It takes a while to identify anything Indian inside the Metropolitan Mall in the rich Delhi suburb of Gurgaon. Harrison Ford peers from the cinema posters; Tommy Hilfiger lines up alongside Reebok and Benetton on the shop floor. Only how a cleaner balances flattened cardboard boxes on his head, and the prominent sign at the escalator (”Be careful of your sari while riding the stairs”) hint this is not a shopping centre in Alabama.
American tastes colonise the food hall. Tex Mex jostles with hot-dog stalls and ice-cream parlours selling smoothies. At Pizza Hut, teenagers buy Indianised versions of the global brand — spicy korma and tikka chicken pizzas, sprinkled heavily with green chillies.
Last week, United States President George Bush was giving some thought to the fondness of young Indians for pizzas. As he prepares for a landmark visit to India — a trip analysts promise will bring ”India firmly and irrevocably on to the world stage as a major player” — it is these consumers he wants.
In a speech ahead of his visit, Bush told US listeners: ”India’s middle class is now estimated at 300-million people. Think about that. That’s greater than the entire population of the United States. India’s middle class is buying air conditioners, kitchen appliances and washing machines, and a lot of them from American companies such as GE [General Electric] and Whirlpool.”
The Bush administration is acutely aware of India changing. With a growth rate now at 8%, its economy has transformed itself in 15 years from that of a Third World nation to a powerful emerging force aspiring to rival China.
On Wednesday, the president will fly into New Delhi along with a large contingent of business leaders to secure a new relationship with India. The US wants to tap into its vast market: last year US exports grew by more than 30%.
With foreign policy initiatives failing elsewhere, Bush’s advisers are reaching out in new directions. As Japan and Europe grow weaker and China stronger, the administration has seen India as a strategic priority. The world’s largest democracy is, as Bush’s aides chant endlessly, ”a country sharing our democratic values and commitment to a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society”.
At the turn of the century, India’s relationship with the US was dominated by sanctions over its 1998 nuclear tests. Interest stirred only very recently, as the effects of economic reforms brought in during the early 1990s began to be felt. For the past three years, investment banks have been forecasting a great economic future for India. Goldman Sachs predicted in 2003 it would be the third most powerful economy by 2032. And the date is creeping forward. A CIA prediction for 2020 says: ”Some experts say India could overtake China as the fastest-growing economy in the world.”
”Some 20% of the world’s population under the age of 24 is Indian and 70% of our population is under 36. Given these statistics, I am confident our youthful workforce is raring to compete at the global level,” said Nandan Nilekani, president of Infosys Technologies, one of India’s most powerful software companies. English speakers add to the value; there are more people who speak English in India than in the US.
At the World Economic Forum at Davos last month, Indian business seized attention with a $4-million promotional campaign that flung aside classical dance and ancient monuments and ran a Bollywood soundtrack to persuade global investors that India was the place to be. Delegates were given turbans, pashminas and iPods loaded with contemporary Indian music. Bars served Kingfisher beer and chicken tikkas, as DJs played the latest Hindi hits.
Perceptions
A few minutes’ drive from the Metropolitan Mall, beyond a dozen sprawling building sites, at the Gurgaon HQ of the India Everywhere campaign, Anupam Yog said perceptions are changing fast.
”What we used to hear and see in the US media about India was not pleasant. The New York Times might occasionally print a photograph of an elephant in the street in Delhi, but that was about the only news from India. Now the image is of a 25-year-old software technician.”
In a country that has never seen the need for high-rise buildings, even the skyline is imported. In glass towers, Indians work through the night to answer banking queries from US customers; engineers sit at computers redesigning engines for American planes; they live in condominiums with names such as Malibu and Beverly Park, built out of pink concrete in an ongoing frenzy of construction; youthful CEOs hit balls on the Gurgaon golf club lawns, lush despite chronic water shortages.
