Unlike last year when the Pakistanis ruined his party in Kargil, the Prime Minister left for his vacation earlier this week in peace. Also, possibly, a bit smug since his departure for the hills coincided with the publication of the list of the 50 most powerful Asians by Asiaweek, the Hong Kong-based newsweekly. The magazine picked Vajpayee as the ideal choice to lead an Asian dream cabinet, a fact duly front-paged by all of us.
You cannot grudge Atal Behari Vajpayee this honour for, as Asiaweek writer Roger Mitton says, “anyone who could lead India can lead the world”. He compliments Vajpayee for handling the “terrifying nightmare” of running a country like India with “extraordinary restraint and astuteness”. The praise is very well deserved, particularly as it does not mention the one quality that sets Vajpayee so far apart, and above the rest of the powerpack in Asia: personal credibility built over half a century in public life, most of it in the opposition. But it would be silly for the rest of us Indians to ride on that usual self-congratulatory mood because what the Asiaweek survey says between the lines is something quite different. And sobering.
While early on we only latched on to the Vajpayee-the-ideal-prime minister aspect of the survey, we missed out a very significant point: that power equations are changing so fast in the world, and in Asia, that telecom and media tai pan Li Ka-shing has topped the list of most powerful men, leaving behind the great Jiang Xemin. While corporate power taking precedence over dictatorial power of somebody presiding over a military, economic and scientific superpower is enough of a change in the old paradigm, think of the industry Li Ka-shing, who started business with plastic flowers, draws his power from.
It is mainly his mobile phone business. The curiously named Orange brand that stares down at you from hoardings in London, Hong Kong, Bombay, almost everywhere. As if that is not enough, his son Richard Li takes the 14th spot, just ahead of Azim Premji, with his Pacific century Cyberworks. Three of the top ten in the list are businessmen and the way power equations are changing around the world, by next year the figure could jump to five, particularly if the new economy shares recover on the stock markets.
Just how does one justify putting corporate czars ahead of national leaders in a power list? After all, no matter what the power of a businessman, a political leader has armies, exchequers, mobs, the power of the laws, judiciary, the works. The magazine’s editors also raise that question in all seriousness but point out that even businessmen now influence our lives in many different ways, from shaping politics to environmental policies.
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Where does India figure in that new equation? One Vajpayee in the top 10 is as much a tribute to his personal image and credibility as to the resilience of Indian democracy and the rising Asian awe for it. The fundamental presumption in the making of this dream cabinet is that it is governing in a democratic dispensation, which is why you need a Vajpayee to run it instead of a Jiang Xemin. It may, however, be difficult to imagine a “democratic” cabinet functioning with Zhu Rongji as Vajpayee’s deputy, Goh Tok Chong as his defence minister, Kim Dae Jung as foreign minister and, now this one should put the fear of god in your hearts, Mahathir Mohammed as home minister. You would suspect Vajpayee would prefer Advani, Fernandes and Jaswant any day. None of these gentlemen, however, reach anywhere near the top 50 list. They don’t even figure among the probables for the coming year. In fact, the other three Indians in the list are all businessmen: Azim Premji, Dhirubhai Ambani and Narayana Murthy.
Surely a nation with our size, economy and power could have done better. The choice of Vajpayee as the ideal prime minister also obscures the hard truth that he figures in the list at number nine, behind, besides others, Idei Nobuyuki, the CEO of the Sony Corpn., both the Kims (Dae Jung and Jong Il), Abdurrahman Wahid and Son Masayoshi, the Softbank founder. If only we had a more focussed, liberalised economic regime, if only we had given the world a little more reason to have faith in future, the basic potential and size of our country would have given many more slots in that list and pushed a prime minister like Vajpayee ahead of at least the odd thug like the North Korean dictator.
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Don’t miss out on some more interesting features. Vajpayee, at 76, is the third oldest man in the list. Most of the others are bachchas in comparison. Chen Shui-bian (No. 6), the newly-elected president of Taiwan, is just 49, pretty much in keeping with the global trend now. Masayoshi is 43, and, if that gives you a complex, Richard Li was born on November 8, 1966. So it will be a clear six months before he will hit 34.
This is one area where we are simply not catching up with the rest of the world. Looking around, Vajpayee and most of his (Indian) cabinet colleagues might find themselves trapped in a generation gap with most other world leaders they talk to. Clinton will retire at 53 as a two-term president. Blair is young enough to produce a child without the help of any new technologies in reproductive surgery or mysterious snake soups or other eastern potions. Putin, at 47, plays karate like a champion. Leaderships in the rest of the world, particularly Asia, are getting younger by the day. Where are we headed?
Self-congratulation comes easy to us and right now we’re quite happy to celebrate Vajpayee’s success here. But looking at the list you wonder how far back India has fallen in the Asian power stakes. Several Asian corporations now seem to have more power than our entire country and if we feel smug just because we are doing so well in the information technology sector, a reality check is urgently required. At the annual Asia Vision 21 conference organised by Harvard University in Hong Kong last week, a senior professor underlined a sobering comparison: Nearly 1,60,000 people engaged in high-tech industry and business in and around Bangalore produce business worth $2 billion a year.
Approximately that many domestic servants mostly expats like Filipinos and Thais also generate exactly that much wealth in a year!
What this indicates is the fact that even now most of our software exports are confined to relatively low-tech, low-value areas where revenues come from volumes, a bit like a high-tech equivalent of our kachcha-baniyan exports in the garment business. Profitable, but dangerous, because one day the Chinese will catch up with us. Just wait till a few millions more of them can learn English.
It is, therefore, dangerous to sit back in comfort just because a Vajpayee wins high praise or Premji and Narayan Murthy signal to the world the arrival of India in the new economy or if a Dhirubhai continues to grow even in the old economy. As in most other fields, these aren’t exceptional individuals who have excelled despite the handicaps placed on them by our systems, bureaucracy, inefficiencies and corruption. What we need to read closely is not just the praise so deservingly heaped on Vajpayee, but the larger message of this list. That if we do not wake up soon enough, the rest, particularly the “yellow” Asia, are rapidly leaving us far behind.
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