Modi needs to break the corrupt nexus of Lutyens' Delhi
It's springtime in Delhi but political clouds gathering overhead signal stormy weather ahead. The prime minister's Sri Lanka visit beginning March 10 will take his mind off the controversies at home: Jammu & Kashmir chief minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed's dalliance with separatists; the global fallout over the ban on the BBC documentary India's Daughter; and unrelenting opposition in Parliament to the Land Acquisition bill.
The ides of March have come calling and it is time for the government to take hard decisions on tackling India's chronic problems. Anyone who spends a week travelling through India's towns and villages knows what those problems are: terrible sanitation, water scarcity, power shortages, bad roads, crumbling infrastructure, appalling pollution, poor healthcare, a broken educational system, corrupt policing, caste discrimination and gender inequality. These are the problems India needs to fix. Women's safety is particularly important for a nation to develop into a truly modern society. What the West says or writes about us on this issue shouldn't matter. Indian journalists and filmmakers are free to write about or film the many ills that plague rich, Western countries: abandoned parents; dysfunctional families; urban crime; youth unemployment; drugs; racism; guns; rape.Rape? While this does not for a moment justify India's awful record in tackling crimes against women, India happens to have among the world's lowest per capita incidents of rape. The figures are startling for those who have come to regard India as the world's rape capital because of the intense global coverage of the brutal sexual violence inflicted on Nirbhaya.
The number of rapes per 1,00,000 people:
United States: 28.6
Britain: 24.1
India: 2.0
It would obviously be a mistake to regard such statistics as a vindication. Low rape rates in India are often due to massive under-reporting, both in urban and rural areas. There are two reasons for this. First, the social stigma attached to rape in a feudal, conservative and patriarchal society like India ensures a majority of rapes go unreported. Second, police in rural India are notoriously reluctant to register complaints of sexual violence even if the victim and her family are brave enough to file a first information report (FIR). Ironically it is India's multiple problems that attract Western businessmen and politicians. Where else are roads, homes, power plants, ports, bridges, townships and other infrastructure required in such magnitude? For the next 20 years, foreign investment will pour into India chasing annual returns in excess of ten per cent. Sovereign Indian bonds offer annual rates of more than eight per cent. In developed, pristine Switzerland, banks charge depositors 0.5 per cent a year for the privilege of "accepting" their surplus investments. So if you have a million dollars in a Swiss bank, you won't get annual interest at eight per cent as in India but actually pay the Swiss bank 0.5 per cent every year for keeping your deposit.
India, along with Africa, is the last big investment frontier for the rest of the world. Africa's population though is 1.12 billion across 47 countries and jurisdictions compared to India's 1.25 billion in a single jurisdiction. That is why the world's leading telecom companies are lining up to buy spectrum and investing heavily in infrastructure projects despite uncertain tax laws, poor logistics and reams of red tape.The Modi government has begun winding up some of that red tape but it will be a while yet before a red carpet rolls out. Just the intent though has been enough for India's foreign exchange reserves to climb to a record of $338 billion last week. The rupee has been one of the world's best performing currencies in the past nine months despite the strength of the US dollar driven by excellent quarterly employment and GDP growth figures in the world's largest economy.
But while India concentrates on finding solutions to its myriad problems rooted in decades of misgovernance and a legacy of dehumanising poverty, it's important to weed out those whose main business is to check India's progress at every turn. There is a cabal of NGOs, journalists, bureaucrats, retired armed forces officers and middlemen who work against India's interests. Some are paid by foreign intelligence agencies to both collect information and spread disinformation. Others are embedded into the Lutyens' ecosystem where self-interest often supersedes national interest.
This treacherous cabal is not responsible for India's grinding poverty - for that we have to thank decades of misguided socialist economic policies and endemic corruption. But the detritus the cabal leaves behind clogs pathways that could lead to faster economic and social progress. In few other countries do powerful cliques in politics, journalism, bureaucracy and the armed forces conspire to protect foreign interests at the expense of their own country.How long will it take to sweep away this treacherous cabal? The task will occupy much of prime minister Modi's term. So deep-set is the rot that important arms of the government too are compromised. The corporate espionage case unfolding across union ministries in Delhi is a symptom of the larger disease: Indians betraying India.
It is crucial to break the corrupt nexus that lies at the heart of Lutyens' Delhi along with its febrile cast of characters: lawyers, journalists, politicians, bureaucrats and fixers disguised as activists. India has a notorious history of enemies within. They collaborated during the waves of Islamic invasions of India. And in 1757, in the key battle of Palashi (Plassey in British history books), Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal Siraj-ud-Daulah only because of the treachery of his army's commandant-in-chief Mir Jafar whom the wily Briton bought off. Bengal fell that year. The rest of India fell, piece by hapless piece, in the following decades.
Today Western businessman - descendants of Clive's East India Company - queue up with briefcases, not guns outside Delhi's Sanchar Bhawan and Shastri Bhawan, where telecom spectrum and coal blocks respectively are being auctioned. The combined target: over Rs four lakh crore. This represents India's window of opportunity to grow rapidly, using foreign and domestic investment to lift millions out of poverty. The window will not remain open forever. The government must sharpen its focus on growth, the only means through which every modern society over the last 100 years has achieved economic prosperity and social equity.