The mall’s pizza eaters are already sold on Bush’s visit. Manoj Dahiya (25), a software engineer with the US firm Fidelity Investments, said: ”No country can afford to be secluded from the US.” His lunch companion, Hitesh Chawla (24), an analyst with Evalueserve — an Indian firm providing back-office services such as filing and research for US businesses — added: ”But it’s also a good sign that every world leader wants to have an alliance with India.”
Traditional anti-Americanism is melting. A Pew Research Centre poll found 71% of the population had a positive opinion of the US, up from 5% in 2003.
The Bush delegation comes bearing a package of cooperation agreements, in agriculture, trade and energy; the US is likely also to announce a new consulate in India, part of diplomatic repositioning from Europe to Asia. Most controversial is the centrepiece plan for nuclear cooperation, which entails lifting an international ban on sales of civilian nuclear technology to India.
Washington has staked a lot on trying to persuade the international community to bypass the Non-Proliferation Treaty (which Delhi has refused to sign) to allow nuclear trading to begin, a move that both sides say should help India tackle its critical energy shortage. The proposal has caused outrage in the US and triggered hostility in India, where left-wing parties in the coalition government have criticised the friendship with the US (the Bush administration is the world’s ”most organised pack of killers”, the communist Chief Minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, said).
India’s nuclear-energy establishment is also angry at the International Atomic Energy Authority inspections the deal would bring. It is a mark of both sides’ determination that both Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have steeled themselves against domestic furore.
Analysts stress that ties are as important for the US as for India. ”Look at the world as an American does. Where are your friends?” a senior foreign ministry official said, arguing that since the Iraq war there was alienation between the US and Europe, disappointment over relations with Russia and growing anxiety about China’s rise. ”They are saying, ‘What relationship have I not tried where I might get some leverage and emerge better in the world? These guys speak English, they’re democratic, we know many of them because there are two million in the US, a lot of our companies do business with them.”’
Partnership
Is India sacrificing anything by entering into this relationship? The ministry official insists not, stressing the buzzword is ”partnership”.
”We’re not embracing the US without caution,” he said. ‘Nobody’s striding into an alliance. We can have convergences, but an alliance is more than that. It means giving up some of our decision-making powers, which we would find hard. We’re much more useful to the US if we’re independent.”
It is not yet certain that India and the US will overcome the obstacles to nuclear cooperation before Bush leaves for Pakistan on Friday. In the longer term, it is less certain still whether India will live up to the optimistic economic analysis.
The vision of India as an emerging superpower is undercut by its dire infrastructure — congested roads, dwindling water supplies, power shortages and struggling airports — and tortuous bureaucracy.
Amid this focus on India’s modern face, there is concern the other side is being forgotten. The country has more than 300-million struggling to survive on less than $1 a day. About 45% of children under five are malnourished. Even the business community wants the government to bridge the divide between the rich and the desperately poor. India ”must get on with the job of sharing its new-found wealth with the vast majority of its people, who so far have little to show for the economic growth”, a recent McKinsey report said.
In the Bhumi Heen (No Land) camp slums of Delhi, residents have never glimpsed Pizza Hut. The roads are gravel paths where people string together bamboo ladders and make mattresses from straw; goats are tethered to the shack-like shops, and chickens poke out from cages.
But by the standards of Delhi’s slums, this is quite a good one. The 10 000 residents live under slats of corrugated iron, rather than rotting plastic. In the 20 years since the slum established itself, many have built brick walls around their tiny allotments. Open sewers run through the narrow alleyways between the houses, and often overflow.
By the entrance to the room she shares with her family of six, a space smaller than a double bed, Suman Singh is trimming stray threads off saris for a nearby export house. It earns her 14 rupees a day. She came here aged five with her family to escape village poverty, but 20 years later is still hoping for proper housing.
”We are waiting for the government to give us some land,” she said. An electric light bulb hangs from the ceiling, but laundry is done in buckets — when water is available. She will not be buying a US-made washing machine any time soon. — Guardian Unlimited Â