Hindi-Chini bye-bye

The growth-centric regime in Delhi has a lot to learn from China. Because China is at the peak of its power and influence. And India is much too far behind 

Mohan Guruswamy Beijing

Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram sounded a little noted warning a few days ago, but in Beijing the ticker strip on television played it so frequently that you couldn't help but notice. Chidambaram warned that the “gap between India and China is growing.” Well, it's no ordinary gap. China's per capita income is now almost $2,400 and is nearly thrice that of India. GDP projections indicate that this gap is now set to widen even more and it will be at least a decade before that gap narrows a bit. And it won't be till we are halfway past this century before that gap closes.

It will be worth our while to remember that when India and China went to war in 1962 China's per capita income was less than half of India's! At that time it was believed that Chinese and Indian military power were asymmetrical. The asymmetry is now total. China is at the peak of its power and influence. We are left well behind. Truly, as of now, it's Hindi-Chini bye-bye.

Given this reality, Comrade Prakash Karat should not worry too much about China being encircled, but could afford some thought to our present predicament. The popular mood in that country is buoyant and there is an air of assertive confidence sweeping over it. We have seen that mood making its presence felt in the counter protests to the Tibetan protests, not only in the Tibetan regions of China but all over the world where the Olympic flame went. Nevertheless, China's triumphant aswamedha yagna was frequently challenged and it is with some glee that its internal dissensions were spotlighted by the dominant western media. The Chinese hierarchy has not taken this too kindly and the indignation has flowed down to the streets not just in China but all over the world, wherever the Chinese live in some numbers.

This is because the Chinese of all political persuasions, and there are a few about, take much pride in the great strides their nation has made. The worst kept secret in China is that it is Lee Kuan Yew and not Mao Zedong who inspires the nation now. When I suggested to a Chinese friend that it is time that the giant picture of Mao that benignly smiles down Tiananmen Square should be replaced by either that of Lee or even Deng, he just remarked that the time was not yet ripe for it. Just as a Russian will tell you about Lenin's embalmed corpse in Red Square.

It has been a little less than a year since I last visited China. The changes are evident all over. Beijing airports brand new Terminal 3 is a sight to behold. It is so huge that it has a train that swishes passengers from the arrival hall to the baggage claim area. It is not just grand, but efficient, spacious and clean. As you leave it, a swirl of flyovers swiftly transport you into the dense traffic of downtown Beijing. In terms of experience it is at the other end of the scale when compared to leaving Delhi.

Three weeks ago in Hyderabad I saw thousands of people swarming in to see the new airport, the likes of which India has not seen before. Beijing's Terminal 3 is many times larger and grander. It will be adequate even five decades from now. But all our new airports are so timid in scale and vision that they will almost definitely be inadequate within a decade. And if Comrades Sitaram Yechury and Gurudas Gupta had their way, we wouldn't even have that.

Its not that the great changes taking place in China are confined to Beijing alone because of the Olympics; as they are expected to do in Delhi on a somewhat different scale due to the infinitely miniscule Commonwealth Games. It is the other way around. The staging of Olympics is the icing on the cake celebrating the arrival of China as a world power, whereas the Commonwealth Games is the entire cake for a small number of Indians to gorge on. And boy, how they are gorging themselves!

In China, the Olympics are a celebration of a great national triumph over poverty, backwardness and ignorance, and a reassertion of national spirit and will. The Commonwealth Games are a gigantic fraud and evidence that business as usual is getting bigger. More Indians are poised to become billionaires, but otherwise it is life as usual for the masses.

Last week Pallavi Aiyar, The Hindu's Beijing correspondent, took me for a quick trip into one of Beijing's hutongs, as its traditional areas are known. The hutongs of the inner city once consisted of homes of the rich and aristocratic like the Chandni Chowk neighborhood was in the days of the Mughals. After the 1947 seizure of power by the communists, the mansions were turned over to the people and many families were crowded into homes that housed the aristocratic and wealthy families. Soon the hutongs became crowded slums.

In the past few years, as China embarked on its great reconstruction, the hutongs were emptied and modern apartment blocks were built in their place. Now very few remain and they are being gradually taken over by the wealthy and getting gentrified. Today, the hutongs are interspersed with the old and new occupants. The Beijing municipality is frenziedly working on sprucing them up before the golden hordes arrive in their Bermuda shorts with digital cameras.

