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India, interrupted

If any of you have any doubts that India needs to swiftly liberalise and become one with the world economy, I suggest you take a flight out of India and come back via Calcutta international airport. I had the misfortune to do so last week when, in my misguided enthusiasm for all things Indian, I caught an Indian Airlines flight from Bangkok which took off exactly three hours behind schedule. There was of course no one from Indian Airlines to assist the delayed passengers either in Bangkok or in Calcutta from where many of us were to catch connecting flights. But then this is a courtesy one has long ceased to expect from our national carriers.

Luckily, I managed to get a connecting flight to Mumbai. But there were others, including a few foreign tourists, who were left stranded. They did not know who to approach, where to go.

The rest of the flight was full of carriers.

The carriers belonged to several communities. I overheard some of them speaking in Bengali. Others spoke in Tamil, Telugu, Oriya, English, Hindi and Punjabi. They were obviously from different provinces and since none of them caught the Mumbai flight later that night, I can only presume that they dispersed to wherever they come from by train from Howrah station which, unlike Calcutta airport, is excellently networked with the rest of India.

The carriers were bringing in cheap firang goods that they buy at low, low prices in markets like Bangkok. Bangkok makes the cheapest readymades anywhere in the world. It also fakes the best brands and sells them openly on the streets. Watches, pens, perfumes. These and the usual cigarettes and whiskeys are what these carriers bring in, which are then retailed here at anything between five to 25 times their acquired price, depending on who the suckers are who buy them. These carriers do the job that importers ought to be doing now that the economy has opened up. But because they are poor, illiterate people who are doing a work that smugglers once did, everyone treats them like dirt.

Indian Airlines treats them badly. (So does Air India, I have seen on flights from the Gulf.) The immigration and customs officials on both sides deal with them with contempt. While the officers of other governments look upon them as an ugly but unavoidable part of their duty, in India these carriers are openly extorted. Often in full view of the passengers. I am sure some of them break a rule here or there, more out of ignorance than out of daredevilry, but most of them are a frightened lot trying to eke out their miserable existence in the only way they know. By doing a job for someone and collecting a small fee. But the way some of our customs officers behaves with them, you would think they were gun runners or drug peddlers.

What they are doing is, in fact, what every businessman does anywhere in the world. They are buying goods and products where they are cheaply available and carrying them to a destination where they can sell them at a higher value. This is the principle on which most of the world's foreign trade is carried out and anywhere else in the world such people would have been applauded for providing an efficient if not exactly essential service. After all, long before Swarovski and Cartier came to India, or Lacoste and Bacardi, it was these humble carriers who whetted the appetite of the rich and influential here for famous global brands. They were the frontiersmen for the new era of liberalisation. But we treat them as if they are crooks and criminals.

This is the problem of the licence raj. It was built on the pillars of avarice and hypocrisy and benefited only those social classes that wielded the most power and influence in a claustrophobic economy. The rest were always looked down upon, however hard they may have worked to make India what it is today. We thought of them as crooks and criminals and allowed the system to harass and humiliate them. Often only because they were less educated than the ruling class.

It is not just these carriers who are browbeaten by the system. The workers who go to the Gulf to work as drivers, peons, cooks, stenos and domestic servants and come home on vacation face exactly the same obnoxious treatment from our immigration and customs officers, who make a fetish out of demeaning them in full public view. They are humiliated, harassed, extorted and because the rest of us keep quiet or look the other way when it happens, these officers get away.

The cooks and drivers and peons and stenos who slog for years in the Gulf to bring up their families in India are the ones who have built up modern India's huge dollar reserves which now exceed 37 billion. While powerful politicians and bureaucrats and corrupt businessmen before whom we are always eager to crawl are those very rascals who have traditionally shortchanged India and banked their wealth offshore. We forget that because of the humble Gulf worker, thousands of villages in Kerala (from where most of them come) are strong and financially independent today. Their children go to decent schools and colleges and the state is today 100 per cent literate. More newspapers and magazines are read there than anywhere in the world. And, unlike some of our other states, people from Kerala do not need to sell off their ancestral land and send their menfolk to the cities to beg.

Unfortunately we have grown up with the hypocrisy of political rhetoric. We have been taught that the State has the inalienable right to control our economy, to straitjacket our spirit of enterprise. We are too frightened to stand up and name the bully. Yet because we are a clever and talented people, in less than a decade of liberalisation, we are about to overtake the Chinese in our annual rate of growth. The Asian Development Bank believes that the Indian economy is picking up at a momentum faster than any other in the Asian continent today and is now threatening to leave even the Chinese behind.

We have shown our mettle wherever we have gone. As Deepak Chopra points out, Indians are less than one per cent at Silicon Valley but their contribution is so impressive that they control over 25 per cent of the wealth out there. In fact, Indians are the single richest ethnic group in the US today, having left the Japanese and the Koreans way behind. This is not the outcome of body shopping though it may have started that way in the sixties and seventies. Today, Indians hold the best jobs in the some of the best US corporations. So much so that US high tech workers are now protesting against the visas that are being granted to us. Even the snooty Germans are now openly welcoming Indian knowledge workers to their country, to ensure that Germany (once the citadel of high technology) does not get left behind in the Internet era.

England in recent years has included more and more Indians in its annual lists of the rich and famous. The curry is now the national dish out there and even the most conservative discotheque plays bhangra pop and Talvin Singh while at least two Bollywood movies make it to the top ten grossers every year.

All these are signs of opening up. We are among the cleverest and most hardworking people in the world. We have talent, initiative, enterprise but, thanks to colonisation and the vulgarity of the licence raj, what we lack is respect for each other. We continue to treat people on the basis of where they come from, what they do. We judge them by what they wear, how they speak, how they carry themselves. In the process we perpetuate the legacy of colonisation even as India moves into the new millennium.

The world now recognises the fact that we are a brilliant people. We can achieve anything if we are given the freedom to do it our way, in our own style. The State must learn to keep away. The bureaucracy must be what they were always meant to be: the servant of the people. Not the designers of our destiny. India's future will be shaped by its people. That is the only way we can rule the world.

Pritish Nandy

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