Crisis Is Opportunity

AT 5 pm on June 1, Yashwant Sinha will stand up in Parliament to present the most crucial Budget in independent India. He will have the chance to use the nuclear crisis to trigger off a chain reaction that will make India far stronger than she has ever been—stronger economically and in real terms, and not in terms of empty rhetoric and school textbook poems. He also could send India down Damnation Alley.

The global seismic tremors unleashed by the Pokhran blasts will converge that day in the Central Hall of Parliament. Because in the final analysis, the rumblings are all economic. They may disguise themselves as otherwise: moral, political, emotional, cultural, but that makes no difference. The developed world knows this truth, and none more so than the US. That is why President Clinton announced the US sanctions with carefully rehearsed personal anguish; that is why he, apparently irrelevantly, mentioned "the great Indian middle class," the vision that US corporations have been chasing enthusiastically for some years now. That is why France has refused to impose sanctions: its largest export is defence equipment, and India is a big customer. That is why Japan announced the cancellation of $1 billion worth of soft loans, slashed that the next day to $26 million, and then added the day after that all the loans approved already will be going through.

To seize that chance, however, Sinha will have to rise above those other fake considerations also. More importantly, he will have to persuade the hardliners and reckless chauvinists in his party to sheath their sabres and relax. Till now, the Pokhran aftermath has been remarkably kind to India. It is unlikely that World Bank loans will dry up, that trade sanctions will be imposed, that anyone will compare India with rogue nations like Libya, Iraq and North Korea.The rupee is down, but to a level that should be cause for cheer rather than apprehension; the stockmarkets remain volatile but not hysterical; no foreign investor has cancelled any project.

But, paradoxically, this only makes the government’s next moves all the more critical. It has to manage the delicate international thrust-and-parry with clinical timing and hairtrigger sensitivity. It has to negotiate to get the maximum it can get, but it needs to sense how much of what it wants is realistic. It has to look the world in the eye proudly, but also with some charm; it should realise how far to go before the developed world begins believing that India is irrational, and therefore not a good economic bet. Above all, it has to be single-mindedly focused on India’s economic objectives, and be totally dispassionate.

This is where the problem will lie. The BJP has several lunatic fringes and first cousins. They must be contained. To keep lowest-common-denominator passions up inside the country, the party has already begun to organise the usual sideshows and photo-ops: farmers burning American goods in front of the US Embassy, the usual breast-beating theatrics, but these will only end up scaring and repelling the West, always suspicious of the true nature of the "Hindu nationalist party." What India needs to do is what China managed after the Tiananmen Square massacres, using its enormous potential as a market to seduce that apolitical apatriotic creature called the transnational corporation, let TNC business interests neutralise political sanctions, and enable China to be master of its own destiny.

To do that, India needs to remind the jingoists that the television news on May 11, after reporting the first series of Pokhran tests, also covered a village in Rajasthan where a girl has grown to a marriageable age for the first time in 110 years. I have never heard anything more sickening than this about my country, and our politicians must understand that the energies of their cadres are far better utilised in attacking this repugnant problem than in dancing the bhangra to celebrate a military weapon they only dimly comprehend, and make a spectacle of themselves in the eyes of the civilised world. They must also understand that problems like female infanticide, shorn of their cultural, sociological, education-related veils, are economic problems.

When Sinha rises in Parliament at 5 pm on June 1, he will know that he speaks for a government that is right now more powerful than any government India has had in the last decade. Coalition problems have been rendered irrelevant, the Opposition is in disarray, a huge majority of the Indian people are cheering him on. He can get away with almost anything. He should open up insurance to the private sector, start the process of serious disinvestment in public sector enterprises, stop this corrupt and whimsical system of case-by-case approvals of

investment proposals, scrap the Foreign Investment Promotion Board. Above all, he has to put the government’s might behind infrastructure projects, by setting up independent powerful single-window authorities which will whisk the projects past those mountains of bureaucratic paperwork and copies in triplicate. To kickstart infrastructure spending through government funds, if he needs to take the fiscal deficit to 8 per cent, he should do so. He—and all the other ministries—should rush in as much as they can, now. If the government cannot detonate as powerful an explosion in the area of economic policy as it did under the Rajasthan sands, all the brilliance of our scientists will have been for nought.

If Sinha presents a status quoist or inward-looking budget, India will remain a petulant bystander as the world moves into the 21st century. And that pinnacle of Indian technology, the explosion of the 55-kiloton thermonuclear device will have no impact even 150 km away, where a newborn girl-child is about to be murdered by her tearful mother.