The important thing is that the changes which entail a good bit of knocking down are being done with the active participation of local communities. In China, every small cluster of habitation is organised into a danwei, akin to the new RWAs now springing up all over Delhi. But there is a difference. The danwei is the basic unit of the government whereas Delhi's RWAs are unions to exert pressure on an extremely reluctant and lethargic local government to provide the most basic of services. True to the spirit of our competitive democracy, there are competing RWAs now and many a dispute over legitimacy is pending in our overcrowded court system.

The danweis exist all over China, from the smallest villages to the great metropolises. This extension of government right down to wherever people live is China's great administrative advantage. In contrast, India's much vaunted steel frame is just a cage to contain popular aspirations and demands.

Now contemplate restoring old Delhi with its grand havelis and water concourses. Relocating occupants into new housing based on logical notions of value and equity is next to impossible. What little that is attempted is quickly subverted by the bureaucrat-politician nexus as we saw in the recent case of the NDMC's canteen contractor who was found to be the owner of hundreds of plots meant for people to be evacuated from slums and unsafe buildings. This fellow incidentally was caught because he had a fondness for good cars with vanity number plates and was literally shouting from parking lots to be caught.

On an earlier trip, I visited a remote rural area in Shanxi province where every village had a governing committee that not only managed day-to-day affairs but also made long term plans and strategised their implementation. In one village, I saw maps of future land use patterns as the village contemplated trebling the per capita income in a decade. In these plans, wheat fields made way to apple orchards, land was reserved for mining sand and coal, and new homes were being built for those being relocated.

On a trip into rural UP last month, I passed through village after village where there was no evidence of any government. Garbage was strewn all around and plastic bags clogged the drains. The drains in turn had overflowed onto the narrow streets and a nauseating stench was a part of everyday life. Traditional self government institutions have disappeared all over India and nothing effective has replaced them.

Yet, public administration by way of salaries and pensions cost us over Rs 195,000 crore last year and is growing at about 14 per cent a year. This is the major component of the services element of the GNP, of whose growth we are so proud about. The State employs over 24 million whereas the IT sector employs less than one million. The irony of an unindustrialised country taking the contours of a post industrial economy seems to miss our Cambridge PhD prime minister!

On the flight to Beijing I had interesting company. One was Indian Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon who was making a quiet visit to Beijing to co-ordinate efforts to move over from the sidelines of the G-5 into the great halls of the G-8. But more interesting was Mukesh Gupta, the Gurgaon-based Director of TPV Technology Limited, a Taiwan company manufacturing LCD displays with all its production capacity located in China. TPV is an OEM manufacturer of LCD displays, increasingly used in flat panel TVs and computers replacing bulky CRT monitors. TPV LCD displays are used by branded manufacturers like Samsung, LG and Sony.

Gupta had an interesting take on how the manufacturing base of their business got centered in China. It seems that unlike India, China had a tariff system where the import duties were much lower on the finished product than on components and raw material. This encouraged the establishment of companies focused on manufacturing components and raw material. Thus, today, China has achieved backward integration in many sectors for global scale manufacturing. LCD displays, Gupta says, can never be manufactured in India, because the government in its wisdom levies practically no duties on fully assembled LCD displays, but all imported materials and components that go into making them are heavily taxed. So the question is, how come a party commissar makes a more enlightened decision than a finance minister who sports a Harvard MBA?

Every trip to China leaves one a bit depressed. We can exult over our democracy and its vibrancy. The Amar Singhs and Mayawatis are ample testimony to it. The trouble with our vibrant democracy is that it cannot make enlightened decisions, let alone keep the streets clean. Sixty years after independence, nearly 35 per cent of Indians are illiterate, when the Constitution promised its eradication within ten years. Don't tell me that a trillion dollar economy cannot put a school within one kilometer of every habitation and put tables and benches and blackboards in all of them. Yet, a quarter of our villages have no access to schools.

And the supreme irony is that while Mao is truly dead and buried in China, he lives in the hinterlands of India. And now Mao has found a home in Nepal also!