A question I ask myself is whether the rhythms of Indi-an life will forever baffle eastern Asians. A year ago, Singapores veteran Lee Kuan Yew inadvertently highlighted this gulf by exclaiming, in another context, In order for people to respect me, I must be poor? The Indian answer would have been an emphatic yes! For good or bad, and in theory at least, virtuous poverty still is the national ideal, rooted in Hindu ethics and reaffirmed by Mahatma Gandhi. Dont Indians want to be rich? an amazed Chinese Singaporean asked me during the Enron fiasco.
This is something that Inder Kumar Gujral might have to explain, though naturally not so directly, if his coalition troubles permit him to make it to Kuala Lumpur for next weeks meeting of the Asean Regional Forum, and he then visits Singapore as planned. He might be subjected then to some searching questions about whither India is headed. Hewlett Packards preference for China or Malaysia to India may well have aggravated doubts about India ever making it to tiger economy status.
China now rides high and strong at one end of the Asian read Sinic scale. Cambodia languishes at the other, having demonstrated that its addiction to politics and violence is stronger than its commitment to economics, which is its why entry into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has been postponed indefinitely. India hovers nearer Cambodia, probably not credited even with the promise that marks Myanmar and Laos, both now about to join Asean.
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But it is colossal nuclear China that dominates thinking. By some curious chemistry, the graciousness with which Britain voluntarily transferred power in Hong Kong, after bravely trying to ensure that the civil, political and economic rights of six million Hong Kongers were not altogether trampled underfoot, became Chinas hour of triumph. The Opium Wars, a somewhat cardboard propaganda film made under Beijings auspices to expose the jaded iniquities of British colonialism, is showing to packed houses and rave reviews.
We are told in tones of the deepest reverence that a survey has shown that 90 per cent of the foreign companies in Hong Kong will stay on there under Chinese rule. About 12 per cent of the 420,000 people who left Hong Kong in the decade before 1994 have returned, while foreigners are flowing in with their capital, citing favourable banking and financial facilities, infrastructure and the tax regime all British creations. Money is the spur. But, as this column has noted before, Asia has forgotten that Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories were nothing but rock, sand and fishing villages inhabited by ignorant peasants when the British occupied them. The new Special Administrative Regions booming prosperity, which makes it so attractive to China and the world, is entirely a British colonial creation. The millions of Chinese who invested their labour and savings in the colony did so to escape the grim reality of China and benefit from British enlightenment.
I am harping on China because the comparison with India seems to be uppermost in many minds. China is the exemplar of everything that a developing country should be. India may only now have yielded to Cambodia as the exemplar of everything that a developed country should not be. Comparisons are sometimes more specific. It was said some years ago that India would have had a catalyst for growth if only it had not absorbed Goa. During the Hong Kong handover, China was congratulated for not emulating Indias example of a military takeover.
Both comments expose prejudice and ignorance. Unlike bust-ling British-ruled Hong Kong, Portuguese-controlled Goa was a somnolent backwater with no economy to speak of. Its only claim to distinction, recalled by the ruins of Old Goa, was the awesome cruelty of the Holy Inquisition which burned heretics at the stake. Secondly, it is to Britains credit that Margaret Thatcher yielded as soon as Deng Xiaoping demanded Hong Kong, with more than a glimpse in his chainmail glove of the steel that would be used if she did not. In contrast, the Salazar dictatorship rejected all Indian representations with the blunt retort that the medieval papal decree that had sanctified Portuguese conquest was valid in perpetuity.
If all this is overlooked deliberately and cynically so it may be because eastern Asians are baffled by India. A Singapore intellectual expressed this on the sidelines of a conference on thinking. Their country is in a mess, their economy is in shambles, yet Indians are so confident, he wondered. Theyre over-confident! Confidence, happiness, enjoyment, contentment, all the emotions in fact, are a function of gross domestic product for him. Even those with understanding, and some goodwill for India, cannot understand why India keeps the profit motive on a leash and multinationals at a distance.
Of course, their prescription blends simplicity with sophistry. Laissez-faire is the last thing that the tiger economies, with their carefully husbanded booming private sectors, would ever allow. There are any number of complex ways of managing private enterprises in all these countries so that no one is really free of state supervision. But that is not the point. It is Indias seemingly contented refusal to take the same path that makes it a source of irritation.
Had India done so, it would have yielded handsome dividends for Asean, South Korean and Japanese investors. If, on the other hand, India had emerged as a military power, it would have earned respect born of fear. Being neither financially nor militarily successful, India remains only a country with potential. Gujral might have to explain when if ever that promise might be realised.