Authors: John Elliott
Implosion (3 page)
Aspirational India and corrupt India merged in another very tangible celebration with the fast-paced Twenty-20 cricket matches of the Indian Premier League (IPL) that was launched in 2008, fetching over $1bn for television rights and $723m for regional franchises that were bought by flashy Indian businessmen and film stars. This had grown by 2010 to a massive $4bn wealth-creating brand of sponsorships, broadcasting and other franchises, fees and other takings.
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Apart from the very poor in remote rural areas who had no access to television, everyone seemed to relish the tournament, despite massive allegations of corruption. Never before had a scam been enjoyed and celebrated by such a massive proportion of Indian people.
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The national celebration of the lucky few getting rich in a poor country is one of India’s many curious contradictions. The poor have (up to a point) always admired the massive illicit personal wealth of some politicians because it shows what can be achieved from a deprived background. Similarly, the successes of the IPL organizers, cricketers and team owners were enjoyed as a symbol of hope for what might be. Some of the scams did catch up with the IPL though, and the brand value had dropped to $2.92bn in 2012.
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Its image crashed in 2013 when a huge match-fixing scandal was exposed by a television sting operation that caught players looking for large bribes, generating police investigations and charges.
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‘Exasperation and Exhilaration’
International criticism has hardened in recent years as India’s less favourable systems have come to the fore with the connivance, after 2004, of a somnolent and corrupt coalition government nominally led by Manmohan Singh as prime minister but effectively controlled by Sonia Gandhi as head of the ruling Congress party. Singh had been put on too high a pedestal for his role as finance minister in the 1991 reformist government that was led by Narasimha Rao, the prime minister. The decline of such an icon as Singh has epitomized India’s failure to sustain the potential of the 2000s when growth neared nine or ten per cent.
I wrote a spoof piece on my blog in September 2010 about an un-named country that was obviously India.
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Left-wing rebels controlled a quarter of the country’s districts. There were two tiresome neighbours, one riven with religious extremism and terrorism that the perpetrators wanted to export. The other, far bigger, neighbour had for years been encouraging the smaller neighbour to do its worst. The prime minister was a nice, well-meaning, elderly guy run by a foreign-born lady whose main interest seemed to be making sure her son became prime minister one day. The prime minister could not control many of his ministers, who mainly wanted to make money for themselves and their regional political parties, thus undermining key areas of the economy for which they were responsible – such as airlines and airports, telecoms and mining, and sometimes industrial and other policies relating to foreign direct investment, special economic zones, petroleum, agriculture and food supplies.
In my story, most parliamentarians – a meaningless title since most of them did little constructive parliamentary work – were dynastically getting their sons, daughters, wives and even mistresses into politics, presumably not for the good of parliament or the country. Personal greed seemed to govern sport, ranging from chaotic preparations for some imminent regional games to a lucrative private sector cricket league. Businessmen and politicians were conniving to plunder the country’s mineral wealth with scant regard for the environment or the law. And you could not believe what you read in the newspapers because several newspapers printed what they were paid to print, and at least one of them had got commercially involved with its advertisers by investing in their stocks and managing their advertising budgets. When I told this story at a small business dinner party before it went up on the blog, the first comment, from a foreign executive, was, ‘Yet we keep coming – India takes you to exasperation and to exhilaration at the same time. That’s the way it is.’
This book does not attempt to cover all aspects of this exasperation and exhilaration, but tries to look at how India works and where it goes wrong – and right – by examining how things are done or not done. It mainly focuses on subjects that I have written about on my blog since it started in April 2007, initially on the
Fortune
magazine website, plus other articles – from 1983 to 1988 in the
FT
, and after 1995 at various times in
The Economist, The New Statesman,
India’s
Business Standard
and
Fortune
.
In the course of my reporting, I’ve been involved in the creation of two internationally recognized words or phrases, and both are in the book. I
’
m credited in Bhutan as the first foreign correspondent to be told (for the
FT
in 1987) by the then King Jigme Singye Wangchuck about his plans for Gross National Happiness or GNH, which later became an international theme. I was also the first journalist (again for the
FT
but in 1979, before I came to India) to write about privatisation, a word which had not appeared before in a newspaper
–
it sounded so odd that the newspaper’s features editor refused to put it in the story’s headline, saying no one would understand it!
To some extent, it is easy to write a book pointing out the faults when India is on a downward trend, as it has been for the past few years. Indeed, what I have written here will probably be more acceptable in the current mood than it would have been five or ten years ago when audiences sometimes found my stories too negative.
The word ‘implosion’ has various connotations. It usually conjures up dramatic images of buildings and glass shattering inwards, and of objects collapsing violently. What is happening in India is not that sort of massive one-off event but a more insidious and equally dramatic inward collapse. Internal forces are gradually eating away at institutions, organizational procedures and the functioning of authority that are needed to run a country.
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Contributing to this creeping implosion are self-serving politicians and government officials, plus widespread and endemic corruption, and a lack of interest in tackling problems. When such developments swamp and begin to destroy the political process, the judiciary and the media, implosion has begun.
When I was about to come to India in the early 1980s, friends had suggested I should read V.S. Naipaul’s celebrated books
An Area of Darkness
and
A Wounded Civilisation
. I began them but gave up, deciding I did not want to start reporting on a country with such depressing negative introductions. A veteran journalist friend, Geoffrey Goodman, then gave me
An Indian Summer
by James Cameron, a great reporter and writer whom he knew well. Geoffrey wrote in the book that he hoped it would ‘help nourish your interest in, and love for, a great land’. Well, it did, because I found that Cameron’s mixture of admiration and frustration for all India’s contradictions matched my first instincts and later experiences. To mark that gift and his continuing sound advice and encouragement till he sadly died in September 2013, this book is dedicated to Geoffrey, in memory of one of Britain’s most dedicated and committed industrial correspondents and one of the finest political commentators of his generation.
