Real state of an emerging super power?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/06/opinion/06mishra.html?ex=1309838400&en=63b025e9403c4696&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

The Myth of the New India
By PANKAJ MISHRA


INDIA is a roaring capitalist success story." So says the latest issue of Foreign Affairs; and last week many leading business executives and politicians in India celebrated as Lakshmi Mittal, the fifth richest man in the world, finally succeeded in his hostile takeover of the Luxembourgian steel company Arcelor. India's leading business newspaper, The Economic Times, summed up the general euphoria over the event in its regular feature, "The Global Indian Takeover": "For India, it is a harbinger of things to come — economic superstardom."

This sounds persuasive as long as you don't know that Mr. Mittal, who lives in Britain, announced his first investment in India only last year. He is as much an Indian success story as Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, is proof of Russia's imminent economic superstardom.

In recent weeks, India seemed an unlikely capitalist success story as communist parties decisively won elections to state legislatures, and the stock market, which had enjoyed record growth in the last two years, fell nearly 20 percent in two weeks, wiping out some $2.4 billion in investor wealth in just four days. This week India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, made it clear that only a small minority of Indians will enjoy "Western standards of living and high consumption."

There is, however, no denying many Indians their conviction that the 21st century will be the Indian Century just as the 20th was American. The exuberant self-confidence of a tiny Indian elite now increasingly infects the news media and foreign policy establishment in the United States.

Encouraged by a powerful lobby of rich Indian-Americans who seek to expand their political influence within both their home and adopted countries, President Bush recently agreed to assist India's nuclear program, even at the risk of undermining his efforts to check the nuclear ambitions of Iran. As if on cue, special reports and covers hailing the rise of India in Time, Foreign Affairs and The Economist have appeared in the last month.

It was not so long ago that India appeared in the American press as a poor, backward and often violent nation, saddled with an inefficient bureaucracy and, though officially nonaligned, friendly to the Soviet Union. Suddenly the country seems to be not only a "roaring capitalist success story" but also, according to Foreign Affairs, an "emerging strategic partner of the United States." To what extent is this wishful thinking rather than an accurate estimate of India's strengths?

Looking for new friends and partners in a rapidly changing world, the Bush administration clearly hopes that India, a fellow democracy, will be a reliable counterweight against China as well as Iran. But trade and cooperation between India and China is growing; and, though grateful for American generosity on the nuclear issue, India is too dependent on Iran for oil (it is also exploring developing a gas pipeline to Iran) to wholeheartedly support the United States in its efforts to prevent the Islamic Republic from acquiring a nuclear weapon. The world, more interdependent now than during the cold war, may no longer be divided up into strategic blocs and alliances.

Nevertheless, there are much better reasons to expect that India will in fact vindicate the twin American ideals of free markets and democracy that neither Latin America nor post-communist countries — nor, indeed, Iraq — have fulfilled.

Since the early 1990's, when the Indian economy was liberalized, India has emerged as the world leader in information technology and business outsourcing, with an average growth of about 6 percent a year. Growing foreign investment and easy credit have fueled a consumer revolution in urban areas. With their Starbucks-style coffee bars, Blackberry-wielding young professionals, and shopping malls selling luxury brand names, large parts of Indian cities strive to resemble Manhattan.

Indian business tycoons are increasingly trying to control marquee names like Taittinger Champagne and the Carlyle Hotel in New York. "India Everywhere" was the slogan of the Indian business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this year.


But the increasingly common, business-centric view of India suppresses more facts than it reveals. Recent accounts of the alleged rise of India barely mention the fact that the country's $728 per capita gross domestic product is just slightly higher than that of sub-Saharan Africa and that, as the 2005 United Nations Human Development Report puts it, even if it sustains its current high growth rates, India will not catch up with high-income countries until 2106.

Nor is India rising very fast on the report's Human Development index, where it ranks 127, just two rungs above Myanmar and more than 70 below Cuba and Mexico. Despite a recent reduction in poverty levels, nearly 380 million Indians still live on less than a dollar a day.

