As
India Goes Global The Public
Goes Private And The State
Becomes A Marketplace
By Aseem Shrivastava
30 March, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Picture
this. At an air-show in Los Angeles one of the biggest arms manufacturers
in the world, British Aerospace, invites Mr. Bill Gates of Microsoft
to have a go at flying one of the latest models of their Hawk fighter
aircraft. Would the American media respond by flashing front-page images
of a beaming Bill Gates waving to supporters as he was entering the
cockpit of the Hawk, following them up with adulatory reports describing
the elevated feelings felt by the unexpected new pilot as he conquered
the sound barrier? Or would the event not generate a national scandal
that a private businessman accepted the invitation to fly a military
aircraft, which ordinarily can only be tested by pilots on public duty?
More than likely the latter
possibility would transpire. However, what happened in Bangalore last
month was another story, as the Indian national media fell to new depths
of celebrity “journalism”.
Corporate Americans, having
grown up in a world run by car salesmen, will go to any lengths to sell
what they must. Thus it came as no surprise when Lockheed Martin –
one of the biggest defense contractor firms in the world – invited
Mr. Tata into the cockpit of the F-16 Falcon at the Bangalore Air Show
in February: the Indian Air Force was, after all, expanding its multi-role
combat aircraft fleet and the American company was competing in the
Indian arms bazaar with the likes of Sukhoi of Russia. To let corporate
India’s leading icon of the season have a go at their merchandise
must have seemed like an obvious sales ploy. (Would they have tried
this gimmick in their own land?)
A private fantasy was gratified.
Mr. Tata’s dream of flying a fighter jet came true.
Not only India’s national
English language dailies, even the vernacular press, flashed front page
pictures of India’s oldest civilian pilot, waving like a rock-star
to fans as he stepped into the cockpit of the fighter aircraft. The
Times of India gushed that “Tata group chairman Ratan Tata soared
to new heights”. Delhi’s Hindustan Times said that he “had
a wonderful time.” The Indian Express said that Mr. Tata had “a
terrific, terrific ride.” Even the ordinarily sober The Hindu
said that Mr.Tata had an “exhilarating experience.”
All this quoted without the
dimmest trace of irony. When boys get their toys, it is indeed “wonderful”
and “exhilarating”. It is evident from the unanimity of
the reports that Mr.Tata indeed had a jolly good time up in the high
skies.
The most remarkable fact
of all – the corporate boss of a leading private concern playing
with military gadgetry, normally accessible only to men and women in
public uniform – went unobserved by our free press. In the day
of “Corporate Executive Officers”, when businessmen are
taking seats of pride in Parliaments and political leaders are more
than happy to see described what they do as a “job”, not
to mention holding shares in companies, how does it matter if ancient
public norms are blithely flouted and one of the most precious distinctions
in the annals of democracy is quietly erased?
Public morality has gone
corporate long back. The public has been colonized by the private ever
since the era of manic privatization was thrust upon us. The joke is
on us, the on-looking public, who don’t seem to realize that the
time-honored separation of the private and the public spheres is an
inconvenient anachronism, an obstacle to mounting prosperity which should
be kicked off the growth path.
The all-important distinction
between the private and the public realms – dear in the past not
only to democracies but to all self-respecting polities since the days
of Greece and Rome – is being openly undermined in India, in vulgar
mimicry of the successful pioneering trail blazed by corporate totalitarianism
in that most famous of all democracies: the United States of America.
If it works there, it must be good, and thus worthy of emulation.
Why reducing the public to
the private is deadly
But why anyway is it a good
thing to retain the distinction between the private and the public realms?
Haven’t we been delivered the technocratic wisdom often enough
from the highest pulpits that running a government is essentially no
different from managing a company? So what’s wrong with it if
men and women are corporate executives one day and ministers or bureaucrats
the next, as long as they are honest (sic) and capable? What’s
wrong, for that matter, with the government making an open offer to
the Tatas that it was willing to use public money to help it financially
in its recent purchase of the British steel company Corus Inc (even
as it complains about lack of resources when it comes to allocating
more funds for development programs for women and children)? Or with
the government declaring Special Economic Zones (SEZs) as public utility
services under the Industrial Disputes Act and, with a happy conflation
of the private with the public interest, making strikes and collective
bargaining illegal, while enabling contract labor?
Well, if nothing is wrong
with all this, why don’t we campaign for an amendment of the Constitution,
and make it the most urgent formal task of the government to enable
corporations to maximize profits, enrich themselves (in the name of
development via the long dysfunctional trickle-down effect) or, more
simply, just legalize graft? Indeed, our government has been doing precisely
that, offering sops to corporates via tax breaks, SEZs and the like,
obsessed as it is with the maximization of the rate of national economic
growth – to the effective exclusion of virtually all social goals,
including development – for years now.
