking place in both
the countries.
According to Foreign Policy’s editor-in-chief,
Mr. Moises Naim “economic disparities have
not changed. Our tolerance for them has…the
world has always suffered from economic inequality.
But, despite all the conspicuous consumption, global
inequality has not changed much”. If nine
people out of ten make 100 rupees per day, and one
makes one million, the average income of these ten
people comes up to 10,090 rupees per day. This figure
is deceptive because the ground reality is that
nine out of these ten still make 100 rupees. The
increase in the number of millionaires and billionaires
does not mean reduction in the number of poor people.
The fact of the matter, as reported by the BBC on
June 25, is that people of the lower caste have
in desperation begun renting their wives, like you
rent a car or an apartment, to the rich Patels at
a rate of 8,000 rupees per month. Being poor in
India and Pakistan means never having enough to
eat; it means utter hunger; it also means hearing
your children cry themselves to sleep because there
is no roti or rice to give them; poverty also means
being shelterless, living in the slums under constant
fear of eviction from developers’ mafia; poverty
also means not being able to afford a visit to the
doctor. In short poverty means watching your child
or wife die a senseless, but needless death from
malnutrition or diarrhea brought on by unsafe drinking
water. Poverty is not just lack of freedom or representation…
poverty means living in the darkening shadows created
by the full moonshine of this economic boom. The
irony of the matter is that in this glitter and
shine of economic prosperity “the wealthy
seem to be leaving the impoverished further and
further behind”. In Islam, the Qur’an
labels such rich as, “The Rejecters of Faith”,
and I am sure in Hinduism, there would certainly
be words or phrases as strong as these for such
callous rich.
What one US Supreme Court judge once said cryptically
about obesity is equally true about poverty. “When
I see it I know it”. When an adivasi starves
to death in Bolangir or Kalahandi, when the widow
of C. Pradesh, a weaver is driven to suicide; when
Amrutbhai Sarasiya after having immersed himself
in excrement to unclog a sewer in Ahmadabad in Gujrat
gets rebuffed at all water wells to get some water
to clean himself, and when Mr. Sukhadeo Thorat,
a faculty member of Jawarlal Nehru University, an
untouchable with a Ph.D. is constrained to insist,
“You can try to disguise it, but there are
so many ways to slip up, the scarlet tattoo of low-caste
printed on their foreheads”; and when Manmohan
Singh feels compelled to warn the CEOs of big companies
to either change their practice of hiring only the
privileged ones or the government would be constrained
to step in, he definitely appears sounding a warning
to the new and old rich, “What more sins you
need to commit in the name of caste, merit and class?”
he definitely is talking about the poor.
The fight against poverty is not always a war against
inequality. Countries that do not arrange the fair
distribution of their wealth, and either through
corruption or inaptness, fail to narrow the gap
between the rich and the poor, or who never feel
any moral compunction to invest heavily in the socio-eco-pol.
sector have never succeeded in the last 25 years
in ending or even reducing inequality and poverty.
Moises Naim, points out SEVEN widely accepted tools
to narrow inequality and reduction in poverty. They
are: access to better education and health-care;
availability of clean water; justice; stability
in jobs; provision of reasonable housing; and finally,
and most importantly, easily available credit facility
for the poor. In the absence of these seven basic
tools which mostly become a good fodder for a rousing
election speech, no tax and labor reforms; no amount
of protection of property rights and subsidies as
allurements, and no foolproof price controls etc
can be effective.
Jeffrey D. Sachs, the world’s best economist
confidently says, “We can banish extreme poverty
in our generation - yet 8 million people die each
year because they are too poor to survive. The tragedy
is that with a little help, they could even thrive”.
He classifies poverty as a disease, an epidemic,
and therefore demands a clinical and not a theoretical
approach. Anirudh Krishna, in his article, “Why
preventing poverty beats curing it? categorically
underpins the cause, “I found that health
and healthcare expenses are the leading cause for
people’s reversal of fortune…millions
of people are living one illness away from financial
disaster, and the world’s aid efforts are
ill-suited to the challenge. A hundred years ago
rich nations were nine times more affluent than
poor countries, now they are 100 times. It is no
consolation to say that poor had always been with
us. The time has come to find answers of why many
are so poor and a few so rich. The pro-reform Guru,
Amartya Sen, the Nobel Laureate, is right on target
when he says that no investment can deliver any
meaningful changes in the society if it by passes
health, education and malnutrition.
If a lorry truck takes eight days, including 32
hours waiting at checkpoints from Kalkota to Mumbai,
Indians can still survive and smile; what it cannot
and should not put up with is its 40% of the world’s
poor living in it, and it earning the title of the
world’s second largest HIV infected population.
India has a democracy; a wonderful constitution
and a comparatively honest judiciary. Above all,
it has a leader like Manmohan Singh, and a whole
Western world ready to act as cheerleader while
it plays. If India succeeds in reducing poverty,
Pakistan will follow suit. Only both need to learn
to TRUST each other.
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