Visiting India is always an experience,
especially now that everyone talks about that
country as a rising power. At least from my
perspective, the real test of a rising power is
how much that country has been able to improve the
standard of living of its people, how much poverty
has been reduced, whether there is discernible
evidence of improvement in that country's
infrastructure, and whether there is a noticeable
improvement in environmental pollution, which has
remained a sustained curse of all developing
countries, including India and China - another rising
power. An interesting aspect
of a rising power is the way it utilizes its
economic wealth for force modernization. For
India, that has been a massive undertaking since
its emergence as a declared nuclear power in May
1998.
I was also interested in looking at
the nature of debate among Muslims over Islam in
India. Even though India's majority is Hindu,
Muslims form between 12% and 18% of the
population. As such, India has the world's largest
Muslim population of any non-Muslim country.
Buying into consumerism In the
realm of improved standard of living, India is
definitely going through revolutionary changes.
Clyde Prestowitz, in his excellent book Three
Billion New Capitalists, presents a
fascinating case of India's emergence as a
world-class center for information technology. He
states that, at one point in the past decade and a
half or so, India became the focus of outsourcing
for jobs that were cheaper to carry out in that
country than in the United States. Now, it is
increasingly becoming a country where
multinational conglomerates are gathering for
lucrative returns on their investments and a
leading hub for highly sophisticated research and
development. The statistics on foreign direct
investment regularly portray India as a more
attractive place for global entrepreneurs than
even the US.
Prestowitz writes:
India's economy can sustain 7-8%
annual GDP [gross domestic product] growth for
the indefinite future. In the past two years it
has grown faster than China, and some believe
that with its legacy of capitalist institutions,
rule of law, and democratic processes it may
well outstrip China over the long term. At those
rates of growth India would have a GDP over
[US]$2 trillion, making India the world's
third-largest economy and perhaps on the way to
becoming the biggest.
According to
another source, India's economy is likely to be
larger than Japan's or Germany's within the next
30 years. India also has the advantage of being
one of the countries with the youngest population.
And according to statistics cited by Steve
Sjuggerud, president of Investment U ("Investing
in India: Sizing up its opportunities"), "25% of
people in the world under the age of 25 are in
India, and a full 80% of the population is under
45 years old".
How does this translate in
terms of India's emerging patterns of conspicuous
consumerism? If one is looking for new US-style
shopping malls, the number of cars and
motorcycles, and highly visible changes in buying
habits, the country is changing in a big way. The
personalized aspects of shopping - ie, going to
small shops and establishing personal ties with
small shopkeepers over a period of years, indeed
decades - is going through discernible changes.
I am convinced that small shopkeepers will
disappear from Indian cities just as they have
pretty much disappeared from US cities. Mega-malls
will eat them up. Chain department stores are
becoming a sine qua non of Indian
consumerism. People in their daily conversations
about progress made by a particular city, or when
comparing urban centers, increasingly measure it
by the number of newer malls or even new "strip
malls" that each city is developing.
Now,
people are going to shopping malls that have
Wal-Mart-like department stores containing cheap
goods from India, China and elsewhere. They are
going to various sections of such stores and
loading up their shopping carts. One wonders
whether most of the shopping being done is to
satisfy personal needs, or merely to satisfy the
desire of being seen in trendy shopping centers.
Misplaced
priorities Globalization has arrived with
full force. Whether that is good or bad depends
upon one's perspective. The entire debate on
globalization is marred with confusing arguments
and counter-arguments from its supporters and
opponents. At least for now, it is difficult to
judge whether increased globalization will be
harmful for India. But a number of changes are in
the making, and they are increasingly appearing
inexorable. I was reminded of a brilliant
observation that Mike LeVine made in his book
Why They Don't Hate Us about the effects of
globalization in developing countries:
In the era of contemporary
globalization the changing cultural preferences
and economic trends of the world's richest
countries profoundly shape expectations among
policymakers and citizens alike in the Global
South. Changes in what and how people consume in
wealthier countries don't just influence the
tastes and desires of people in poorer ones,
they help shape an international economic agenda
in which poor people are told that they should
be consuming services or other essentially
cultural products they don't necessarily need
and can't really afford in order for their
economies to "grow" and because they "should" be
able to afford them, they are no longer
considered as poor as before.
Unlike
US shopping malls, Indian malls also contain huge
showrooms for cars that are being manufactured in
that country through mushrooming programs of joint
ventures between Indian and foreign car
manufactures. The idea of opening such showrooms
in malls is an ingenious one, since they become a
gathering place for seriously interested as well
as merely curious consumers. They get elaborate
briefings from representatives about getting a
variety of loans. Such programs were responsible
for flooding Indian roads with motorcycles and
scooters between the 1970s and 1980s.
Within less than a decade, Indian roads
will be flooded with mostly locally manufactured
cars. Traffic jams are clogging narrow roads of
Indian cities, which were never meant for endless
streams of cycles, rickshaws, motorcycles, and now
cars. I had the feeling that India's march toward
a capitalist economy - which started in 1991 - is
in the process of becoming irreversible.