Listening to the chorus of
applause from the mainstream media both in India and in the West, it
would seem that this democracy has overcome its erstwhile socialist
infantilism and finally matured into corporate adulthood – allowing,
as is only in the fitness of things, men and women of eminence to occupy
top corporate positions today and high offices in government tomorrow.
In fact, in the age of (An)globalization, well-connected members of
our ruling elites have long been in the habit of changing offices globally
– having manned the upper echelons of imperial projects in the
offices of the World Bank and the IMF in Washington virtually being
a prior qualification to be at the national political helm in New Delhi,
a custom which is finely attuned to the needs of our imperial masters.
What could be wrong with
such an efficient arrangement? Free and fair elections are after all
not fundamentally different from free and fair markets. We choose our
leaders in one place, our cars and favorite magazines in another. And
we expect our leaders to entertain us, just as we find amusement in
driving fast cars (thanks to Vijay Mallya New Delhi’s Rajpath,
which once hosted political protests, might well see a F-1 race soon)
and watching thrilling films. Such is the lure and charm of a Laloo
Prasad Yadav. So what’s wrong if Ratan Tata, the corporate Pope,
is also seen as a rock-star with all the star quality that comes with
the role? Only sour grapes and petty envy would bicker about such a
thing.
Is it? If the government
becomes a business, then profits and growth obviously become its overriding
pursuits. What then? Who is allowed to criticize this noble project
and all it inevitably involves, especially today? What happens to human
rights, to labor standards, to environmental regulations, to tax laws,
to social commitments and political promises for distributive justice?
To the Constitution itself? In fact, one is entitled to ask, what happens
to law and public morality? Shall we simply open up the market for justice
too? Shall we experiment with private judicial systems in addition to
privatizing the executive branch and the legislature (public offices
are already auctioned in so many parts of the world)? In short, shall
we just dispense with public liberty altogether and write into law a
formal “corpocracy” which finally prises open all political
markets, legitimizes private tyranny and inducts it into the visible
mainstream of the affairs of state?
But somewhere, the line between
public and private will have to be drawn, if only because in the absence
of a robust public realm, private parties – driven by the will
to power – will fight their way to war with each other, at our
expense. (They already do, even in the presence of strong governments.
So how much more so in their absence, unrestrained by any law or public
morality whatsoever!) Society will not survive for long under such circumstances.
Among so many other things,
isn’t democratic government there precisely because the unrestrained
pursuit of private commercial interest leaves no time or room for worrying
about matters which concern everyone, not just a minority constituency
of privilege? BAE and Lockheed Martin can’t help themselves from
selling arms across the world. It is their stock-in-trade, their line
of business. And the imperatives of competitive capitalism will not
brook any complacency, the reason that public restraint is necessary.
To cut costs and grow their market shares corporations will scour the
earth, loot indigenous peoples, pollute air and water and slog pliant
female labor for 12 or 16 hours a day. Without public restraint what
is there to prevent them from committing such crimes and hasten the
end of civilized society itself?
Laws are there to protect
public and individual liberty against oppression by those who hold power.
This is why the rule of law is rightly regarded as one of the enduring
achievements of civilized humanity. If it is threatened today –
by imperial gluttony and other varieties of barbarism on the one hand
and a relentless, unmitigated, corporately nurtured, state-sanctioned
greed on the other – the answer is not to allow classes and social
groups who hold power to further consolidate their influence. Both courage
and wisdom actually lie on the side of challenging and restraining such
power in the larger interest. Indeed, it may turn out – given
the emerging facts on climate change and other looming environmental
crises – that our very survival as a species might come to hinge
on the evolution of a new public ethic which finds it within its imagination
and character to do so.
In this task the media can
be an accomplice or an obstacle. What we have seen so far makes the
media resemble nothing so much as a disheveled theatre stage occupied
by a bunch of image-toting lackeys of shadowy moneyed men in pin-striped
suits, their shotguns held not too far from the heads of editors. They
have monopolized the mike, carrying on their petty private squabbles
within range of public audibility, putting the public to sleep with
their tabloid perversions, while quietly conspiring to keep off-limits
any authentic discussion of issues of genuine public significance.
It is time that the newspapers
and the TV channels woke up from their somnolence and put an end to
the charade of glamorizing the rapid encroachments on the best traditions
of democracy. The Lockheed-Martins, BAEs and Tatas cannot be expected
to behave with a sense of public responsibility. They would not be where
they are had they had that. They have to be exposed and restrained.
It is impossible without the media.
If freedom matters to us,
we must heed Rousseau: “A free people obey laws and laws only,
and it is by the force of the laws that it does not obey men.”
Aseem Shrivastava is an independent writer. He can
be reached at [email protected].
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