Sunil Sethi: The Flame of India's First Export

AL FRESCO

The force of the Indian state was on full view on Thursday as the capital all but shut down for the passing of the Olympic torch "" implacable, all-pervasive and unmindful of citizens' rights. Free Tibet protestors were swiftly bundled into police vans, public transport was paralysed and the media kept firmly at bay. The city's central axis, Rajpath, never looked sorrier, as a few participants, VIPs and desultory schoolchildren pretended to look happy. All the apparatus of government must have breathed in relief when the sharply abbreviated event passed without major incident. At least the torch wasn't extinguished or the tanks ordered in. And the India-China story, of 2.4 billion people one day dominating the world economy, had no torn pages.

In his recent book Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures and Yours, Prof. Tarun Khanna of the Harvard Business School, projects exactly such a rosy future. Although he has retracted from his earlier belief that India is better positioned to overtake the Chinese economy in the 21st century, he now argues that the "dance of mutualism" between the two countries will ensure a reoccupation of the economic space they vacated two centuries ago "" in the 1800s India and China accounted for 50 per cent of the world GDP.

Tarun Khanna's book is worth reading; he is that rare auteur in the dry-as-dust world of professional academics with a gift for setting a scene and recording voices. Like an intrepid journalist he takes us on a journey through the factories and stock exchanges of the two countries, meeting vigorous men and women engaged in manufacturing tractors and cell phones or jointly exploring Africa's oil fields. He says that although China's $20 billion annual trade with India is but one-tenth of the business it does with the US or the European Union, the sceptics will be proved wrong. Economic mutualism will override political differences and old prejudices. "Both countries have now put the feeding of hundreds of millions of hungry people ahead of relatively petty border disputes, and both have too much to lose by not working in concert with each other. This does not imply a love fest, but merely a credible cessation of mutual hostility and suspicion."

One of the oddest gaps in Khanna's treatise is Tibet. In his far-flung travels in China he failed to book a seat on the Beijing-Lhasa railway, the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) shining symbol of economic progress in the Tibet Autonomous Region. Is he now taken aback by the protests in world capitals at the joyless and imperiled progress of the Olympic torch? Tarun Khanna admits that historically India's biggest export to China, religion, preceded its biggest commodity export, opium, but he only mentions the Dalai Lama once in his 350-page book. Like the CCP he has misread the persisting and unbroken power of that first export.

Pallavi Aiyar, the best of the Indian correspondents reporting from Beijing, is a Mandarin speaker and, like Khanna, an intrepid traveller. But her take on why Tibet remains China's Achilles' heel is different. The CCP's policy of dealing with dissent harshly while developing Tibet economically was aimed at convincing Tibetans that the party, rather than the Dalai Lama, could ensure a better life. Now that policy is foundering, she says. "No matter how much the Dalai Lama is projected domestically as a sinister 'splittist', the average Tibetan still believes the spiritual leader is a living Buddha; a belief that cannot be bought off by subsidies and trains. The Tibet issue is therefore not of 'independence'... but of the freedom to believe and worship. In Tibet such freedom is equivalent to worshipping the Dalai Lama."

Although the CCP now permits the devout to pray, spirituality is controlled and Tibetan Buddhism keenly monitored. The trouble in Tibet hinges on the question posed by India's first export to China in the first century AD: Is the central party committee the real Buddha for Tibetans?