Re: [A-List] India: neoliberal cheerleader

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

India Unbound is a timely product that neoliberals would welcome in the era of global economic collapse caused by neo-liberalism.  The author is an intellectual compradore in the tradition of the Bell Curve, a 1994 book written by Charles Murray of the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the late Richard Herrnstein of Harvard, with the  central thesis - that there are measurable genetic differences in intelligence levels between races, seeking to make racism intellectually acceptable.
The ideas presented in India Unbound are neither new or original, but they are what neo-liberals have been selling for the last decade.  The problem with India has nothing to do with socialism which India never actually practised.  If anything, India's problem has more to do with an incompetent civil service inherited from the British.  The British developed the civil service which excelled under brilliant and daring political leadership.  India leaders all suffered from the OxBridge disease of gentlemanly timidity.  They have all been poisoned by obsolete, irrelevant and impractical British elitism.  Even today, the majority of Indian cannot speak or write the official language (English) well enough to
challenge the Indian elite.  Adopting English as its official language was a major political error.  It condamned India into perpetual voluntary victimization by cultural imperialism.

The book admires Bill Gates whose only technical contribution was limited to the development of DOS, which became industry standard when IMB made the greatest strategic error of underestimating the potential of the PC and give the opportunity to Gates.  Eveything else Microsoft monopolized after DOs was stolen, from Windows to Words to IE.  Microsoft's success was not technical innovation, but financial manipulation. Gates was more like Rockefeller than Edison, not even a Ford.

The fixation of creating wealth for a few as the solution to India's problem is mass poverty is obscene.  The fact that Citibank ordered 1000 copies of the book is itself telling.  Within a decade, some independent minded Indian will write a book entitled: India Can Say No, which had appear first in Japan then in China.  Fact: none of the current leaders of Japan or China were educated in the West.

Next you know, the author will tell you that what India needs is a few Enrons and Global Crossings.

Henry C.K. Liu

Keaney Michael wrote:

> 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
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> 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.
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> 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".
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> 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.
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> 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."
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> 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."
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> 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."
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> 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?"
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> 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."
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> 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?"
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> 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."
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> 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."
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> 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."
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> 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.
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> 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."