A recently released Transparency International survey lists India as the fourth most corrupt country in the World. Confirming what we always suspected, the poll states that “In Afghanistan, Nigeria, Iraq and India more than 50% of people said they had paid a bribe in the past year”.
This, along with the second tranche of tapes containing the conversations from the lady who runs our banana republic, reminded me how much the Indian narrative has changed in the past twenty years. I can chart the following shifts in the Indian Narrative:
a) When Dr. Manmohan Singh and Narsimha Rao began first hesitant steps towards liberalization, the consensus was that India was fast degenerating, and perhaps would trace the steps of Russia and Argentina in being unable to manage its finances.
b) The political instability of 1996-1999, and the ostracization by the World community after the nuclear explosions of 1998, made many wonder whether India would veer back towards the ‘Hindu rate of growth’.
c) The ‘India Shining’ years of 2000-2004 and the near-double digit growth that occurred during the early years of UPA-1, made many believe that India was gradually reclaiming its true place in the World order, that of a superpower. The nuclear deal with the US cemented this belief, along with the global acquisitions done by the companies from the Tata group and the Mittals
.
Today, however, the narrative has rapidly changed again. India seems to be unraveling and slipping in a quagmire of corruption. Many of us today perceive India as a fundamentally flawed, corrupt society that is run by mostly incompetent and corrupt politicians to serve and protect the interests of crony and rent-seeking capitalists, a society that has forgotten that an overwhelming majority (~77% as per some estimates) survives on less than twenty rupees (~40 USD cents) per day, and a society that lives in the most dangerous parts of the World and continues to ignore deep-seated internal security problems.
Given the arrow of history, I am sure this narrative would change again – I only hope things don’t get worse from here.
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