A bridge too far
Rumina Sethi

Deepening Democracy: Challenges of Governance and Globalization in India.
by Madhu Purnima Kishwar.
Oxford. Pages 334. Rs. 595.

In 1985, when Madhu Kishwar published her hugely popular article, Gandhi on Women, in the EPW, she criticised the Mahatma for advocating mere "benevolence" by those in authority towards the downtrodden instead of striving to remove economic injustices altogether. In Deepening Democracy, Kishwar’s heart is still in the right place: her focus is on the growing rift between the urban elite and the rural poor. Kishwar attempts to evoke a sense of "shared destiny" between all classes, reminding the "best" that their domestic help, gardeners, plumbers, electricians, tailors and rickshaw pullers are part of the "rest" that fills the slums we keep wishing away.

When the BJP government was routed last summer, it became clear that the masses had acutely felt their exclusion from the "feel good factor" of belonging to a globalised India. The questions that this raises are: why should the poor remain so in spite of heavy subsidies by the government? Why does a nation with surplus food grain have starvation deaths?

In Kishwar’s analysis, it is the state that tends to play labour against capital and peasants against rich landlords. The toiling peasants and industrial workers are always projected by the ruling parties as the enemies of big farmers and the owners of industries, so that the politicians can vaunt themselves as the ultimate saviour of the underdog.

Not only the right-wing bureaucrats, but also the anti-globalization brigades are reserved for censure. Although these brigades are part of an NGO network that exists on first-world grants-in-aid, they don’t tire of rejecting Pepsi, Coke and McDonalds. Yet these brigades cannot exist without the use of the Internet, fax machines and cellphones, or foreign cars and television: "Could it be that they really have not understood that micro chips are the real symbols and enablers of globalization, not potato chips."

Kishwar’s aggression against anti-globalisation politics runs so deep that the book suddenly shifts focus to pro-globalisation arguments. It helps contain communal violence, since all efforts are made to present a clean image of the country to the TNCs. When the Left governments fault globalisation by waving the red flag and rally the workers of the world against capitalism, they encourage closed-door economies. Without an open economy, no developing country can move ahead.

Further, globalisation frees economies from sectarian and unethical bureaucracies of the world. Above all, it brings wealth. In other words, Kishwar believes in globalisation as a panacea for the ills (poverty, excessive bureaucratisation, corruption, illiteracy) of the third world.

Although it cannot be denied that global give-and-take has increased jobs, it has also been a smoke screen to increase America’s hegemony in the third world. The setting up of trans-cultural corporations and call centres in the third world has, on the one hand, democratised the world but, on the other, also exacerbated their economic differences.

While we could agree with Joseph Stiglitz that interdependence and the transformation of traditional patterns of socio-economic organisations is "the way of the future", it can be maintained equally that the rationales of free-market economy ends up in the economic degradation of developing countries because of the predatory nature of global corporates. It is widely believed that WTO replaced GATT mainly in order to kick away the ladder and prevent developing countries from catching up.

Kishwar’s book openly acknowledges the advantages a country like India could reap from globalisation, but we could also judge from the growing American insecurity over outsourcing that globalisation may be a spent force. The trend of restricting the entry of overseas students to America may also signal a discredited globalisation.

When in 1999, the Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamed, proved by inhibiting the role of the IMF and the neocons that globalisation was a choice, globalisation received its severest blow.

Kishwar would also have to account for the reasons why the so-called victim economies ardently aspire towards globalisation. To quote Hardt and Negri, the profits made by comprador capitalists are so huge that "we continually find the First World in the Third, the Third in the First, and the Second almost nowhere at all".

What Kishwar exposes in great detail are the many issues ranging from India’s language policy, the evils of the license-permit raj and the lack of accountability in politics to causes of ethnic conflict. In sum, she gives us new substance to relate to our concerns for the increase in absolute poverty in the third world and the uses of a global economy, but she also leaves us wondering how far globalisation is a play of vested interests. Her study would benefit by a discussion of the ways in which one can combat, withstand, or at least adapt to it.

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