The information revolution, which has
affected both India and China, is definitely
enlarging the size of India's middle class. But
these changes in size of the middle class are not
necessarily reducing the level of abject poverty
in India. The type and scope of social policies
that are needed to reduce the level of poverty
have not yet been implemented. Pranab Bardhan, an
economics professor with the University of
California at Berkeley, states in a comparative
study of poverty rates in India and China
published online by the Yale Center for the Study
of Globalization:
Both China and India are still
desperately poor countries. Of the total of 2.3
billion people in these two countries, nearly
1.5 billion earn less than US$2 a day, according
to World Bank calculations. Of course, the
lifting of hundreds of millions of people above
poverty in China has been historic. Thanks to
repeated assertions in the international
financial press, conventional wisdom now
suggests that globalization is responsible for
this feat. Yet a substantial part of China's
decline in poverty since 1980 already happened
by [the] mid-1980s (largely as a result of
agricultural growth), before the big strides in
foreign trade and investment in the 1990s.
Assertions about Indian poverty reduction
primarily through trade liberalization are even
shakier. In the '90s, the decade of major trade
liberalization, the rate of decline in poverty
by some aggregative estimates has, if anything,
slowed down. In any case, India is as yet a
minor player in world trade, contributing less
than 1% of world exports. (China's share is
about 6%.)
The reasons for this lack
of progress in alleviating poverty in India are
too complicated to be explained fully here.
Suffice it to note that right now India's
priorities are misplaced. As its economic progress
was gathering momentum in the mid to late 1990s,
India's top decision-makers decided to make it a
world-class military power. As much as it has
become a rising economic power, it still has to
determine whether it will focus on creating a just
and fair society by eradicating poverty, or assign
higher significance to becoming a regional, and
then a global, military power. It cannot do both
with equal emphasis. The average Indian may not
understand the intricacies of judging whether his
country should become a stable economic place
first, and then opt for building military muscle.
However, Indians take discernible pride in
watching the progress made by their country in
space technology, in ballistic-missile
development, and in developing a blue-water navy.
Becoming a world-class military power
requires enormous expenditures in facilitating
training programs, in building a highly intricate
support infrastructure, in concluding
capital-intensive contracts facilitating transfer
of technology to manufacture high-tech military
platforms indigenously, and in purchasing other
high-tech platforms from the established major
powers that cannot be covered under such contracts
or produced under joint ventures.
To that
end, India is making tremendous investments. It is
focused on acquiring military technology from the
United States as well as Russia. It has recently
signed a "safeguard agreement that will pave the
way for Indian defense companies to obtain US
technology". Since the US administration's
decision in 2001 to lift sanctions against India,
"the US government has approved more than 700
export licenses for direct commercial defense
sales to India. US defense sales to India tripled
from $5.6 million in 2003 to $17.7 million in
2004, and are projected to nearly quadruple again
to $64 million in 2005", Defense News reported
last month. At the same time, India on December 6
signed "a much-awaited agreement on intellectual
property rights" with Russia "to regulate joint
defense research and development work between
those two countries". According to Russian Defense
Minister Sergei Ivanov, India has imported more
than $9 billion worth of Russian arms since 1998.
In 2004, India purchased more than $1 billion in
Russian arms, said the Defense News report.
Despite its tremendous economic
prosperity, India's Achilles' heel remains its
weak and very backward civilian infrastructure.
Last August, the World Bank granted it a loan of
more than $9 billion for rural development over
the next three years. Even though these "loans are
earmarked for roads, drinking water and irrigation
facilities in rural areas", there is not much
evidence of progress in those realms at this
point.
To be fair, however, the largely
rural nature of the Indian society makes
development-related problems highly obdurate. As a
study published by Maurizio d'Orlando in
AsiaNews.it noted in August, "Nearly 70% of
India's more than 1 billion people live in more
than 500,000 villages connected largely by dusty
tracks, dependent on agriculture and forced to
endure acute shortages of drinking water and
electricity." Still, the aforementioned misplaced
priorities also remain a major obstacle to rapid
progress.
Bumpy road away from
corruption In addition, India's major
affliction hurting its ability to solve
development-related problems is the highly
entrenched corruption at all levels of government
- central, state and local. Developmental funds
are allocated in each constituency of a member of
parliament (MP). From those funds, he or she gets
about 20% as a share of his or her cut before any
work is initiated. While the projects start, the
contractors take a series of illegal shortcuts and
cost-saving measures that doom the projects from
the get-go. Politicians and bureaucrats at all
levels and in all walks of life are on the take on
a daily basis in India. That is how most workers
in the public sectors make their ends meet. Thus
all development projects become financial
sinkholes that require constant expenditures of
capital benefiting the corrupt politicians and
fraudulent contractors.
To understand
fully the entrenched level of corruption and how
it constantly undermines the civilian
infrastructure of India, one has to take a car
trip from Delhi to Agra (about 130 kilometers),
where the world-famous Taj Mahal is located. The
so-called highway from Delhi to Agra is in very
poor condition, with scores of cows and
pedestrians roaming among cars and trucks speeding
along at 120-130km/h. Once you enter Agra, you had
better slow down to avoid a serious accident or
even overturning your car because of an unending
series of large potholes. Once again, the
aforementioned nexus between corrupt politicians
and contractors is responsible for this sorry of
state of affairs. (While I was there, the Indian
newspapers were running articles on the arrest of
a number of MPs who were caught on camera
demanding and accepting bribes.) That the shoddy
state of roads inside Agra is not getting the
attention of the central government is especially
annoying given the fact that tourists from all
over the world regularly visit there to experience
the fading glamor of the Taj, which is another
tragic story related to India.
