South Asia

India Everywhere

By Dweep Chanana ⋅ March 4, 2006 ⋅  Email this post ⋅ Post a comment

At the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, it was. The Confederation of Indian Industry launched a major publicity campaign to bring India to the world. It was so successful, BusinessWeek took notice.

BusinessWeek, if anything, was ahead of the curve on this one. In the wake of Bush’s visit, both the Economist and Newsweek ran cover stories on India. The Brookings Institution held a panel. And now that the Nuclear deal has been signed, they have even more to say.

For the moment, the optimists are ruling the roost. I have for a long time been one of them, but all this media coverage is making me quesy. It is making Indians (like me) arrogant. And it may sidestep an issue that should actually be at the core of this debate - of just how India will grow.

When the cold war ended the only alternative to capitalism failed. Since then, it has proven rather bad at the distribution of wealth. As I learnt in school, capitalism (and economics) talks only of how big the pie is, not how it is shared.

As a democracy, India cannot grow its pie without sharing at least some of it. So its growth matters to the world because it is a test case for another kind of capitalism - one driven forward by capitalists, and driven elsewhere by the people.

This is not an issue of particular import to Newsweek, Economist, or BusinessWeek. But it must be of critical importance to the millions of Indians that voted out the last government.

So, who is right - the optimists or doomsayers? I’m still with the optimists, though the unbriddled optimism I see around me actually makes me stop and think that what goes up, must come down. Still, I can place my faith in a system that is on the whole very strong, with far too many stakes in it for it to crumble easily.