India has an image problem: Of fanciful Five Ts and failing Three Fs

Imagine if you had never been to India and instead the news largely formed your impression of it. What would this economy of tomorrow, of elephants perennially getting ready to run and tigers perpetually about to be uncaged, look like from afar? One of the articles that might have caught your eye over the past month or so would be this from the New York Times: “Jayant Sinha is a Celtics (the basketball team for Boston) fan. He graduated from Harvard. He worked for McKinsey…This month, he also feted and garlanded eight men who were part of a Hindu lynch mob that the authorities said beat an unarmed and terrified Muslim man to death… It has become the year of the lynch mob in India.”

A fortnight ago, the BBC news website featured a belated report of the rape of girls at the Muzaffarpur shelter that is too well known and too depressing to reprise here. The story about the 11-year-old in Chennai who had been allegedly raped by several men in her building complex has been forwarded to me all too often. Web news is a treadmill that seeks to keep readers on it for as long as possible so the BBC Muzaffarpur article inevitably had a link to another, posing a rhetorical question: “Child sex crime: Does India have a growing problem?”

By this point, one’s mind is filled with such horrific images that it is difficult to think of India as part of the 21st century – let alone the next China, whose female emancipation is an under-appreciated aspect of that country’s success. The Asian cover story of The Economist in early July was about women missing from the workforce in India, estimated by the magazine to be 235 million. In India “women are less likely to work than they are in any country in the G20, except for Saudi Arabia. They contribute one-sixth of economic output, among the lowest shares in the world and half the global average.”

Managers of factories in southern China have for a decade now bemoaned that in China’s labour-scarce economy, women were applying for jobs in factories in much fewer numbers as opportunities for them in retail and in office work opened up. They preferred hiring women, viewed as more diligent and less prone to quit than men. In India, this might also be true if women were given a chance but, as The Economist reported: “The female employment rate in India, counting both the formal and informal economy, has tumbled from an already-low 35 per cent in 2005 to just 26 per cent now.” The comparable figures for Nigeria and Indonesia are about 50 per cent. Many families and women themselves feel they would be unsafe going to work outside the home. I have written before on these pages about an Indian-born garment factory tycoon in Hong Kong who employs 20,000 mostly women workers in Bangladesh, and several thousand in Vietnam. He is yet to open a factory in India.

On matters large and important, India has an image problem. We are increasingly seen as a country not of the prime minister’s fanciful Five Ts – talent, tradition, tourism, technology and trade – but as one of failing F grades on oppression of Females, religious Fundamentalism and Fissiparous secessionism in Kashmir. To be fair, the country’s appalling record on female emancipation long predates this government. And, the first couple of years of this government featured stories that looked optimistically at prospects that it might speed up liberalising the economy. This narrative was badly punctured by demonetisation – or the “currency exchange initiative” as the International Monetary Fund recently diplomatically described it – but still coexisted with positive stories on the bankruptcy court and the passing of the goods and services tax. By contrast, this month the Financial Times zoomed in on S Gurumurthy’s largely titular appointment as a non-official RBI director with a roll call of eminent economists this government has lost.

The floodgates have opened. The repeated lynchings have been a turning point and the horrific rapes have contributed to create a medieval-majoritarian-misogynistic montage. I have grumbled to a Kenyan Indian friend in New York, once enamoured of Gujarat and Rajasthan, that I will mark his emails as spam if he sends me more grim stories. The foreign press is by no means omniscient about India, but it is the world’s window on us. And, the shards of shattered glass can also be illuminating. One of the most thoughtful stories I have read was from the New York Times on Kashmir. Kashmir is now our Palestine, a human rights debacle in perpetuity. The terrorism is mostly home-grown. “I’ll be honest,” Mohammad Aslam, a police commander is quoted as saying. “For every militant we kill, more are joining.”

It is police officers in the NYT report who deliver the most disturbing analyses of ground realities: “Officer Ashiq Tak said that Kashmiris had so little faith in the security services that when a police officer or soldier killed a civilian, people didn’t even bother demanding justice. “Anywhere else, they’d ask for an investigation,” he said. “Here, they just take the body and go away.”