Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has lost the election. He wasn’t standing, but we won’t split hairs. His policies have been put to the test by an electorate blessed with a viable opposition —and crushed. In throwing him out of their lives, the voters of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh may have destroyed the world’s most dangerous economic experiment.
Chandrababu Naidu, the state’s chief minister, was the West’s favourite Indian. Blair and former United States president Bill Clinton both visited him in Hyderabad, the state capital. Time magazine named him South Asian of the year; the governor of Illinois created a ”Naidu day” in his honour; and the British government and the World Bank flooded his state with money. They loved him because he did what he was told.
Naidu realised that to sustain power, he must surrender it. He knew that as long as he gave the global powers what they wanted, he would get the money and stature that count for so much in Indian politics. So instead of devising his own programme, he handed the job to the US consultancy McKinsey.
McKinsey’s scheme, Vision 2020, says one thing in its summary, quite another in its contents. It begins by insisting that education and health care must be available to everyone. Later, you discover that the state’s hospitals and universities are to be privatised and funded by ”user charges”. It extols small businesses but, beyond the point where most people stop reading, reveals that it intends to ”eliminate” the laws that defend them and replace small investors, who ”lack motivation”, with ”large corporations”. It claims it will ”generate employment” in the countryside, and goes on to insist that more than 20-million people should be thrown off the land.
Put together these and other proposals for privatisation, deregulation and the shrinking of the state, and you have a blueprint for mass starvation. You dispossess 20-million farmers just as the state is reducing its employees and foreign corporations are ”rationalising”, and you end up with millions who are without work or state support.
”The state’s people,” McKinsey warns, ”will need to be enlightened about the benefits of change.”
McKinsey’s vision was not confined to Naidu’s government. Once he had implemented these policies, Andhra Pradesh ”should seize opportunities to lead other states in such reform, becoming … the benchmark state”. Foreign donors would pay for the experiment, then persuade other parts of the developing world to follow Naidu’s example.
Vision 2020 contains 11 glowing references to Chile’s experiment in the 1980s, when General Augusto Pinochet handed economic management of his country to a group of neo-liberal economists known as the Chicago Boys. They privatised social provision, tore up laws protecting workers and the environment and left the economy to multinational companies. The result was a bonanza for big business and a staggering growth in debt, unemployment, homelessness and malnutrition. The plan was funded by the US in the hope that it could be rolled out worldwide.
In July 2001, despite numerous official denials, Clare Short, then United Kingdom secretary of state for international development, finally admitted that Britain was funding Vision 2020.
Blair’s government has financed the state’s economic reform programme, its privatisation of the power sector and its ”centre for good governance” (which means as little governance as possible).
The secretariat is run, at Britain’s insistence, by the Adam Smith Institute, a far-right business lobby group. The money for all this comes out of Britain’s foreign-aid budget.
It is not difficult to see why this is happening. As Stephen Byers revealed when he was Britain’s secretary of state for trade and industry: ”The UK government has designated India as one of the UK’s 15 campaign markets.” The campaign is to expand opportunities for British capital. The people of Andhra Pradesh know what this means: they call it ”the return of the East India Company”.
There’s something uncanny about the way in which the scandals that surrounded Blair during his first term are recurring in India.
Bernie Ecclestone, the formula one (F1) boss who gave Blair’s Labour Party £1-million and whose sport later received an exemption from the ban on tobacco advertising, was negotiating with Naidu to bring his sport to Hyderabad.
I have been shown the leaked minutes of a state Cabinet meeting on January 10. McKinsey, they reveal, instructed the Cabinet that Hyderabad should be a ”world-class futuristic city with F1 as a core component”. To make it viable, however, there would be a ”state support requirement” of four- to six-billion rupees (between £50-million and £75-million) a year.
In Andhra Pradesh, thousands now die of malnutrition-related diseases because Naidu previously cut the food subsidy.
F1, the minutes add, should be exempted from the Indian ban on tobacco advertising.
Naidu had already ”addressed the prime minister as well as the health minister in this regard”, and was hoping to enact ”legislation creating an exemption to the Act”.
The Hinduja brothers (Srichand, Gopichand and Prakash), the businessmen facing criminal charges in India who were given British passports after former Blairite minister Peter Mandelson intervened on their behalf, have also been sniffing round Vision 2020.
More leaked minutes show that in 1999 their representatives held a secret meeting in London with the Indian attorney general and the British Export Credits Guarantee Department, to help them get the backing required to build a power station under Naidu’s privatisation programme.
When the attorney general began lobbying the Indian government on their behalf, this caused another Hinduja scandal.
The results of the UK-funded programme are plain to see. During the hungry season, hundreds of thousands of people in Andhra Pradesh are now kept alive on gruel supplied by charities. Last year hundreds of children died in an encephalitis outbreak because of the shortage of state-run hospitals.
The state government’s own figures suggest that 77% of the population has fallen below the poverty line. The measurement criteria are not consistent, but this appears to be a massive rise.
In 1993 one bus a week took migrant workers from Andhra Pradesh to Mumbai. Today there are 34. The dispossessed must reduce themselves to become the transplanted ”coolies” of Blair’s new empire.
Luckily, democracy still functions in India. In 1999 Naidu’s party won 29 seats, leaving Congress with five. Last week those results were precisely reversed.
The British can’t yet vote Blair out of office, but in Andhra Pradesh, they have done the job on Britain’s behalf. — Â