Notes
1
. ‘Brazil’s monetary
jeitinho
’,
Financial Times
, 15 January 2013,
http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2013/01/15/brazils-monetary-jeitinho/#axzz2idTH2e1O
2
.
http://www.indiatimes.com/more-from-india/vijay-mallya-donates-3kg-gold-to-tirupati-%5Btwitter-reacts%5D-50681.html
3
. Antonio Armellini,
If the Elephant Flies: India Confronts the Twenty-first Century
, p. 407, Har-Anand Publications, Delhi 2012
4
. Thomas L. Friedman, ‘India vs. China vs. Egypt’,
The New York Times
, 5 February 2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/opinion/friedman-india-vs-china-vs-egypt.html?_r=0
5
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2012/11/26/writing-in-the-wild-at-kipling-camp/
6
. ‘Madhya Pradesh Lokayukta raids forest official, uncovers assets worth Rs. 40 crore’,
Mail Today
, 6 February 2013 – with photographs of the raid including a suitcase with bundles of 1,000-rupee notes,
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/madhya-pradesh-lokayukta-raids-forest-official-uncovers-assets/1/249088.html
7
. John Elliott (JE), ‘Celebrating the Vested Interest Raj’, ‘Bystander’ column,
Business Standard
, 29 June 2001,
http://www.business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=94193&
8
.
India and China – Asia’s New Giants: Stepping stones to prosperity
by JE, page 3, Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies, Delhi 1995
9
. John Elliott (JE), ‘Celebrating the Vested Interest Raj’, ‘Bystander’ column,
Business Standard
, 29 June 2001,
http://www.business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=94193&
10
. ‘Go east, entrepreneurs – with Indian partners’,
Financial Times
, 14 February 2013,
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c24607ac-7689-11e2-8569-0144feabdc0.html#axzz2SKxZeg65
11
. K. Shankar Bajpai in conversation with JE, October 2012
12
. JE, ‘India and China: Asia’s New Giants: Stepping Stones to Prosperity’, Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies, Delhi, 1995.
13
.
http://www.secondshaadi.com/
14
. ‘Made in India: Contemporary Art in India’,
http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/ra-magazine/winter2006/features/made-in-india,49,RAMA.html
15
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/delhi%E2%80%99s-art-summit-a-huge-international-success-with-128000-visitors-and-good-sales/
and
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress. com/2012/10/02/ratan-tata-and-mahatma-gandhi-reflected-in-anamorphic-cylinders/
16
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/incredible-india%E2%80%99s-literary-woodstock/
17
. ‘IPL brand value doubles to $4.13bn: Brand Finance’, PTI,
http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/ipl-brand-value-doubles-to-4-13-bn-brand-finance-110032200177_1.html
18
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/india% E2%80%99s-scam-ridden-ipl-cricket-is-a-national-celebration/
19
. ‘profits still elude some IPL teams’,
Mint
, 2 April 2013,
http://www.livemint.com/Consumer/Vx82Oge7kJ5nYt6rylf5FM/Profits-still-elude-some-IPL-teams.html
20
. ‘Betting scandal deepens in India cricket league’,
Financial Times
, 23 May 2013,
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d635c988-c39a-11e2-aa5b-00144feab7de.html
21
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2010/09/10/india-as-it-is-%E2%80%93-a-spoof%E2%80%99s-eye-view/
22
.
http://www.macmillandictionary.com/thesaurus/british/implosion#implosion_4
One of the magical things about India is its unpredictability and its ability to turn muddle and adversity into success. This is true of many countries, of course, especially developing economies, but in India it has been turned into an art form and governs the way that vast areas of the country operate. In the days of the pre-1991 Licence Raj, when government controls restricted what companies could do and people could buy, this approach enabled the country to work, creakily, until systems and machinery broke down and were patched up again to judder on inefficiently.
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Hindustan Motors’ Ambassador car, which is still being produced,
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is an archetypal example of such patchwork. Its 60-year-old (British Morris Oxford) body has been remoulded on the edges and smartened up with chrome strips, and the engine, gearbox and other parts have been replenished over the years, while the basic car has remained the same.
This kind of jugaad, which means making do and innovating with what is available, can be many things, both good and bad. It is the knack of turning shortages, chaos and adversity into some sort of order and success, and it enables the poor in India to benefit from low-cost adaptations and innovations with fixes such as using a belt from a motorbike wheel to run an irrigation pump, using a Pringles potato crisps container to bridge a piping gap in a car engine, and applying turmeric powder to fix a radiator leak.
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It leads to the innovation that drives entrepreneurial activity – for example, in slums like the world-famous Dharavi in Mumbai where, in filthy conditions, there is an informal and unregulated $750m–$1bn a year parallel economy with businesses ranging from the manufacture of good-quality leather goods to recycling of plastics and electronic hardware. Some 60,000 families live there, tightly packed amid the squalor.
The positive aspects of jugaad are being lauded internationally because of what some auto industry executives and others call India’s ‘frugal engineering’, where the best is made of minimal resources for the lowest cost. This has appeared over the past decade as India’s manufacturing industry has begun to shed an image of inefficiency and poor workmanship, proving that internationally competitive products can be produced. Jugaad has consequently become a management fad and is being praised outside India as a great Indian invention. The BBC made a 30-minute radio programme revelling in jugaad’s canny inventions,
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and management books are putting jugaad on a pinnacle of achievement.
