Food prices become intolerable for the poor. Protests against corruption paralyse Parliament. Then a series of American diplomatic cables exposes a brazenly mendacious and venal ruling class.
This sounds like Tunisia or Egypt. But it is India, where in recent days WikiLeaks has highlighted how national democratic institutions are no defence against the rapacity and selfishness of globalised elites. Most of the cables, published by The Hindu, the country’s most respected English-language newspaper, offer nothing new to those who haven’t drunk the “rising India” Kool-Aid vended by business people, politicians and their journalist groupies.
The evidence of economic liberalisation providing cover for a wholesale plunder of the country’s resources has been mounting in recent months. The loss of a staggering $39-billion in the government’s sale of the telecom spectrum has alerted many Indians to the corrupt nexuses between corporate and political power.
Even the Western financial press, gung-ho about the money to be made in India, is getting restless. Early this year, The Economist asked: “Is Indian capitalism becoming oligarchic?”, a question to which the only possible response is “Hell-ooo”. The Financial Times has described Indian business dynasties as “robber barons”.
The intimate details about politicians revealed by WikiLeaks leave one speechless. What can be said about the former cabinet minister, a fervent spokesman for low-caste Hindus, who demanded a large bribe from Dow Chemical Company, which is being helped by senior American officials to overcome its association with the gas leak at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal that in 1984 killed and maimed tens of thousands? Indeed, the cables show that United States businesses and officials are just as embedded in India’s politics as they are in Pakistan’s.
In 2008, the aide to an old courtier of the Nehru-Gandhi family showed a US diplomat two chests containing $25-million in cash for bribing MPs into voting for an India-US nuclear deal, a prelude to massive US arms sales to India.
The cables offer many instances of ideological deception. Virtually all recent economic growth, a senior politician admits, is concentrated in the four southern states, two western states (Gujarat and Maharashtra) and “within 100km of Delhi”. But why worry? He has nieces and sisters living in the US and “five homes to visit between DC and New York”.
As for the entry of retailers such as Walmart into India, that “should not seriously hurt the mom-and-pop stores that form a BJP constituency”.
The Americans have developed contempt for such representatives, who validate Gandhi’s denunciation of Parliament as a “prostitute”. Hillary Clinton gets to the point in a cabled inquiry about Pranab Mukherjee, the finance minister tipped as India’s next prime minister: “To which industrial or business groups is Mukherjee beholden?”
There are many more revelations in store. These are tense days for many politicians and business people. They probably hope the news is being buried by the cricket World Cup celebrations. They will also try to prove their fealty to the father of the Indian nation. Last week, politicians vied to threaten a study of Gandhi by American writer Joseph Lelyveld with banning. But there is nothing more un-Gandhian than this supranational elite’s cravings for power and wealth and its indifference to suffering. — Guardian News & Media 2011
Pankaj Mishra is the author of Temptations of the West