South Asia and Globalisation: Book Review
Sukla Sen
Globalization and South Asia: Multidimensional
Perspectives, edited by Achin Vanaik; Academy of Third
World Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia and Manohar
Publications, New Delhi, 2004; pages 362, Rs.745.
'Globalisation' is a hotly contested terrain. It
evokes a bewildering variety of views and opinions as
regards its meaning, implications, prospects and
desirability. While the term itself gained currency in
the eighties, it became very much a part of the common
vocabulary with the path breaking massive protests
against globalisation led by a wide spectrum loose
coalition - comprising anarchists, socialists,
feminists, environmentalists, trade unionists, rights
activists fighting for gay-lesbians, homeless,
migrants, indigenous peoples and so on and so forth
from all over the world, in Seattle on November 30,
1999, when protesters blocked delegates' entrance to
WTO meetings. The protests forced the cancellation of
the opening ceremonies and lasted the length of the
meeting until December 3. To tackle the protesters the
city was put under curfew. The Seattle protests were
preceded by a string of similar protests on the
preceding June 18 in a number of cities around the
world, particularly London and Eugene, Oregon. But
Seattle was unmatched in terms of scale, the element
of surprise and, most of all, dramatic effect.
Consequently it is the Seattle 1999, which brought
both 'globalisation' and 'anti-globalisation' to the
centre stage of popular discourse.
Many analysts have tried to present globalisation,
rather bland and decontextualised, as essentially a
process of global integration, just not economic but
also cultural and political, led by higher and higher
levels of international trade and facilitated by the
recent upsurge in communication technology - in the
process lowering down the political barriers erected
by the nation states coming in the way. Claims have
been made that globalisation commenced, in fact,
centuries back. Seen from this angle, some have traced
it to antiquity. A section of the anti-globalisers
have also fallen for this line. For many of them,
however, Christopher Columbus is the first globaliser.
Any meaningful exploration of 'globalisation' must,
nevertheless, examine it in its relationship with its
dialectical opposite 'anti-globalisation'. Otherwise
the defining specificities of 'globalisation', or the
current phase of globalisation - if one so pleases,
get either missed out or severely understated.
Globalisation, for that reason, needs to be viewed
also in relationship with the rise and rise of
neo-liberalism through the eighties to hegemonic
heights and the consequent decline of the welfare
states along with the foundational creed -
Keynesianism - which had arisen as the grand response
to the Great Depression, the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the Warsaw Pact by early nineties and, of
course, the emergence of the WTO in the mid-nineties
as the tailor made instrument to radically
revise/upgrade the rules of the game for its
unobstructed onward march. While the radically
expanded and expanding operations of the TNCs and
hugely augmented volumes of finance capital flowing
across national borders constitute two of the
fundamental markers of the process, the giant strides
made in the recent years in the fields of information
technology and communication systems have played a
vital role in shaping up the things the way they are.
In the specific Indian context, 'globalisation'
remains inextricably intertwined with 'economic
reforms', which made its tentative entry as the
acknowledged official creed in the mid-eighties under
the premiership of Rajiv Gandhi - the self-proclaimed
harbinger of the 'twenty first century', and picked up
inexorable momentum in the early nineties, in the wake
of the severe balance of payment crisis, under
Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh, goaded and monitored
by the IMF and World Bank. This symbiotic intimacy is
perhaps best captured in the fairly popular acronym,
LPG - Liberalisation, Privatisation, Globalisation.
The volume under review is, as it appears, virtually
the verbatim reproduction of the proceedings of a
four-day symposium, held in 2001, on 'Globalisation
and South Asia' organised by the Academy of Third
World Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia in collaboration
with the Indian Social Institute, New Delhi. The first
two sessions covered the economics of globalisation,
in the case of India, and took the form of panel
discussions involving speakers both supportive and
critical. The remaining sessions dealt with all other
aspects led by one introductory speaker and followed
by an open floor discussion. The main speakers were:
Arvind Virmani, Arun Kumar, Sanjay Baru, Prabhat
Patnaik, Bibek Debroy, Jayati Ghosh, I mukherjee, P
Sahadevan, C.P. Chandrasekhar, Abhijit Sen, Praful
Bidwai, Mahesh Rangarajan, Mohan Rao, Krishna Kumar,
Harish Khare, Ritu Menon, Rajeev Bhargava, Sumit
Sarkar, and Achin Vanaik. Closing remarks were
delivered by Mushirul Hassan and Father Louis Prakash.
Consequently the style is free flowing and
conversational. The book is avowedly meant to serve as
a basic text for the college and university teachers
and students. It is to cater also to the broader
readership engaged with the issue. As a sort of
affirmation of the informal style, it does not contain
any bibliography, references or footnotes. Nor there
is any formal and elaborate introduction to the
subject itself by the editor.
