By all accounts, 2008 was a difficult year for a very large section of the world's population. Like it's communist counterpart, the capitalist model faced a severe setback (though only after many decades of hegemony). Luckily for it, there were no ideologues hunting for cracks that could demolish the whole system. But the system itself went into a self-destruct mode, and had governments the world over trying to contain the damage. It was a bulimia of sorts. The binge was over, the purging had begun, and slowly, but steadily, the system was hollowing itself. It wasn't just a loss of jobs, though. It was, in some ways an validation of the robustness of simplicity, of the teaching that the "meek shall rule the earth", or of the futile research that cockroaches will survive a nuclear holocaust. India, a relatively new entrant into the world of luxury cars, spas, vast shopping spaces and unbridled spending took the hit of the economic downturn much better than it's more affluent cicerones, and on the back of this ironic achievement, the policy makers congratulated themselves for their home-brew economic policies, which, to many of who they seek to emulate, might appear pariah. Might have it been that India wasn't really affected because a vast majority of people still don't live on credit? Or maybe the organized credit sector in India doesn't lend to the vast majority of those who consume on credit? Or that however bad things get people still can't stop eating and in a country where the largest part of many families' budget consists of food, economic downturn or no economic downturn, spending can't fall beyond a certain minimum? Of course, if you have a degree in economics, you are entitled to stronger, more articulate, esoteric and tendentious opinions. But might there be something to contemplate when people working at investment banks, and possibly doing enough to earn their ridiculously large pay-packets, lost their jobs, but many who were paid a lot less managed to hang on to theirs?
The Indian polity has, historically, been divided about the best economic model for India. There is a distinct free market group, there is a distinct group advocating the communist principle of governmental (and by implication, public) control, and there is the group with no ideology and no understanding of the implications of their policies. The third group, I believe, is the most populous and perhaps the most dangerous. These are the people who change what they advocate depending on what seems the best sound-byte in a given circumstance. Take Satyam, for instance. There was this coterie that brayed about corporate trust and doing away with unnecessary regulation, and now barks sore about the failed regulatory mechanisms. Whether Satyam was an isolated rotten apple, or was just unlucky enough to get trapped, I do not know, but I find it somewhat ironic that precisely when the two most able financial ministers in India were at the helm of affairs, with Chidambram as finance minister and Manmohan as the prime minister, that the economy slows down and the, somewhat later, biggest corporate fraud in India is unearthed. This is not to say that circumstance offers proof of their incompetence, but rather that individual competence is no match for systemic incompetence. This, perhaps, is another lesson I should carry into the next year.
One reason India was allowed many prime minutes on international TV this year was the terrorist attack on Mumbai, which, unimaginatively, and not surprisingly, the Indian media called "India's 9/11", or "26/11" for short. Of course, there might have been many in the Indian media to whom this might have been cathartic, for many a time they might have looked at their American counterparts and felt deprived of opportunities for breaking news and gutsy journalism. India, after all, has seen war only four times, as opposed to the many many times the United States' military has been involved in pulverising haplessly unequal opponents. For that matter, this terrorist attack was probably the first of its kind in that it got, not one, but two names. Many people have talked about this attack being different because of it being brazen beyond anything that India has experienced before, but perhaps what really sets this attack apart from the others is how much media coverage this attack received, both in the domestic and the international media. The international media had an agenda: firstly, their citizens were involved, and rightly, this made important news. Secondly, India had already been making a few ripples because of its improving economic situation and the nuclear deal with America. And thirdly, chaos from developing countries streamed live into affluent bedrooms with glass walls overlooking a quiet American suburb does make the viewers smug about how good they actually have it. The domestic media, though, remains the mystery. In a country where every couple of weeks a bomb blast kills dozens, in a country where a blast is inside-page news, in a country where terrorism is so rampant that it might well be accepted as way of life, in such a country, it is inexplicable that one act of terror that claimed fewer than perhaps a hundredth of lives lost due to terror each year, received, and continues to receive, a thousand times more coverage than all the other acts of terror put together. Of course, terrorism is pathetic and tragic, but one life lost is one life lost, and just because it was lost in a swank hotel and not in a damp and filthy market in Assam does not make it any more grave a loss. The Indian system thrives on heroes and scapegoats, and the management of this crisis, despite the many many hours of footage streamed into our lives, was no different. Apathy is our way of life, and our memories are hopelessly short. The Mumbai terror attack, too, will be relegated to the subconscious, only to surface when something similar happens.
The other reason India made many ripples internationally was its nuclear co-operation with America. Of course, the co-operation is to be operationalized on a vendor-buyer basis (which makes it hard for me to see the cooperativity), but what surprised me immensely was the degree of mis-informed debate that the national media spurred within the country. Of course, a lot of misinformation had to do with the premier himself: according to the universal source of knowledge, the Wikipedia,
While the Hyde Act’s bar on Indian testing is explicit, the one in the NSG waiver is implicit, yet unmistakable. The NSG waiver is overtly anchored in NSG Guidelines Paragraph 16, which deals with the consequence of “an explosion of a nuclear device”. The waiver’s Section 3(e) refers to this key paragraph, which allows a supplier to call for a special NSG meeting, and seek termination of cooperation, in the event of a test or any other “violation of a supplier-recipient understanding”. The recently leaked Bush administration letter to Congress has cited how this Paragraph 16 rule will effectively bind India to the Hyde Act’s conditions on the pain of a U.S.-sponsored cut-off of all multilateral cooperation. India will not be able to escape from the U.S.-set conditions by turning to other suppliers.
It isn't that I am a great fan of nuclear tests. In all probability, one test that establishes credibility might render further tests a waste or resources, and India might well be at a point where further testing isn't necessary, but what bothers me is that a government, especially one that had at its helm people who appear to be the best of the crop, could hide crucial elements of an agreement that it entered into, with no other obvious motive save the opportunity to tout the agreement as a foreign policy success. As it happens, I think the party that should be credited with successful foreign policy is Bush's team. It is surprising that Bush's "foreign policy" which (with the exception of India) would otherwise seem an example of "shock, awe and despair", scored a concession from India that administrations before his had tried very hard to receive and failed.
Interestingly, the Indo-US nuclear nonsense brought to the fore another very intriguing phenomenon. When India tested a nuclear device in Pokharan in 1998, the defenders of the "aam aadmi", our very own Prakash Karat and his ilk cried sore about "roti" and "makaan" being much more important to the people of India than nuclear weapons. It was this same flock that cried hoarse about India "losing" its freedom to conduct nuclear tests if it signed the nuclear agreement. For me, this was a little less than a revelation, but it was a fairly painful realization. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I had managed to cling to the faith that ideology, even if flawed, was still a mainstay of Indian politics, and this inspired me to believe that if ever we got beyond our petty nitpicking, we might, truly, become a great nation. The Left epitomized the ideological camp, and this revelation through different acts of the drama that culminated in the signing of the deal served as a rude wake-up call.
2008 was unique in that there were issues that inspired strong reactions from me. Many of these were baseless, others immature but the feeling was definitely alien. It might have something to do with growing older.
