A taste of India, with a hot cup of tea

Bharat Wariavwalla 

By acquiring 30 percent stake in Glaceau, a food beverage giant in the US, Tata Tea and Tata Sons have presented to the American people a vivid image of India on the move. Americans will literally taste the power of corporate India when they drink a cup of Tata Tea, hopefully with a pakora. They will get a differently flavoured India though — not the India of sadhus and snake-charmers, but an India that is on the ascendancy globally.

In an age where the masses are both consumers as well as voters, it is important for a country to project its power to the people of a country it wishes to impress. Diplomats do their job but PR men also have an important role in this exercise. Nothing impresses, or angers, people more than the sites of McDonald and Pizza Hut in their towns. They see them as symbols of the power of American mass culture. Tata Tea may well turn out to be our McDonald.

It is important that we realise this dimension of power, for all along South Block you’ll find babus and politicians who seem to believe that the only power that matters is military power.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent statement in the Parliament on the India-US nuclear deal of July 2005 read like a declaration of complete nuclear sovereignty. He said that we’ll conduct nuclear tests if our interest so requires, that we won’t accept any cut on the production of fissile material that other NPT powers don’t accept, and that we are the equal of the five countries who founded the NPT. In short, we won’t accept any limitation on our nuclear sovereignty. The PM’s statement clearly suggests a hardening of the government’s position on the July 2005 nuclear deal.

This is unfortunate because it comes at a time when the Bush administration, bruised as it is on Iraq and a host of other domestic issues, needs the Manmohan Singh government’s cooperation to get the July 2005 agreement passed by the Congress without any substantial changes.

Underlying the PM’s statement is a dangerous piece of philosophy that Indian decision-makers since Jawaharlal Nehru have subscribed to: nuclear weapons are the currency of power. It’s a preposterous idea but it appealed to us at a time when we had nothing. The economy limped along at a Hindu rate of growth, and on all indices of power, except military power, we were not much different from the most wretched of the third world countries: Burma, Bolivia or Burkina Faso.

Today we have the power which the democracies of Europe and North America value. We have the economic power, complemented by the power that comes from our political institutions and our huge cultural diversity.

For the Bush administration, it is India’s economic power and not the nukes that matters. On the eve of his India visit, he said at the Asia Society in New York that India constituted a market of 300 million people. Larger, he added, than the American market. Indians are potential buyers of Whirlpool washing machines and Westinghouse air conditioners. He said the same thing in Hyderabad. That crusty politician, vice president Dick Cheney, defended the agreement on the same grounds in a Senate debate on the deal.

In the post 9/11 world, our sturdy democracy and rich diversity are our strengths. Our economic strength is conveyed to the corporate world in New York, Frankfurt and Tokyo by Indian companies’ acquisitions of European and American assets. Tata Tea is a more apt symbol of ascendant India than nukes.

The writer is a honorary fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi.