Akshay

India lies in America's blind spot
Emerging world power affects us more each day

Cheryll Barron
Sunday, February 11, 2007

"Everyone in Washington ignores India," wrote veteran geopolitical analyst and State Department watcher Martin Sieff in 1998 after India's second round of nuclear tests. He complained that America, obsessed by small, insignificant countries, was failing to court India and "secure an important ally." Not until November was there a sign of such advice being heeded. The United States agreed to share nuclear technology with the subcontinent, but only after fierce lobbying by rich and prominent Indian Americans, including Bay Area venture capitalists.

America's blind spot about India explains why a $12.2 billion corporate takeover in late January that Europe treated like a scary number on the Richter scale was reported without fanfare and garnered scant comment in U.S. media. Writing in the Independent, the upscale paper of the British left, Hamish McRae -- one of the most sober and respected economics writers for more than 30 years -- said the acquisition signified "a shift of seismic proportions, something far beyond anything that has occurred in our lifetimes."

On Jan. 31, India's Tata group, a conglomerate founded in the 1860s and today controlled by a charitable foundation, bought Corus -- the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker that employs 47,000 people and contains the heart of Industrial Age Britain, the company once known as British Steel. Tata is one-fifth the size of Corus, and the takeover was the biggest foreign purchase ever made by an Indian company. Ratan Tata, the company's chairman and a descendant of a founder who was himself descended from a long line of Parsee priests, said that outbidding a Brazilian rival, Companhia Siderurgica Nacional, had led to "a moment of great fulfillment for India."

Large Indian corporations in industries ranging from pharmaceuticals to software have quietly been growing bolder about snapping up companies in the United States and Europe, and this reflects the steady upward revision of economic forecasts for India, now that its gross domestic product has grown at an average yearly rate of more than 8 percent for four years -- a pace that could reach double figures by the end of this year. The latest projections from Goldman Sachs, the international investment bank, show India's economy overtaking Italy's in size by 2012, France's by 2015 and Britain's by 2016.

Goldman Sachs also expects that while China's economy will be larger than America's by the 2030s, India's could zoom past the United States by 2045. The modest attention that U.S. media paid to Tata and Corus suggests that America only barely acknowledges India's high rank among the fast-rising countries outside the West that were one focus of last month's World Economic Forum in Davos -- "the shifting power equation."

Book publishing trends can be an index of what the educated population of a country considers important.

It has been more than a decade since Indian writers like Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth and Jhumpa Lahiri supplanted Latin American magical realists on U.S. lists of best-selling foreign fiction. Indian cookbooks do well, Bollywood music has for some time been fashionable on university campuses, the Indian-born M. Night Shyamalan has directed Hollywood blockbusters, and yoga is so popular that strains of it are tailored for Americans.

Accelerating in the 1960s, with the New Age philosophizing that came with tie-dyed T-shirts and beads and was just as superficial, the crowd-pleasing Indian cultural exports have satisfied American appetites for aesthetic exoticism. By contrast -- and not only because of an outsourcing boom during a deep recession three years ago -- Indian software companies' ever-greater importance in world trade has caused deep unease as they have graduated from routine coding to systems specification and software architecture.

Recently, The Chronicle reported on a joint UC Berkeley and Duke University study revealing that a quarter of U.S. technology companies created between 1995 and 2004 had at least one foreign founder. But the paper did not record that the study also uncovered an astonishing fact -- that more Indian immigrants were at the helm of U.S. engineering and technology startups over the period than migrants from China, the United Kingdom, Japan and Taiwan combined. Nor did it say that Indian-born entrepreneurs were principal founders of 26 percent of immigrant-led Silicon Valley ventures, just overtaking Chinese and Taiwanese founders, who accounted for 24.4 percent of the total. Yet in the week that these findings were released, The Chronicle splashed across its arts pages a magnificent color spread about the Indian novelist Vikram Chandra and his million-dollar book advance.

Any idea of India as an economic or political power triggers semiconscious prejudices that persist, even though the basis for them has either grown weaker or vanished. Born into the most exalted realization of the Enlightenment ideals of equality and freedom, Americans understandably never quite forget India's centuries-long status as the world's most hierarchical and caste-bound society -- even though modern India, unlike China, has passionately embraced democracy and has struggled for decades to get results from its many versions of affirmative action, making bumpy and slow but still measurable progress.

If the news media had given Tata's coup the attention it deserved, Americans would have learned that this corporation, India's largest after the buyout, has for decades given workers in its company town subsidized housing and electricity, free purified water, hospital care and schooling for children.

Many Americans have resented Indians' traditional pride in their "ancient and spiritual civilization" and read into it -- accurately or not -- an implication that it is superior to the materialistic New World's. But in the last seven years, the subcontinent has been keener to promote a new image as "shining India," the slogan of one political party that pithily conveys the wish of all dynamic contemporary Indians to be seen as thoroughly future-focused. There are Americans who still cannot forgive India for aligning itself for 30 years with the old Soviet Union, even after that Bolshevik invention fell apart, and even though its rump, Russia, now openly prefers China as an ally.

