India sinking

These days, I tell my kids to go, and not look back. My eldest is at university in the US and my son is preparing for admissions. Make your lives in America, I tell them. For the first time in a quarter century I’m pessimistic about India. In fact, 20 summers ago I visited the US and found its mood so negative and in such contrast to newly-liberalised India’s optimism that it seemed the two countries were on different trajectories; and I believed the choice to live in India was the right one.

In 2004 the US National Intelligence Council projected the 2020 world scenario in a report called “Mapping the Global Future”. It mostly dwelled on how the rise of China and India would affect the US and the rest of the planet. It was optimistic about India’s prospects in the long term — though by 2050 our per capita GDP was projected to be only 20% of the USA’s, even though our total GDP might be second in the world; and demography and political development gave India more hope than China — but it still listed three economic growth prospects for India: good, bad and ugly. Here, bad meant middling along, always verging on greatness but never quite there; and ugly meant slipping back into a 1970s-type morass.

Midway between the year of the report and the year of its projections, it is not a stretch to say that India would be lucky to achieve the bad scenario outlined by the USA’s NIC. The irony is that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who, under the direction of the late PV Narasimha Rao, liberalised the economy and gladdened the middle-class’s heart, is the same man responsible for the despondency that has now set in. For it is now a commonplace to hear that there no longer is an “India story”.

Last week, the Washington Post asserted this. There were two reactions: one was that the Indian media has been saying this for a while, and such views are only taken seriously when a Westerner says so; this is nonsense. The Indian media’s attacks on the prime minister and UPA-2 have strictly been political, and at the most bemoaned the depths of corruption to which our public life has sunk. No one has said India has failed. Secondly, the political class’s reaction has been to shoot the messenger. While some of us might feel schadenfreude over an instance of pseudo-plagiarism by a Western journalist, the fact is that what he said remains true: that silence in the face of staggering corruption has contributed to Manmohan Singh’s “fall from grace”, and that the prime minister is “going down in history as a failure”.

You could argue that the prime minister is going through a patch of bad luck because of the world economic situation (looming European crisis + “hard landing” by China = second great recession); had economic growth been healthy then while he would have been criticised for the corruption, he wouldn’t have been called a failure. This is unconvincing simply because the very man who has long been lauded as India’s scholar-statesman could find nothing to do to recession-proof the Indian economy. So what were he and his fellow economist-geniuses — Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Kaushik Basu, C Rangarajan, Raghuram Rajan, et al — doing since 2008? The “external factors” plea can get you only so far and no more.

Then you could argue that with the BJP’s obstruction, which did not allow a day of law-making in Parliament’s monsoon session, Manmohan Singh is helpless against political gridlock. Firstly, obstruction of Parliament is a legitimate political tactic. Obviously, the BJP wants to drive home how ineffectual the prime minister is. Why cut him a break? Ultimately he has to take the blame for a non-functioning government, no matter how much he cries into TV cameras (and notice how, now that he is desperate, he finally interacts with the media — he could have avoided the WaPo saga had he stopped characteristically dodging interview requests). Secondly, if Parliament is paralysed, there exist executive actions he could take, in the way that US Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton did when faced by obstructionist conservative legislators.

Frankly, nothing is going to move in this country (except for prices, upwards) for the next few years. Not many of us expect that 2014 will bring us a purposeful and politically sound government; in fact, most of us expect a short-lived regional coalition. If political strategists are looking towards 2016 as a time when a proper agenda can be implemented, then governance between now and then will continue to be characterised by limbo.

And if we have this kind of drift for the next four years, during which time the demands of ordinary citizens increase — political action on land, water, power, education, health, the economy, etc — then do you blame some of us for losing hope and telling our children to jump ship? By the time India becomes a big power, if ever, my children will be grandparents. They might as well go out and enjoy life right now.

The writer is the Editor-in-Chief, DNA, based in Mumbai