EDITORIAL

C-india-rella meets Prince Obama’s Charms - 27-Nov-2009

The observation has been made that while China has order, but little democracy, India has democracy, but little order. Indeed, India has the distinction of being the world’s largest democracy and of being the world’s second most populous nation (behind China).

Both nations are mounting challenges to the Americo-Euro-centrism of the global economy.

And each has internal political schisms to deal with – the Uighurs and Tibet in China’s case, the Kashmir, Naga, Assam, and Tamils are among India’s most notorious troubled pressure points for separatism. Apart from that, there is little to link the two Asian giants. China evolved from foreign domination and a bloody revolution, India was formed by liberating itself from British Raj colonialism. China has a strong central government, India’s is weak by comparison. China has the world’s most sustained economic growth, India’s economy is about the size of Norway’s. A sore spot inhibiting economic expansion in India is the tradition of longstanding bureaucratic and cultural obstacles to outsider investment. Businesses take longer to start up than in China. Internet access in India is one-third of what it is in China and, despite the impressions given by Bollywood,

Indian ownership of mobile phones and related technology is about one fifth of what it is in China.

While China is a one-party state, it may in one sense be described as freer than India due to its growing middle-class having higher literacy rates and there being less poverty and more even distribution of wealth overall. The majority of India’s people live in poverty. Famines in India therefore have a deeper, more tragic impact and more Indian than Chinese children are, by ratio, malnourished. Mumbai, the setting for a terrorist attack as well as a spectacular Hollywood dream, is accountable for one-third of India’s wealth, but its slums, with an estimated ten million residents, constitute the worlds biggest. The prospects for India’s rural poor are just as devastating. Despite India’s urban push to better corporate credentials, to outsourcing, to high-tech industrial growth, and to making billionaire fortunes, 700 million Indians still have to rely on their agricultural sector - just 30% of the national economy – for their livelihood.

That sector is easily the most precarious, exposed as it is to wet season monsoonal flooding, tsunami, drought and India’s rapidly depleting water table.

Despite Indian PM Manmohan Singh’s thinly veiled scorn of China evident during his recent state visit to the US, the challenge for his government is not to compete with China, but to work with it. That’s the reality it faces despite added taunting in recent weeks over Tibet and the Dalai Lama. History points in that direction too - Burma, once a part of colonial India, is now closer to China, and India’s relationship with its former state has had to be revised accordingly. Economics also underlines the point - more than half of India’s trade is tied up in East Asia with Japan, South Korea and Singapore, in turn, dominating the profile of foreign investors in India. China itself is responsible for 20 billion worth of trade with India annually. India’s IT sector cannot operate without Chinese hardware. Hence, as one American observer put it, ‘even if India rises, it will be according to Chinese rules’.

All of which makes PM Manmohan Singh’s US state visit – the first hosted by President Obama - all the more intriguing. There is no doubt that a game of mutual wedge politics lurks beneath the tripartisan welcoming of closer ties between the US, China and India.

Similarly, India’s once prickly Cold War non-alignment position in world politics has now become a case of multi-alignment: to China it says it will cooperate in reshaping the global order; to the United States, it expresses solidarity in being a ‘twin tower of democracy’. President Obama’s commitment to assist India is more of the same we saw under his predecessor Bush – more high-tech investment and hardware/software access, affirmation of defense agreements, more civil nuclear technology (as per the 2005 accord), increases in visas, more anti-global warming strategies, and more joint counter-terrorism. But more pressing than all of these big-ticket items, would seem to be India’s ground-zero problems of poverty and associated health-related crises arising from it.

These are not just malnutrition and disease from dirty drinking water, but crippling resurgent polio and rocketing HIV/AIDS infections. While the dominant global economic ideology says poverty can best be solved by economic bootstrapping, in India’s case, that seems hollow, and American support for its democratic Asian partner seems a long way from the everyday reality faced by most Indians. And a question here for India is whether America or China’s experience and leadership offers the best route out of these besetting problems.



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