Malnutrition affects half of all children in India, and there is little sign that they are being helped by the country's market reforms, which have focused on creating private wealth rather than expanding access to health care and education. Despite the country's growing economy, 2.5 million Indian children die annually, accounting for one out of every five child deaths worldwide; and facilities for primary education have collapsed in large parts of the country (the official literacy rate of 61 percent includes many who can barely write their names). In the countryside, where 70 percent of India's population lives, the government has reported that about 100,000 farmers committed suicide between 1993 and 2003.

Feeding on the resentment of those left behind by the urban-oriented economic growth, communist insurgencies (unrelated to India's parliamentary communist parties) have erupted in some of the most populous and poorest parts of north and central India. The Indian government no longer effectively controls many of the districts where communists battle landlords and police, imposing a harsh form of justice on a largely hapless rural population.

The potential for conflict — among castes as well as classes — also grows in urban areas, where India's cruel social and economic disparities are as evident as its new prosperity. The main reason for this is that India's economic growth has been largely jobless. Only 1.3 million out of a working population of 400 million are employed in the information technology and business processing industries that make up the so-called new economy.

No labor-intensive manufacturing boom of the kind that powered the economic growth of almost every developed and developing country in the world has yet occurred in India. Unlike China, India still imports more than it exports. This means that as 70 million more people enter the work force in the next five years, most of them without the skills required for the new economy, unemployment and inequality could provoke even more social instability than they have already.

For decades now, India's underprivileged have used elections to register their protests against joblessness, inequality and corruption. In the 2004 general elections, they voted out a central government that claimed that India was "shining," bewildering not only most foreign journalists but also those in India who had predicted an easy victory for the ruling coalition.

Among the politicians whom voters rejected was Chandrababu Naidu, the technocratic chief minister of one of India's poorest states, whose forward-sounding policies, like providing Internet access to villages, prompted Time magazine to declare him "South Asian of The Year" and a "beacon of hope."

But the anti-India insurgency in Kashmir, which has claimed some 80,000 lives in the last decade and a half, and the strength of violent communist militants across India, hint that regular elections may not be enough to contain the frustration and rage of millions of have-nots, or to shield them from the temptations of religious and ideological extremism.

Many serious problems confront India. They are unlikely to be solved as long as the wealthy, both inside and outside the country, choose to believe their own complacent myths.

Pankaj Mishra is the author of "Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond."

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Everybody who trashes the Japanese over the Yasukuni Shrine ought to learn a little history about it
Our Correspondent
04 October 2006
Will he or won’t he go to the Yasukuni Shrine? The question hangs over new Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as he attempts to juggle an expressed desire to improve relations with Asian neighbors with a promise to domestic voters to free Japan from some its post-1945 quasi- pacifist shackles.

He would of course be wise not to go to Yasukuni, least of all in an official capacity. It incites China and Korea and gives Beijing an excuse for some nationalist gestures of its own, always a help in diverting attention from local issues.

But the rest of the world would do well to stop forever accusing Japan of wanting to gloss over its history of aggression and war crimes. Asian countries in particular may need reminding of some of their history in that period as a counter to how views have been shaped by a mix of American (and western in general) bias and Chinese propaganda.

To start with, in the usual media coverage – at least outside Japan – the words Yasukuni Shrine are bracketed with the phrase “Class A war criminals” whose names are recorded among the fallen. Let us forget for a moment the numerous monuments to imperialist generals, oppressive colonial rulers and leaders of ethnic cleansing wars against indigenous inhabitants that are found in the cities of the west. Those may be deemed irrelevant if only because few excite much attention from contemporary politicians.

Instead let us look back at what actually happened in Asia 60-70 years ago. It is usually assumed that Class A criminals were adjudged by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East – colloquially known as the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal -- to be the worst, most evil offenders and hence deserving of the death penalty.

In fact, however, Class A referred not to specific incidences of crimes in the normal sense of the word but the imprecise “crimes against peace”. Those indicted were not murderers and rapists but senior commanders and political leaders, including several top diplomats – but not the Emperor.

The actual specific crimes were in separate categories – Class B for crimes of war and Class C for crimes against humanity such as the Nanjing massacre. More than 300,000 Japanese were indicted under the latter categories.