While India, for very understandable reasons, remains
the central focus, the impact of globalisation on
other major constituents of South Asia viz. Nepal, Sri
Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh have also been dealt
with. The most remarkable aspect of the design of the
book is that it covers an extremely wide range of
topics, just not the economic ones, in order to
explore the implications and impacts of globalisation.
The array of speakers, representing again a wide range
of ideological positions, is, it goes without saying,
highly impressive. It is this very impressiveness,
however, makes one take note of the absence of Vandana
Shiva and Arundhati Roy.
The first session, with the first four speakers on the
panel, went into 'The New Economic Reforms' in India.
It was quite a lively and informative one with intense
interactions between the audience and the panellists.
Virmani, the first speaker, quite forcefully pitched
for 'reforms' and globalisation based on a brief
survey, linked to our real life experiences, of the
major failures of India's economic performance and
governance since Independence. His policy
prescriptions included downsizing of government,
dismantling of PSUs, increased (economic) competition
- both internal and external, and, rather
interestingly, enactment of a law ensuring right to
information to the citizens. He also made out that FDI
does not mean only capital; it comes bundled with
technology and management practices as well, which
casts a positive spell on the whole economy through
the process of diffusion. Radically raised level of
economic growth focused on productive employment
generation, for him, holds the key to salvation.
Evidently, hardly anybody would quarrel with the goal
of faster economic growth or employment generation -
at least publicly. So it is not the goal but the means
that remained the bone of contention. Of the other
three speakers, Sanjay Baru was generally supportive
of his line, while Arun Kumar and Prabhat Patnaik
countered. Kumar made a couple of interesting points.
He equated commencement of globalisation with the
onset of colonisation. He also claimed that the black
market transactions constitute a very large part of
Indian economy makes it specifically vulnerable to the
allurements and pressures of globalisation. In an
unregulated, or 'free', market - where one dollar has
one vote, he made out that the marginalized get more
marginalized to the advantage of the wealthy and hence
powerful. Patnaik pointed out that free flow of
finance capital, or more specifically 'hot money' in
the form of speculative capital, is a major
characteristic of the globalisation process. And it is
the prospect of sudden flight of this capital, huge in
quantum, with the attendant prospects of economic
collapse make the 'national' governments, willy-nilly,
toe the line dictated by foreign capital. According to
Patnaik, if national sovereignty is the major casualty
of globalisation, then defence of the nation state has
got to emerge as the rallying point for the fight
against globalisation. Both Kumar and Patnaik pointed
out that pre-Independence India, with virtually no
tariff barrier, registered a measly growth rate of
about 1.5% per annum. But the array of official
statistics, cited during the deliberations, indicating
an impressive rise in growth rate, and also reduction
in poverty level, since eighties, and more
particularly nineties, evidently put them on the back
foot. Patnaik, however, tried to extricate himself by
expressing his scepticism regarding the official data.
While the exchanges that followed were extremely
lively and enlightening, what strikes one in the face
is that no one for once referred to HDI in the course
of assessing the impacts of globalisation and reforms
on the Indian economy. Even granting that there will
always be a phase gap between an economic measure and
its impact translated in terms of HDI, the total
silence on this score on all sides remains, however,
somewhat baffling.
The opening speaker for the next session dealing
specifically with the WTO was Bibek Debroy. He gave a
very elaborate and comprehensive presentation on the
history and the rather complex functioning of the WTO.
He quite lucidly brought out how the WTO was brought
into being as the successor to the GATT with a far
enlarged domain, and as an institution as against mere
agreements, through and as the culmination of the
Uruguay Round of negotiations. He made out a strong
case that while bullies will remain bullies, a
multilateral institution like the WTO is any time much
preferable for the weaker players as compared to any
bilateral dealings. The other speaker Jayati Ghosh
differed on this score. She claimed that the WTO
agreements, and for that matter the whole system, are
intrinsically loaded against the weaker nations.
However, on the question of whether India should walk
out there was no clear-cut answer. Ghosh suggested
that India should make use of such threats as a
bargaining chip. On the issue of South-South
cooperation also the two panellists differed. Debroy
denied that there was any homogenous South, or for
that matter, North. Hence alliances or blocks, within
the WTO, have to be issue specific cutting across
imagined borders. However, not all were convinced that
such transient blocks can effectively serve Indian
interests. The overwhelming sentiment remained that in
spite of internal heterogeneity the divide between the
South and the North is a real one and needs to be
properly recognised as such. Jayati Ghosh suggested
that further rounds of WTO negotiations, where the
underdeveloped nations are by and large hardly any
match for the developed ones, must be blocked. The
hope of gaining advantage by the weaker countries
through renegotiations, as regards agriculture and
garments trade in particular, is only a mirage. In
response to the question whether the WTO would enhance
the prospects for foreign investments, Ghosh pointed
out that the total value of remittances in the
nineties were three times the total value of all
foreign capital inflow put together. No one, however,
addressed the question why the developed nations take
the initiative when the WTO is preferable to bilateral
dealings from the point of view of the weaker nations.
