Julie
Bishop last week surprised a high-calibre audience of Indians by telling them
that their country was "taking its rightful position as a world
leader, as a superpower".
When
she sat down to lunch after giving her speech, an Indian woman asked the
Australian Foreign Affairs Minister how she justified the superpower title.
Bishop
turned the question back on her interlocutor: "You don't think a country
with 1.3 billion people is a superpower?"
One
sixth of the human race lives in India, the second most populous nation. In a
decade its population is projected to reach 1.6 billion, overtaking China.
Yet
the shocking truth is that a country with 56 times Australia's population
generates national income only 1.3 times Australia's.
This is the key reason that
Indians are incredulous to hear their country described as a superpower.
National income per person of just $US1600 a year is about the same as that of
the most impoverished country in the Middle East, Yemen. It puts a grim limit
on the quality of life for most Indians.
Bishop's comment reflects the
expectations that now surround India, expectations that rest squarely on a
single man, Narendra Modi, elected prime minister 11 months ago.
The expectations are so giddy
that, improbably, no less a figure than the United States president, Barack
Obama, has written a gushing tribute to the man in Time magazine,
under the headline "India's Reformer-in-Chief".
He says Modi's vision will
allow India to realise its enormous potential. The immense frustration of
modern India is that its vast potential always remains just that. It wasn't
always so.
The people of India had
world-class water and sewerage systems 5000 years ago as part of the Harappan
civilisation in the Bronze Age. Today more than 100 million Indians have no
clean water and more than 800 million have no access to a sewerage
system.
The lack of proper toilets is
central to India's modern failure. One telling effect. Girls drop out of
education at the end of primary school at three times the rate of boys. Not
because they don't want to learn but because most schools have no proper
toilets. Boys can cope but many girls are unwilling to squat in an open field.
There was a time when India
was the most prosperous place on earth. "In the beginning, there were two
nations," writes Alex von Tunzelmann in her account of Britain's retreat
from its Indian empire, Indian Summer.
"One was a vast, mighty
and magnificent empire, brilliantly organised and culturally unified." The
other was "an underdeveloped, semi-feudal realm, driven by religious
factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking
masses. The first nation was India. The second was England."
She was describing the India
unified under the Mogul emperor, Akbar the Great, in 1577. India's tragedy is
that its people have never recovered the relative prosperity they enjoyed in
that era. The Mogul Empire collapsed and India fractured.
And it was a surging Britain,
powered by the Industrial Revolution, that occupied India and plundered it
systematically for 200 years.
The first prime minister of
independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, thought India was destined to become one
of the two or three greatest powers on earth. But he guaranteed that he could
not by imposing system of socialist autarky.
Fleetingly, India in 1991
embraced pro-market reforms which immediately yielded a surge of economic
growth. Yet a quasi-socialist system persisted.
Quasi-socialist economics was
strangulation enough. But modern India has also suffered a failure of its state
apparatus. The public service has been overburdened to the point of paralysis.
Politicians and officials have paid little heed to the people or the nation and
feasted on every available morsel to feed a chronic corruption.
The author Gurcharan Das
cites a saying among Indians: " 'India grows at night while the government
sleeps,' meaning that India may well be rising despite the state."
India's great success in
information technology is exhibit A. It flourished because, as a new sector,
there was no existing government restraint on its development.
But Das says that India's
private sector has hit a limit of what it can do without the state.
For instance, a senior
executive at the giant Mahindra corporation, Hemant Luthra, says that "we
have pockets full of money to invest, but we can't invest without power".
What sort of power? Electricity. In most of India, the power is on for only a
few hours a day.
Modi became the first leader
in 30 years to win an absolute majority in the lower house because he has
promised development above all. "We need toilets more than temples,"
is one of his themes. An ambitious "make in India" campaign to boost
manufacturing is another.
He has made a solid start to
the daunting task of reforming India. The big political story today is his land
bill to make it easier for companies to acquire land.
"If Modi can get the
land bill through the upper house, he will have passed all the things that
international investors think of as being important," says James Crabtree,
the Financial Times correspondent in Mumbai.
He has liberalised pensions,
insurance, cleaned up the corrupt grants of mining leases, opened mining to
competition. Next he promises a big bang tax reform – streamlining a messy tax
system and introducing a GST.
"Eighteen months ago it
looked like India might have to call in the IMF, but it's recovered well and
it's the only major developing nation that has a prospect of doing even
better" in the short term. But Crabtree, who once worked in the British
prime minister's office, is not naive: "The complexity of governing India
is jaw-droppingly difficult."
"Good days are
coming" is Modi's refrain. Can he pull it off? "The jury is still
out," Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, founder and chair of the Biocon pharmaceuticals
firm, tells me.
India today teeters on the
brink. It has the prospect of greatness on one side. On the other is relapse to
the status of a country that cannot provide toilets to its schools. And even
Modi's toughest critics concede that if he fails, there is no other hope in
sight.
Peter
Hartcher is the international editor. He travelled to India courtesy of the
Walkley Media Exchange, funded by the Australia India Council.
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