<b>Aakar Patel:</b> India and the loss of sovereignty

In two decades, foreign corporations will be bigger agents of change than the state

This week, on Tuesday night, they showed Close Encounters of the Third Kind on television again. Steven Spielberg’s 1977 movie ends with the hero, played by Richard Dreyfuss, entering an alien ship headed to the unknown. This is quite similar to the way we’re going to feel about the next two decades. The changes they will bring will be so profound, the things invented will be so astonishing, they may as well come from an alien world. 

Most of these things we will not be able to anticipate. There are some who have consistently seen into the next two decades really well, and the inventor, Ray Kurzweil, is one of them. The rest of us do not have this ability. However, some of these changes are so obvious that they are guaranteed to come upon us. The one I am interested to look at today is a loss of sovereignty.

To explain what I mean let’s go back a quarter century, to 1991. What were our two big stories of that period? Before that year, it was the Bofors issue, on which a general election was fought and won. And after it, of course, we had the energy sapping distraction of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, on which a great political force was built democratically. 

The liberalisation of the economy, which was an enormous shift, and which affected people much more and for much longer, slipped in unnoticed under the din of the two noisy stories. Minister of State M J Akbar once reported that Manmohan Singh may have been imposed on India by the International Monetary Fund. Mr Akbar meant it as an allegation, to show how unable the Congress government of the time had been in securing its sovereignty and national interest.

But few in economics can say today either that Mr Singh was the wrong man or that the reforms were not the right thing for India to have done. It is not necessary, then, that a thing imposed from the outside is bad. This is particularly so in nations where the debate may be free and open but also immature, dominated by a media that is designed by architecture to serve advertisers (we touched upon the economics of this in my last piece, The bleak future of newspapers, January 6).

If we were to look at two things that are, like economic reforms were, likely to be imposed on us externally, they would be changes in our policies on health and education. Some facts, well known, need to be repeated. Half a million Indian children die of malnutrition every year. Thirty-eight per cent of our children are stunted at age two, denying them a fulfilling life intellectually and physically. Half of the children our state educates can at age 10 not really read or count. Some of this is improving, though slowly. Some of it may not be, and could in fact be regressing. In any case, after the problem is identified, we are unable to fix it efficiently. 

How long will the world allow us to bungle along on this while it stands by and observes? Not long. It will step in and act. Indeed, some of this is already happening. I was chatting with someone from the Intelligence Bureau, and this individual was complaining about the influence the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had on the Union government, particularly the health ministry. The agenda on many issues, the individual felt, was largely determined by the foundation. Spooks are trained to suspect and resent external influence so this was fine. 

Illustration by Binay Sinha

To me, this information was not alarming though it was to some extent surprising. I had assumed that it would take much longer for this to happen. But the fact is this: If the focus of our government and media is on irrelevant things like terrorism (which accounts for, outside of our three conflict areas, less than 15 deaths a year), someone will step in and work on the relevant issues. This will happen because America’s technology sector, centred in the most liberal city of this planet, is unusual and produces unusual billionaires. They have the resources and the interest to solve problems that trouble them more than us, even when they concern us.

We spend every year about Rs 3,30,000 crore, including pensions, on defence. And we spend a tenth of that, Rs 33,000 crore, on health. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley actually cut this on the assumption, a correct one, that he would not face anger. Should it surprise us that we have put our poor in the situation they are in? No. Last year, we spent Rs 59,000 crore on 36 warplanes. Soldiers are dying at the border, so Indian children dying in thousands should stop whining. This year, we are buying Gujaratis a bullet train for Rs 99,000 crore. We insist on paying for all of this because to us that bullet train represents development and those French fighter jets — we last used warplanes in combat 45 years ago in an offensive war that we launched — represent security.

Such nations cannot change internally. The outside world comes and saves them. The next two decades will produce scientific change and inventions which will weaken the link, and therefore the dependency, the individual has with the state. The foreign corporation, far more powerful, far more motivated, will be a bigger agent of change.

Yes, many of us nationalists will resent this intrusion into our sovereignty, as we did the economic reforms. But given our reality, and it will not change, we should anticipate that it will happen. Perhaps we will be able to live with it, just as we have with the reforms, on which no election was fought, and which had no democratic mandate, but were legislated just the same. Indeed, we may not even notice the intrusion. Playing with our toys, bullet trains and fighter planes, we will be content while the outside world comes in and fixes us.