The next four sessions, each led by a single main
speaker, dealt with in good details in a broadly
similar fashion the cases of India's four major
neighbours - Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and
Bangladesh. While presentations on Nepal and Sri
Lanka, by I Mukherjee and P Sahadevan respectively,
concentrated almost exclusively on these two
countries, with references to India only for the
purpose of comparison, both C P Chandrasekhar, on
Pakistan, and A Sen, on Bangladesh, straddled the
larger canvas of South Asia as a whole and, to an
extent, the globe. Chandrasekhar remarked that
accumulation of large surpluses, deposited in the
international banking system, as an outcome of the oil
shocks of 73-74 and 78-80 played a major role in
initiating the commencement of globalisation,
characterised by large flows of finance capital. He
also brought out that the liberalisation-globalisation
for these countries was broadly a two-phased process.
The first phase commenced in the eighties, with the
gradual elimination of quantitative restrictions on
imports. It is only during the second phase, in the
nineties, the tariff barrier was radically brought
down. Sen, in his presentation, also underscored the
basic similarities in the globalisation pattern of
these countries with significantly raised rates of
growth since the eighties in sharp contrast with the
rest of the world. However, in the nineties the
increments in growth rates over the previous decade
were rather small. Pakistan was the sole exception,
which suffered very substantial fall in growth rate
during the nineties. Sahadevan had earlier pointed out
that in Sri Lanka the process had been initiated in
the seventies. Notwithstanding these broad
similarities, however, all these four countries have
their own specificities, which were brought out by the
speakers. Sen made a number of interesting points. He
brought out that market liberalisation by and large
improved the terms of trade in favour of agriculture.
He, the first among all the speakers, talked of HDI.
Sen also drew attention to the much larger roles
played by the NGOs, aided by international funding
organisations, in the economic development of
Bangladesh.
In what can be termed as the third section of the
book, the rest of the speakers, each eminent in one's
own field, dealt with the impacts of
globalisation/liberalisation in the fields of science
and technology; environment; health; education; media;
feminist publishing; culture; communalism and
international relations. The format remained the same.
The presentations made by Bidwai, on science and
technology, and Rangarajan, on environment, demand
special mention for being extremely well informed. And
Sarkar, on communalism, and Vanaik, on international
relations, stand out for their treatments of certain
fundamental issues and concepts. Sarkar points out
that there is a strong but extremely complex
relationship between communalism and globalisation.
This is by no means a straightforward, simple, linear
one despite certain evidences of congruence. He also
quite emphatically brought out the retrograde face of
nationalism, specifically in the Indian context with
reference to the North East and Kashmir. Vanaik
claimed that transnationalisation of economic and
social relations is an integral element of capitalism
itself and thereby capitalist globalisation as well.
He also traced the emergence of the modern nation
states to very substantive separation between
politics, and ideology, and economy as a defining
aspect of capitalism as contrasted to all
pre-capitalist forms requiring direct coercive
intervention by the state for extraction of economic
surpluses from the labouring classes. Hence, he claims
that transnationalisation and nation states are the
two faces of the selfsame capitalism operating on a
global scale based on the principle of combined and
uneven development. So there is no withering away of
the states. If the economic functions of the states
have been undermined to an extent then their
political/coercive functions have been strengthened to
push ahead the globalisation/ liberalisation agenda.
He also posited here the quite remarkable thesis of
five elements of security, of which international
relations is one, and seven fundamental problems,
global in nature, confronting the humankind.
It is this third section going beyond the restricted
realm of economics and delving deep into the various
related fields covering a wide spectrum has added a
unique dimension to this volume. Another unique
feature is the very valuable contributions made by the
participants from the floor. All in all, the book
provides a truly multidimensional perspective,
exploring various facets from different angles and
bringing together both protagonists and antagonists of
globalisation and liberalisation of considerable
eminence. It cannot but both broaden and deepen our
understanding of the processes and impacts of
globalisation and, more importantly, propel us towards
further exploration with an open and enriched mind.
This remarkable volume, however, definitely deserved a
more thoroughgoing and rigorous editing.
Despite some passage of time the book, however,
remains as relevant and enlightening.
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