By Mira Kamdar
Somehow, I don’t feel cheered by indications in the month since I wrote my article for the 25th anniversary edition of World Policy Journal that India seems right on track to fulfill the mixed future I predicted in India: Richer, Poorer, Hotter, Armed. On the wealth front, cellular telephone company Bharti Airtel posted a net profit increase of 27 percent, Standard & Poor’s retained its bullish outlook for future economic growth, inflation snuck down under 11 percent and the stock market roared, snapped, roared and snapped again. In comparison with the continued panicked erosion of the financial markets and economies in the West, India seems poised to survive the global financial crisis not too bruised nor too battered. It will even, along with China, emerge with a new global say in the world’s financial architecture since it’s participation in a new G7 that will rise to some as yet unclear new number is now assured.
On the poverty front, India’s minister of finance, Palaniappan Chidambaram swore that slowed economic growth would not result in job cuts. Indeed, Jet Airways first fired then rehired hundreds of young workers who were shocked that the mall stalking they’d just begun to get used to being able to pay for might come to a sudden end. Even at a slower 7 percent rate, he opined, jobs would still be created though not as many as quickly as at a higher rate of growth. Of course, that doesn’t include India’s still moribund agricultural sector where the vast majority of its people still eek out a living and where growth is at a near-stagnant 2.3 percent. India’s Ministry of Agriculture released its fall or Kharif harvest projections a couple of weeks ago: production has declined across the board in basic food crops and cotton, on which great hopes were placed, increased by only 0.5 percent. Saving a few hundred service jobs in the airline industry cannot come near to compensating for this disaster. After more than 60 years of independence, India is still stealing from its farmers to push for the industrialization and urban development that will make it feel like a developed country. The poor, in other words, continue to be sacrificed to the rich and the newly minted and eagerly consuming middle class.
As for hotter, while China issued a sweeping proposal on climate change in which it called for the planet’s wealthy countries to foot the bill to help poorer countries cope and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon called for India to play a leadership role, the government of India remained mute. Thankfully, R.K. Pachauri, director of TERI, the Tata Energy Research Institute and co-winner of the Nobel prize with Al Gore for his work on climate change, is on the case. It remains to be seen what effect his efforts and those of others can have on a government that has been busy letting its chemical industry dictate policy at the meeting of the Rotterdam Convention under the rules of which 126 world nations agree on products so toxic that their export must be accompanied by full disclosure of environmental and health risks. India is refusing to issue any such warning (much less cease the production or import or export of) as pertains to asbestos and the pesticide endosulfan.
Finally, on the armed front, another gruesome terrorist bombing claimed 71 lives in India’s troubled Northeast and India was, with China, the top purchaser of arms from the number two dealer in the world Russia. It was also the runner-up among developing countries after Saudi Arabia in arms purchases from the United States, accounting for $5 billion or 20 percent of the whopping U.S. total arms sales in 2007 of $24.8 billion. This number represents a full 50 percent increase over U.S. arms sales in 2006 of a mere $16.7 billion. In light of the havoc wreaked on the U.S. economy by the financial meltdown, the U.S.-India strategic partnership is likely to get even more cheerleading in the year to come. But there will also be more competition for India’s arms shopping spree: Israel and France are looking to increase their not inconsiderable arms sales to India, and even Italy is making a play to sell some of its military hardware to the rising Asian power.
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Mira Kamdar is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute and the author of Planet India: The Turbulent Rise of the Largest Democracy and the Future of Our World (Scribner, 2008).