“The quality of life of the people and their expectations were totally disproportionate to the productive base of the economy,” said Tiruchelvam of Sri Lanka’s similar experiment. “Looking back, I would place the emphasis on the mismanagement of these expectations. This is a small country. Look, for comparison, at the nature of public discourse in Singapore—a constant obsession with economic indicators, an obsession with their capital reserves. I wouldn’t like to live in Singapore, but we belong to the other extreme. Our leaders don’t take people into their confidence about the economy, about inflation, budget deficits, and so on. You’re not framing meaningful strategies that way.”
I spent long hours in New Delhi talking with Indian politicians and planners about the Sri Lankan experience with liberalization and its relevance for the rest of South Asia. We found a few bases for comparison. The problem of entry-level employment—the danger of promoting “extended adolescence in all its virulent forms”—is a palpable part of the continuing rebellions in Punjab and Kashmir. The predicament of those who do not speak English is comparable, although not so stark, since India is not an island nation dependent on international trade, but rather possesses a robust internal economy that revolves around indigenous languages. The imbalances of opportunity that rocked Sri Lanka are already visible in India, particularly in the volatile north, where vast communities of subsidized craftsmen—weavers, locksmiths, cobblers, scissors makers—confront what will be at best a very painful integration into the new, more dynamic market economy.
Yet there seem at least an equal number of reasons to believe that the Sri Lankan lessons will not apply. India’s philosophy and practice of nationalism-through-pluralism is far more developed than was Sri Lanka’s in 1977. Its education system and its state apparatus have long emphasized the “technical skills behind the frontiers” of a dynamic economy. Its affirmative action programs and its pattern of development have promoted a more diverse middle class. Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, even China, have faced similar challenges during the 1980s and have proved, to Sri Lanka’s dismay, that with enough capital and dynamism, all sorts of wonderful things can happen very quickly in Asia these days, even with the usual lousy politicians in charge.
In any event, there is no turning back now. South Asia’s future belongs to its ascending middle classes. If India’s economic and social reformers succeed, their neighbors will have myriad opportunities to rise alongside. If they fail ...
One of the last architects of the new India whom I met before leaving New Delhi was Amit Judge, a retailing entrepreneur who has accomplished, among other things, the profitable import of Lacoste alligator shirts for the Indian yuppie classes. Judge is the son of a middle-class Nehruvian civil servant. He was educated at “one of those blue-blooded public schools the English left behind,” but his mother worked as a hotel clerk to put him through school. As a young man in his family, “‘business’ was a very dirty word. I was told not to mix with this guy because he was a businessman’s son and made black money. I came from a clean, socialist background and did not mix with businessmen.... Business was a big, bad, mafialike thing. My father was one of those idiotic public servants who, if he got a can of Coke from someone, he hurled it back, shouting about bribery, corruption, scandal. I never understood what this can of Coke was all about.” A decade later, Judge had built on his own a textile and industrial firm with $40 million in annual revenues and partnerships with several multinational corporations. He still sees his family, including his father-in-law, I. K. Gujral, one of India’s best known putatively socialist politicians. But Judge finds himself arguing a lot these days about ideology and progress.
The framework and meaning of these arguments extend far beyond narrow questions about how to implement free market reform in a socialist political economy. The arguments involve fundamental questions about how to distribute power and manage change in a new world. This is why the debate about capitalist reform in South Asia today is so significant—it is not a debate, as it is in the United States currently, about tinkering with the government’s role in the economy, about shifting a marginal amount of resources within a system that is fixed and widely endorsed. South Asia’s predicament is much more fundamental because it involves the reconciliation of outdated, narrow, top-heavy political and social arrangements with the swelling, vigorous pluralism of rising middle classes. In this sense, the subcontinent’s predicament is comparable to China’s, where the paradox of a totalitarian elite and a capitalist middle class is far more extreme than on the subcontinent. The point is that in South Asia, while the public language about reform often focuses on technical questions about business licensing and tax policy, such language disguises a profound, open-ended, even perilous rethinking of the basic rules of the political economy.
Judge summed this up one weekend morning at his office behind a fetid smugglers’ market. He wore a knit golf shirt and Western slacks. What he wanted to talk about was India as a kind of blank slate.
“There are eight hundred million people across India,” he began. “What you want to do with them is a fantasy.... India will go through a phase of ‘Look, Mom, what I got!’ but we are still a bit scared. We are still spiritually inclined, shy of spending a lot of money on so-called frivolous consumption items. Of course, I don’t talk about the Lacoste segment. Those guys, hopefully, will buy things they don’t need.
“Before these reforms I was frustrated. I would go to Thailand and see the sea change there. I knew that Indian entrepreneurs are very sharp guys. We move extremely rapidly. This used to frustrate me, these bloody Asian countries. What are they? Nothing. They get four million tourists in Thailand. Why? Because they have planes that go places, that’s why.
“But now I’m an optimist that people will be allowed to do business. I had this big argument with I. K. Gujral just last Sunday. I said, ‘It’s guys like you who ruined this country. For thirty years you went to villages and promised jobs, but you can’t create jobs. Only I can. Business can.’
“There’s a great, great optimism that business can be done in India now. I for one am extremely surprised by the pace of reform taking place. The headlines in the
Economic Times
today would have had us huddling around at the golf course just a couple of years ago. Now it’s mundane news. There is no doubt that this liberalization process is complete in terms of political will. In India this decade, we can become a major power.
“The only thing which disturbs me is still the politics. Up till now, if you see the statues in this country, they are of some jerk politicians. If J. R. D. Tata [a leading industrialist] dies tomorrow, hardly anyone will notice. But if some jerk politician dies tomorrow, there will be a state funeral and the bloody country will shut down for a day.
