[A-List] India: neoliberal cheerleader

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Lion of India

In his controversial new book, Gurcharan Das claims that India will soon
overtake Europe as a global economic power - and that Britain should
have exploited its colony more. He tells Randeep Ramesh why

Tuesday June 11, 2002
The Guardian

Gurcharan Das is a small man with a big voice. Standing 5ft 3in tall, he
is booming away to the Guardian's photographer. "My name is Gurcharan
Das, G-U-R-C-H-A-R-A-N-D-A-S. It means the servant of the guru's feet...
a name of humility." The smiling Das has nothing to be humble about, and
he knows it. His book, India Unbound, is a quiet earthquake that shook
faraway shores long before its shockwave reached our own. Britain has
become accustomed to Indian authors whose ease with English belies their
mother tongue. Das is different insofar as his work is non-fiction, an
economic tract embroidered by personal narrative.

India Unbound's conclusion is that in the next two decades India will
become the third largest economy, after the US and China, with a middle
class of 250 million people. He talks of an India where teenage tea-shop
assistants work to save money for computer lessons. Where Bill Gates has
replaced Gandhi in the hearts of the people and money is the new god in
the temple. Where the lifting of the "dead hand of politicians and
bureaucrats" means the private sector runs schools and multinationals
are free to exploit the country. In this India, Das says, "minds have
been decolonised".

A manifesto for free trade, free markets and economic reform, the book
has made Das an unlikely pin-up for globalisers. Professor Amartya Sen,
the Nobel Prize-winner and master of Trinity College, Cambridge, was so
impressed he asked Das to start a "secular, rightwing party" modelled on
Britain's Tories in India. Citibank, the Wall Street financial house,
was so taken with India Unbound that it ordered 1,000 copies. Das even
got a six-figure advance for the US edition. In India, there are no
plans for a paperback because the hardback is still selling well.

Born into a well-to-do middle-class family in pre-independence India,
Das spent his youth in Washington after his father, a civil servant, was
posted there. He graduated from Harvard with a philosophy degree, and
was taught by JK Galbraith, Henry Kissinger and the philosopher John
Rawls. It was Rawls who turned Das into an unapologetic capitalist. "His
minimax theory did it. Basically, it says that if the poor get rich and
a few people get filthy rich, that is better than worrying about the
distribution of wealth and no one getting rich."

At the age of 21 Das returned to Bombay, discovered a flair for sales
and went on to sell more Vicks VapoRub than anyone else in the world.
That he did so by relabelling the menthol rub an "ayurvedic" medicine
and briefing lawyers to prove that Vicks was really a traditional herbal
Indian remedy is a tale that he delights in retelling. Despite rising to
the top of the career ladder - ending up with a $1m pay package and
directorship at Procter & Gamble in America - Das, aged 50, gave up on
business to become a writer. "I got bored, basically. My friends at P&G
played golf. I wrote."

It is globalisation that has provided Das with the best lines. India
nearly went bankrupt in 1991 and thanks to pressure from the
International Monetary Fund, its finance minister burned 40 years of red
tape in seven hours. That this revolution also saw Hindu nationalism
course through the country's veins is "deplorable". But the last decade,
says Das, has seen literacy jump from 52% to 65%, population growth slow
and 110 million people cross the poverty line. "We had six prime
ministers and the most appalling governance. But we had great economic
growth."

In fact, Das says, it is the west's anti-capitalists who are denying the
poor the chance of getting rich, a fact illustrated by the delay in
allowing GM crops to be grown in India. "I think it is terrible that the
Indian government wasted six years denying its farmers Monsanto's GM
cotton." He argues that the US and China have seized the opportunity to
turn vast chunks of farmland over to GM cotton, which not only produces
more crop per acre than its natural equivalent, but is also resistant to
insect attack. "Thanks to the Greenpeace-funded lunatics, nobody points
this out. If Monsanto gets rich and at the same time the Indian farmer
gets rich beyond his wildest dreams, then what is wrong with that?"

For Das, two industries, information technology and agriculture, will
lift India out of poverty. It was after all the subcontinent's computer
scientists who helped inflate the internet bubble - but now that has
been pricked, is the argument not redundant? "No. Indian IT companies
grew by 32% last year, and that was in a recession."

With farming, the reasoning is simpler. Within India's borders lies half
of all the arable land in Asia. India should, therefore, be able "to
feed and clothe the world". "China's industrial products are on every
high street in the world. Why is India's produce not there too?"

For a British reader, the eyebrow-arching passages in India Unbound are
those that claim that India and China, growing at more than 6% a year,
will overtake Europe but not America. The reason he gives is that
America's economy is as vigorous as its more populous rivals, but the
old world's is not. "Europe has chosen the good life. A short working
week, long vacations, beauty, museums, art. As an aesthete I love
Europe's traditions. But they do not create wealth."

The problem with Europe is not just its history, but its demographics.
Not only, says Das, does Europe have an ageing population, but it cannot
seem to absorb immigrants. Even Britain, says Das, will not wake up
before it sleepwalks into economic insignificance. "I think, when the
chips are down, the UK is part of Europe, not part of America.
Economically you would gain from being part of America. Culturally you
would lose. You don't want to become McWorld."

Das admits that nuclear war casts a large shadow over the subcontinent,
but frowns on his country's obsession with its neighbour. "Even when
there is no sign of conflict, for every mention of China in our papers
there are eight mentions of Pakistan. We should be following every move
in China, not Pakistan."

A columnist for the Times of India, Das enjoys controversy. He believes
that colonialism did not go far enough, that Britain should have
exploited India more. That Arundhati Roy, another author-turned-activist
(albeit for the other side), is a "sadly misguided thing who does not
understand economics". That India's disease was socialism, which saw it
export less than Hong Kong and become addicted to foreign aid. That the
only cure is a form of shock therapy, which he regrets is only being
administered slowly.

Big political players on the subcontinent sense that the ground beneath
them is shifting and that Das might know in which direction. Both
opposition and government court him, although he loathes the resurgent
Hindu nationalist cause. But despite the endorsement of Amartya Sen, Das
says democracy is better off with him outside shooting in. "There are
not enough people like me in India, but there will be. That is the story
of India Unbound."