From Davos, without love

Brand New Nation: Capitalist dreams and nationalist designs in twenty-first century India

Author: Ravinder Kaur

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: xvi+348

Price: Rs 599

In 2012, Ravinder Kaur, a Danish don, visited Davos, a town deep in the Swiss Alps that hosts the world’s luminary investors and those seeking investments from around the globe for one week at the end of January. Those after investment try to outdo each other in selling their country as the most desirable destination. 

Our scholar lady visited Davos again several times (she has pictures!) and decided that she did not like what she saw, especially the show put on by the country of her origin, India.  Not because it was not effective (indeed, it wasn’t) but because the spectacle seemed to violate her understanding of liberal democratic societies.  So she set about collecting material that would support this conclusion.  She wrote essays on the effect of capitalism and nationalism on democratic freedoms, how India aspired for global standing, how it ran the grandiose India Shining and Incredible India campaigns, how dialogues took place in Davos, how The Times of India ran a campaign called Lead India for raising citizens’ voices about corruption-free India and, finally, about the advent of Narendra Modi in Davos in 2018.  Stanford University Press published this loose collection as Brand New State in 2020.  It has been offered with a new preface by the author in June 2021 (which duly notes the seco­nd surge of Covid in India with the horri­fying images circulated in world media) as HarperCollins’ gift to India on the occasion of its 75th independence day.

Professors from renowned universities have hailed the book, and several others, mostly from online media, have joined the chorus.  The excerpts from these included in the present edition make the job of a reviewer akin to that of the TV umpire in a cricket match, who has to find evidence beyond doubt to overrule the on-field umpires’ soft signal.  This review will attempt just that.

The brief contents of the book outlined above show that it lacks thematic unity. Davos keeps popping up, but it is really India’s lack of progress (as understood by the author) that the book is concerned about. About the closest Ms Kaur gets to her objective is “And this faith in market/merit persists despite the fact that even after two deacades (sic) of economic reforms the market mechanism has not fulfilled its promise to trickle-down wealth to the poorest citizens.”  If that is the theme, Ms Kaur is late in discovering it by a good few years. Many have made the point after careful analyses, including Vijay Joshi (India’s Long Road, 2016), not as a throwaway truism culled from Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze.  They find no mention in the book, nor does Surjit Bhalla, who has written tirelessly on how reforms have reduced poverty. 

Ms Kaur does not find it worth citing the seminal criticisms of Pratap Bhanu Mehta or Ramachandra Guha or, in fact, any columnists other than Yogendra Yadav and Christophe Jaffrelot. As a visitor to Davos, she quotes columnist Shaili Chopra and builder Vivek Oberoi, but not such regulars as Anand Mahindra or Tavleen Singh.

Ms Kaur talks at length about nationalism and its facets.  But she makes only one passing reference to Eric Hobsbawm.  Her “two decades” involved both NDA-I and the UPA governments.  Yet we find scant references to A B Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, P Chidambaram, Yashwant Sinha or Jaswant Singh, the architects of reforms (or lack thereof) in that era.  But Mr Modi figures profusely.  On the corporate front, the Ambani brothers are prominent by their absence. Infosys merits one reference, but TCS none.  A mid-level advertising manager in the Times empire is quoted at length. Ms Kaur chooses to quote only that which is convenient to her already formed argument and others not at all.

Ms Kaur’s priorities are odd. 

Mr Modi is the leader she loves to hate.  Yet her one-issue chapter on the Times campaign and Aam admi consumes 47 pages while Mr Modi’s then six-year reign (plus his previous 12 years in Gujarat) is covered in just 18 pages.  She also makes the rather strange point that Mr Modi’s one appearance at Davos was marred by the Karni Sena’s agitation against Padmavat (with a reference to Deepika Padukone’s bare midriff).  She omits to add that the agitation fizzled out and Padmavat went on to become the highest grossing film of 2018, with or without the Padukone midriff.

The essay on nationalism goes around in circles. It is poorly written, with long, unreadable sentences. 

Ms Kaur is fond of using rather high-sounding poly-syllabic words.  Affective is one such, appearing several tens of times.  It refers to moods and attitudes.  Thus to her, developmental decisions are a matter of moods.  She is supposed to have written a highly readable book. It contains gems such as “The highly mediatised popular mobilisation of the Aam admi sought to liberate the nation from corruption and, in doing so, unleash the entrepreneurial spirits constrained by a corrupt government.”  Martin Wolf of Financial Times found the book “Original and highly provocative.” That it is, but not quite in the sense he most likely meant. 

A blurb on the back cover says, “Grounded in the history of modern India, the book reveals how the forces of identity economy, identity politics, publicity, populism, violence and economic growth are rapidly rearranging the liberal political order the world over.”  How I wish it did so!

Disclosure: The reviewer is currently tracing the journey of a unique enterprise in Gujarat to attract and facilitate investment, multi-national and Indian