Beijing roars, London whines, as India fiddles

If Bengal loses the Nano, and scares away prospective investors for the next 100 years, it will serve the leftists right. I mean, isn't it a delicious irony that after doing all they could to block every economic measure initiated by the government they were supposed to be supporting at the Centre, they're getting their comeuppance in their own backyard? That too from old foe Mamata Banerjee who has hijacked their own agenda of pitting the "common man" against the "big bad investor"!

Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee now realises that running a state, giving people opportunities to earn a decent living, and staying in power, requires resources, something his counterparts across the border realised about three decades earlier, when they switched from Mao's communism to Deng's "pragmatism", which was, of course, a euphemism for capitalism as China embraced foreign investors with open arms. What that has achieved was on show this month at the Beijing Olympics: The infrastructure, the efficiency, and the refusal to remain in the Third World, or even the Second.

'So what? They're not free' is how many of us consoled ourselves, as we focused on things like the air in Beijing, the age of their gymnasts, and the 'faking' of some parts of the opening ceremony. But what sort of human rights do people stuck in poverty have anyway, without half-decent public facilities, without being able to afford education of an acceptable standard, and without the opening of other avenues to improve their lot?

You can dispute the numbers, but there can be little doubt that millions of Chinese have come out of poverty since Deng Xiaoping took the pragmatic path. A new study by a Western think-tank expects 30 million Chinese moving into the 'middle class' every year for the next decade or so. That is, they will be earning Rs3 lakh to Rs15 lakh a year. So eat your heart out, and don't waste your tears on "the poor Chinese who have no human rights".

If you want to feel sorry, save it for the Brits who are in a real quandary now over how they can avoid appearing like poor cousins of the Chinese when it is their turn to host the Olympics in 2012. That's going to be tough considering their $9 billion budget for the Games, which is less than a quarter of what China spent. So now the counter-argument is that the Olympics should not really be about national image-building, but a simple sporting event. Sour grapes if ever there were any.

Or you can feel sorry for yourself when you're stuck in Mumbai's perennial traffic jams, wondering why the government cannot give you the right to a road on which you can travel. Perhaps the Tatas should have stuck to building trucks, because the only good roads being built in this country are the inter-city highways. And guess why? Because they gave those to large private corporations to develop.
c_sumit@dnaindia.net