The Tokyo Tribunal process themselves lend themselves easily to the term “victors’ justice.” The only representative of a non-combatant nation, India’s Radhabinod Pal, wrote a 1,000 page dissenting judgment in which he attacked the underlying assumptions of the proceedings and asked why the atom bomb attacks were not also included. Pal himself was biased because he had been a sympathizer of fellow Bengali Subhas Chandra Bose, whose Indian National Army had allied itself with Japan.

But if Pal’s sweeping condemnation of the process was unique, other judges had deep reservations too. The French judge was critical of the process and its speed, the Dutch one voted for several acquittals on account of the vague nature of the charges. Both of these judges were lawyers. China’s judge was a military man.

The Russians and Chinese also carried out their own trials. And so did the US. Perhaps the most notorious was the Manila trial and execution of General Yamashita, accused of being responsible for the war crimes that accompanied the battle for Manila in 1945. This was a travesty. Yamashita, who had a reputation for honorable conduct, had withdrawn with most of his force to northern Luzon rather than defend Manila. The battle for the city which cost perhaps 250,000 mostly civilian lives, was the result of a frontal assault with massive artillery use by General Douglas MacArthur and defense by a Japanese naval contingent which was only nominally under Yamashita’s command.

None of this is to deny the atrocious behavior of Japanese troops on various occasions, of which Nanjing is the most notorious. Nor the coverup of issues such as “comfort women” and germ warfare research that went on long after 1945 – with the connivance of the victors. But the performance of the tribunals, not to mention that amnesty for the emperor and the rapid return to political leadership of unreformed rightists like Nobusuke Kishi who went from being a suspect Class A criminal to prime minister has naturally given the Japanese a sense of injustice. Add in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the symbolism of the Yasukuni visit becomes clearer.

Asians in particular should also remember how much they cheered the Japanese military victories, at least initially. Not only at the general level did Japan effectively end western imperialism in Asia. Even when the oppressive nature of Japanese rule was well known, nationalist leaders saw wisdom in cooperating with it. In Burma, Aung San was trained and installed by the invading Japanese who pushed out the British though later fell out with them when he discovered their independence was a sham.

In Indonesia, Sukarno skillfully played the Japanese card in his push for independence, Suharto worked for a Japanese-led force before becoming a hero of the war against the Dutch. Even Koreans, who were most obviously oppressed by a Japanese occupation dating to 1910, collaborated. Park Chung Hee, the modernizing hero of post-1960 Korea, was an officer in the Japanese army in Manchukuo.

In the Philippines, leading families collaborated too. Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino’s father was the ambassador in Tokyo of the puppet government of President Laurel, father of Cory Aquino’s vice president. Yes, the Japanese occupation of the Philippines was harsh, and the Americans were welcomed back. But the hardships were as much the result of the war as of the Japanese themselves. Laurel was charged with treason but this was later dropped and he ran unsuccessfully for president in 1949. He had been a nationalist who saw cooperation as the best way of protecting his people and at times stood up against his masters – including refusing to declare war on the US. A villain? A hero? Or a decent man caught between two imperialist powers?

In the Malay Peninsula, Chinese were naturally in the forefront of resistance to the Japanese. It was a time when Peiping (as Beijing was then known) claimed the loyalty of all overseas Chinese. But Malays, even the aristocracy that the British cultivated, tended to be neutral. Meanwhile in Thailand the ever-pragmatic Thais under Pibul Songkram aligned themselves with Japan before switching sides and government as the outcome of the war became clear. Arrested as a war criminal, Pibul later returned to power for another decade. In exile after 1960, he moved to Japan.

It is worth recalling now, given the problems in Thailand’s southern, Malay-speaking provinces, that in 1945 the British proposed, as punishment for aligning with Japan, these provinces be joined to Malaya. This had long been favored by the Sultan of Pattani who preferred the loose British oversight of being one of several Malay states to direct rule from Bangkok. But the US opposed it on the grounds of keeping Thailand in the pro-west camp.

Does all this have much to do with Yasukuni? Yes it does. Because only by remembering what was going through Asia in the turbulent decade 1935-45 which the shrine recalls can one understand Japan’s relationships with all its neighbors, not just China and Korea.