By some estimates, three years from now China and India will together churn out 12 times as many engineers, mathematicians, scientists and technicians as the United States. True, only a small proportion of these are educated to high standards today, but that will improve. Even without any strategic political incentives for treating India as an honored friend -- such as hoping for help with keeping Chinese expansionism in check -- it is impossible to see the United States holding its own in the knowledge economy taking shape without leaning heavily on Indian as well as Chinese workers of many stripes.

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subba

Excellent article Akshay Sir!

I wonder how they blow up the HT India 'superpower' summit thing or the 'India poised' TOI stuff then.

There certainly is some prejudice. Maybe it's our fault?

texasjohn

What is the HT summit, or "India poised" all about? tell me, I don't know...

subba

Texas sir, this 'superpower' and 'India poised' campaigns are being largely conducted by 2 media organizations. Namely HT and TOI.

TOI presently is conducting an 'India poised' irritating campaign as if India is on some threshold of superpower status.

HT held a full scale seminar over 3 days whose theme was 'India the emerging Superpower'. They called over Bill and Hillary Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Deepak Chopra and likes.

Those campaigns got onto a lot of nerves. Mine included frankly. We've been discussing that on the other thread quite a bit.

gunnut

So it's like a self-stroking ego trip conducted by ultra-nationalists?

Got it.

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texasjohn

Subba, allow me to bore you with this little story. My daughter years ago went to school with this kid who was born here, his parents came over to the US as students etc. Very sharp kid, who ended up winning the State spelling bee and was in the news.

I saw the news the next day in HT as "Indian origin whiz wins spelling contest" - all well and good, except this kid had nothing Indian about him - he spoke not a lick of any Indian language, and his mom and dad spoke english at home too. So the HT clip was "technically correct" but realistically nothing Indian about him, just his "origin".

It's true a majority of Americans won't be able to point out India on a map ( Iraq, sadly they can). They do hear about Bangalore though -it's over there, they will tell you!

Jay

English media in India is looking for catchy headlines. If Sunita like to eat samosas that's a scoop news. In the West they have a separate genre of news papers to print this sort of stories, but in India, the main line newspapers like HT, ToI do it.

I remember Indian media crying out loud for Mittal Arcleor deal, as if Mittal steel is a GoI company. The same day Mittal issued a statement distancing his company from India/Indian media. He publicly stated that Mittal steel is an European company with its regd office in Europe and shares European ethos and work culture.

Thats why these days I dont read ToI or HT. I just stick with The Hindu, though they are a little socialist they atleast cover relevant news as-is.

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subba

Gunnut Sir, funny thing is it's NOT the so called ultranationalists.

Texasjohn Sir your point is well taken. That does happen. But this spellbee thing is hardly noticed. It's not in the front page news or something. Even if highlighted, it's relevent to note many "Indian origin' kids win it. Don't take thattoo hard on the Indian media please, even TOI or HT for that matter.

Jay Sir, you're right the 'Hindu' edits are far better than TOI and HT!

texasjohn

I have read The Hindu on line. What I like about them? They call a spade a spade with no garnishments..

highsea

The Corus takeover didn't go unnoticed, it was reported in WSJ and trade journals. It's just that Corus is a European company, and that kind of news just doesn't really make top spot in the mainstream press.

John- do you have any statistics that support your assertion that most Americans can't locate India on a map? This certainly goes against my own experience.

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texasjohn

You must hang out with a high brow crowd!

The people that do seem to know much about India are the servicemen ( no matter what branch). I don't have stats but most blue collar types just don't seem to know or for that matter, really care. Now on the University Campus where I work, most do. So do most college graduates in general, but they are rapidly being overtaken by trade school grads.

highsea

No, I work for a living.

I admit I don't know what they are teaching kids in school these days, and from the quality of discussion I see from younger people on these boards, I am not too impressed. But basic geography is something that was taught every to 5th grader when I was in school, and I don't think I even know anyone that couldn't pick out India on a map.
When it comes to brains and "blue-collar" types, I will put any aerospace machinist against any one of your college kids any time.

Akshay

There is no doubt that the reporting conducted by Indian newspaper media is well below level without proper research & usually marred with trivial or non-relevant details. Even a newspaper as reputed as ToI went about with the news of LN Mittal holding an Indian passport. But still LN Mittal should be thankful for the backing the whole nation put behind him simply for the reason of him being 'Indian-born'. Seldom do nations stand proudly behind their expatriat citizens.

texasjohn

I agree completely!! even my own dauughter and her friends are fairly "geography ignorant" to are large extent. It's gotten pretty bad from my days.


Brains vs. "blue collar"? An old friend of mine Kent, has a small company making military aircraft parts in Arlington,TX with just 20 employees. These guys are amazing. No college degrees, they just know their stuff!

gunnut

Well, aren't some school districts talking about teaching elementary school children about homosexuality? They want to make sure the kids understand that it's normal for some kids to have 2 moms or 2 dads.

Also I read in the newspaper a while back that says the techniques used to boost kids' self-esteem don't seem to work. Apparently some of our public schools spend an hour a day teaching kids to write on a piece of paper phrases like "I'm smart" and "I can achieve anything" to prepare them for real life.