“I was arguing with I. K. Gujral the other day about the multinationals. He is against them. But it was our own socialist system that perpetuated this mess. I could very well have been swamped by the system if I had been part of it. When I was younger, I would go to see I.K.’s house when he was a minister, and he had this big bungalow, and all these sycophants. Guys with guns protecting him. It could warp anybody’s mind. It gave them a warped sense of power.
“But now at the golf course, these so-called politicians come to play and we don’t talk to them anymore. They play by themselves and nobody follows them around. I only hang around you if I need you. I don’t need the politician anymore.
“My friends in school who have joined the Indian Administrative Service, they’re trying to quit the ministries now. Until now, if you were an IAS officer, you printed it on your card, you tattooed it on your forehead, because this was your passport to power. You had this little flashing red light on your car. What is this? Who is this guy? Why the hell does he need a light on his car? I’m not saying the process is complete, but it is happening rapidly.”
We walked into the dirt parking lot. The morning air was humid, sweltering. Shirtless workmen climbed around us on bamboo scaffolding, banging on the concrete frames of new office buildings. Judge climbed into his Indian-made compact car and drove off. He was smiling, pumped up—he was going to play golf. There is nothing quite like golf on a Saturday morning, he said a few times.
I thought about Amit Judge for a long while afterward—about his confidence, his sense of entitlement to India. “Only I can,” he declared. I thought about his golf game—Judge and his pals striding around the course, whacking away. If the future belongs to the Lacoste crowd, what besides energetic selfishness can we possibly expect them to deliver? Yet by Judge’s own account, for all his brashness, his claim to the future was not arbitrary, but was instead a product of negotiation, of cordial argument with the graying Nehruvian old guard, with people like his father-in-law, Gujral. In that essentially respectful weekend dialogue, replicated millions of times, lies the potential for a peaceful and democratic transition, and from there—is it too much to wish?—even deliverance from history.
Epilogue: Time Bomb
A
around noon on December 27, 2007, Benazir Bhutto arrived at a fourth-floor suite in the Serena Hotel in Islamabad to meet with Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan. She “was in a very good mood,” Karzai told me recently. She admired his cape and they laughed as he recounted how he had acquired it—an improbable tale that involved a visit to the exiled king of Afghanistan. They sipped tea and coffee and discussed the region’s gathering political violence. Militant Islamic leaders had named both of them as targets for assassination ; suicide bombings had escalated in their two countries during 2007 and in Pakistan had reached an unprecedented rate of about one a week. The targets included politicians, Pakistani Army soldiers, Air Force cadets, intelligence agency employees, paramilitaries, and civilians. Bhutto had been attacked in Karachi in October as she returned from exile in Dubai; she escaped, but more than 140 people died. “I am not afraid of death,” she told Karzai. The Afghan president, who had never spoken with her in person, found her “to be a very, very brave woman—too courageous for her own good,” he recalled.
That evening, Bhutto was to meet with two American officials, Senator Arlen Specter and Representative Patrick Kennedy. After seeing Karzai, she went to her Islamabad home and summoned Farhatullah Babar, a close aide, and asked him to prepare a short briefing memo for the Americans about Pakistan’s large and influential intelligence agencies. The spy services, particularly the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, which is run by the military, have a long history of collaborating with Islamist militias to wage covert war in Afghanistan and India. The ISI also collects foreign intelligence, represses separatist movements inside Pakistan, monitors loyalty in the country’s armed services, and involves itself in electoral politics on the military’s behalf. A national parliamentary vote was less than two weeks away; Bhutto asked Babar to describe in his memo how the intelligence services “were directly interfering in the elections, with some specific examples—what she felt, her fears,” Babar recalled.
She ate a light lunch and then climbed into her armored white Land Cruiser to drive to the nearby city of Rawalpindi, where a political rally had been organized in a park called Liaquat Bagh, an irregular oval surrounded by brick walls and metal railings. The park is named for Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first prime minister, who was assassinated there in 1951. A few pine and eucalyptus trees shade its lawn. A banner hung above a raised platform where Bhutto and local leaders of the party she headed, the Pakistan People’s Party, were to speak; it depicted Bhutto and her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a former president and prime minister of Pakistan, who, in 1979, was hanged in a military prison a mile away.
As Bhutto sat on the platform and listened to the opening speeches, her aides’ cell phones began to ring. Sherry Rehman, a senior political and media adviser, leaned over to relay the news: elsewhere in the city, gunmen had killed election workers for Nawaz Sharif, a political rival of Bhutto’s who heads a branch of the Pakistan Muslim League, and who, like her, had served twice as Pakistan’s prime minister. “OK,” Bhutto said. “We must phone him,” to offer sympathy and support. She asked Rehman to remind her to make the call.
She was hoarse from campaigning, but, in Rehman’s estimation, she delivered “one of the most resounding and exceptional speeches” she had made since her return. Bhutto praised local party workers and promised to help the poor and to lead a national struggle against religious extremists.
“Long live Bhutto!” the crowd chanted as she descended from the platform at around 5 p.m. She got into the Land Cruiser, which was surrounded by other party vehicles. There were police patrolling the park, but not as many as Bhutto wanted: she and her aides had petitioned the government for four police vehicles to create a protective phalanx when she traveled by car, but the request had not been met. As the Land Cruiser left the park, the driver crossed a median to turn east onto a city street. Another crowd of chanting supporters swarmed toward her. The vehicle stopped; Bhutto unrolled the sunroof and stood up to wave to them. A clean-shaven man wearing sunglasses and a black vest moved toward her, raised a pistol, and fired. Video footage acquired by a British broadcaster showed that moments later either this man or a second man behind him, who was wearing a white head scarf, apparently detonated a suicide explosive device.