In the
realm of environmental pollution, India has made
some progress. However, I remain unimpressed.
Spending much of my time in Lucknow (about 500km
southeast of New Delhi), which is the capital of
India's largest state, Uttar Pradesh, I have only
noticed minor progress. The auto-rickshaws that
used to spew deadly black smoke along the roads of
that town are now banned. Those who reside in
Lucknow also assure me that their town has made
tremendous progress in improving the quality of
air. I do notice improvement in the quality of
air, however, when I go to New Delhi. Still, my
lungs and sinuses take a severe beating every time
I visit either Lucknow or New Delhi.
Jihad and cooperation Islam is a
highly developed religion in India. There have
been at least two major centers of Islamic
learning - Hyderabad (560km southeast of Mumbai)
and Lucknow - and at least three major schools of
Islamic thoughts - Nadwat ul-Ulama (or Nadwa) in
Lucknow and Barelvi and Deobandi schools, named
after the cities where they are located, Bareli
and Deoband. Deoband is about 145km northeast of
New Delhi. Westerners have not heard much, if
anything at all, about the Barelvi and Nadwa
schools, while they have might have seen several
references to the Deobandi School, especially
since September 11, 2001.
The Barelvi and
Deobandi schools are of Sunni origin and belong to
the Hanafi Mazhab (school of thought). The Barelvi
School is influenced by Sufism and reveres the
role of Sufis in spreading Islam across the
subcontinent as well as in Afghanistan and Central
Asia. Its followers assign superhuman qualities to
the Sufis and believe they have the authority to
intercede on their behalf on the Day of Judgment.
The Deobandi School emphasizes theological purity
and considers the influence of Sufis as a practice
of polytheism, and thus blatantly anti-Islamic.
Followers of both the Barelvi and Deobandi schools
spend a lot of time calling each other
kafir (infidel).
The Deobandi
schools of the Northwestern Frontier Province of
Pakistan were offshoots of the Deobandi School of
India, but came under heavy influence of the
religious puritanism advocated by Mohammad Ben
Abdel Wahhab of Saudi Arabia. In reality, the
theological differences between the Deobandi
School of India and Wahhabism have been matters of
degree. In the Pakistani Deobandi schools, the
difference virtually disappeared, with the
militant doctrine of jihad becoming the driving
force. The United States, with the enthusiastic
support and participation of Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia, promoted the militant jihadi doctrine to
liberate Afghanistan from the Soviet subjugation
in the 1980s. In the 1990s and on, the very same
doctrine of militant jihad envisaged the US as a
major target, the chief "enemy" of Islam.
As much as a number of debates are taking
place in the Middle East and elsewhere in Europe
and even in North America over redefining the
notion of jihad, I saw only limited, but still
important, evidence of such a debate in
Indian-administered Kashmir. It seems that the
Wahhabi/Deobandi forces are gaining an upper hand
in their struggle to end India's rule over
Kashmir. They regard the Sufi element of that
region as too diffident about accepting India's
suzerainty. Thus the doctrine of militant jihad -
not the peaceful practices of Sufism - is being
viewed as a panacea for ending India's
"occupation".
Given that India has
maintained a large military force in its portion
of Kashmir, no amount of increased clout of the
Wahhabi/Deobandi forces is likely to end Indian
rule. What is certain is that Kashmir will remain
a powder keg, and may even come close to blowing
up, as it did during the late 1990s when India and
Pakistan nearly went to war over the Kargil
conflict. The US played a crucial role in defusing
that conflict. It is likely to play a similar role
if India and Pakistan come close to getting
entangled in a military skirmish in the future. As
much as Pakistan wishes to resolve the Kashmir
conflict in its favor, one wonders when President
General Pervez Musharraf will realize that, as far
as India is concerned, the so-called Line of
Control is the final international border between
the two countries.
As many times as I have
gone back to the subcontinent, I never experienced
as much optimism inside India about its future as
a rising economic and military power as I did this
time. India is becoming increasingly confident in
its new role. It appears no longer worried or even
slightly concerned about its traditional rivalry
with China. Indeed, India and China are
increasingly cooperating in seeking joint energy
ventures in the Middle East and Africa.
India's ties with its arch rival Pakistan
also seem to be steadily improving. Unless there
is an unfortunate development related to al-Qaeda
activities in Pakistan, it appears that ties
between the two major countries of the
subcontinent will remain free of major mishaps.
India is finally getting the recognition and
respect it always rightly thought that it
deserved.
Ehsan Ahrari is an
independent strategic analyst based in Alexandria,
Virginia. His columns appear regularly in Asia
Times Online. He is also a regular contributor to
the Global Beat Syndicate. His website:
www.ehsanahrari.com.
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