Pravasi Bharatiya Divas begins in New Delhi on Jan 7

The 9th Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PDB), an annual meet of non-resident Indians organized by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs, will begin tomorrow at the Vigyan Bhavan in New Delhi, India. The three day event will be inaugurated by Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh aPBDnd includes seminars, round-table conferences, interaction with Union Ministers, cultural programs and Conferment of Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Awards. Around 1500 delegations from over 50 countries are expected to participate in the event.

The Pravasi Bharatiya Divas has grown to be one of the largest meeting points for the Indian Diaspora across continents.  PBD gives non-resident Indians an opportunity to engage, interact and build relationships with members of the Diaspora across the globe, as well as the country of their forefathers. The PBD is not just a meet and greet event, but serious deliberations on issues of concern to the community, problems facing the country, business and other opportunities presented by India etc. are also discussed alongside a plethora of cultural events. Earlier PBDs have resulted in the formulation of various schemes and plans such as the Overseas Citizenship of India scheme, establishment of Overseas Indian Facilitation Centre, conceptualization of Pravasi Bharatiya Kendra, formation of Prime Minister’s Global Advisory Council of people of Indian Origin, setting up of the India Development Foundation, and the launching of the Global Indian Network of Knowledge (Global-INK).

This year the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas would focus on the North-Eastern States of India, healthcare, education and increasing involvement of the younger generation of the Diaspora. As such, the Ministry of Development of the North Eastern Region has partnered with PBD. The Chief Ministers of the states in the region will discuss the investment opportunities in their states in a special plenary session. The relatively neglected north-eastern region is one of the most scenic and untouched parts of the country, and provides numerous opportunities for business and tourism. However, it is has been reeling under the menace of insurgents and has been unable to develop at par with the rest of the country.

Among other sessions will be the annual C.K. Prahalad memorial lecture to be delivered by Gautam Ahuja. The Chairman of Corporate Strategy and International Business group at University of Michigan’s School of Business will talk about inclusive growth. A plenary session with a group of Union Ministers will discuss business opportunities in India, while dedicated seminars on healthcare and education opportunities in India will also be conducted. The Pravasi Bharatiya Samman awards will be presented by the President of India to distinguished non-resident Indians.

Make a New Year’s Resolution

On Wednesday December 29, 2010, I heard Rick Santelli proclaim on CNBC that “This is the best country in the world and we are going to fight for it to keep it great and solvent”. This was a couple of minutes after he warned, “…I tell you what Joe, in the next couple of years I think we are going to have an internal conflict in this country of huge proportions…” Rick Santelli, the voice of the Bond Market on CNBC, is better known as one of the founding spirits of the Tea Party.

The Tea Party was the most important phenomenon in America in 2010. I am less concerned about the message, the political views or the social stance of the Tea Party. What is relevant to the rest of the World and to India in particular is the deep passion of the people who came together to form the Tea Party, their outrage at the direction in which the country was headed and the arrogance with which they saw the political establishment treat the American people. The Tea Party came together to take back their country. And they did in the November 2010 elections.

In sharp contrast is the ennui in Europe and in India. Europe seems headed towards economic, social, and perhaps demographic disaster.  The desperate state of Europe’s youth, the highest-educated generation in Europe’s history, is well described in the New York Times article Europe’s Young Grow Agitated Over Future Prospects. Europeans have realized their social system is a “Ponzi scheme,” in the words of an expert in fiscal policy quoted in the article. Yet, the European people are quiet, supine and inclined to wither away in relative silence.

In recent months, we have seen a massive corruption scheme come to light in India. The entire Indian Establishment has been shown to be a giant web of cronyism – from cabinet ministers to politicians to TV anchors to corporate lobbyists. If you are inside this web, you sit pretty. If you are outside, you face the doubling of the price of onions, the most basic food in India. This is on top of a chronic food inflation virus that is eating away at the incomes of all but those in the politico-business circle. At the same time, one hears that the education system in India, especially the College-University system, is in serious decay. Degrees are proliferating, students are graduating but the education keeps getting less and less relevant to the needs of the job market. And on top of all this, the Indian Government is giving away enormous sums of money in the name of protecting the poor.

The Indian middle class and the poor are getting caught in a vicious pincer. Yet, you do not see the middle class in India expressing their outrage. There is no evidence of either a spontaneous or an organized movement by the middle class in India to pull down the corrupt or to launch reforms that will cut down on government waste. Tea might be a great Indian export, but there is no Tea Party in India.

Unfortunately, this ennui of Indian society has been imported by Indian-Americans into America. The current downtrend has been rough on many Indian-Americans. In some sense, Indian Americans are more vulnerable. They have no political power; they are known to be quiet people. There is little risk of a backlash if Indian-Americans are laid off or fired.

Ironically, the success of a few Indian-Americans and the current media darling status of India have made it more difficult for the average Indian-American to argue unfair treatment. We forget and most don’t realize that the few Indian-Americans that have made it to the top are people who succeeded from the inside and often with the help of mentors within their own circles.

But, despite their successes and troubles, the Indian-American community has not   thrown up a vocal activist in the genre of Rick Santelli.

This is surprising. After all, being a “loud mouth” is an Indian characteristic. The Indian protest against British rule began with “loud mouth” lawyers, professors and journalists expressing their anger in print and in political forums.

But today’s Indian-American middle class does not exhibit this spirit. Without this spirit, the Indian-America community will remain on the periphery of American society, a quiet, affluent but powerless and invisible microcosm. That would be a pity.

It is necessary for each Indian-American to make a resolution this New Year to fight for some goal or against some problem. Speak out fervently and rationally for or against issues that they care about. No issue is too small or too large. It is important that you protest, in person, over the phone or via email. Share your outrage with your friends and build a movement.

If you don’t fight for what you believe, you truly doom yourself and your community to obscurity.

Up Persian creek without a strategy

India must get its act together on Iran…quickly.

The apparent lack of policy co-ordination within the Indian government over Iran is really worrying.

We are referring to the RBI’s decisions in recent days closing the Asian Clearing Union (ACU) mechanism to imports—beginning with oil and extending to other goods and services—from Iran. The move not only caught the industry by surprise, it looks like it caught the relevant government ministries by surprise as well. Given that Iran is India’s second largest supplier of crude oil accounting for around 13 percent ($12 billion) of oil imports and the risk of a short-term supply shock sending oil prices higher, the lack of policy coordination amounts to dereliction of duty.

The lack of coordination reflects a deeper malaise—the UPA government’s inability to evolve a coherent policy on Iran, with the result that New Delhi is forever in reactive mode. [See: Will the Ayatollah step behind the line?] The overall failure of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his government to communicate with the public—witness how they botched up the India-U.S. nuclear deal—means that no political leader explains why the government is doing whatever it is doing, and why difficult decisions have to be made. The latter would still be acceptable if the government executed in a competent fashion—like in the case of the nuclear deal—but intolerable where execution is poor.

In this case, there is no evidence that the relevant cabinet committees ever discussed the implications of RBI’s move and took the necessary measures to manage the fallout. The RBI’s independence doesn’t preclude coordination in matters like this. A competent government would have reassured the markets and the public that although RBI’s measures against imports from Iran would put 13% of India’s supply of crude at risk, it has alternative plans to protect the Indian economy. Instead we were left working out the implications of terse press releases issued by the central bank.

What might those alternative plans be? These could involve arrangements to import Iranian oil through other currencies (or the Indian rupee), assurances from other suppliers (read Saudi Arabia) that they will make up the shortfall or both. Given Saudi interests in keeping the lid on Iran’s nuclear programme, New Delhi could have extracted the latter as the price of tightening the financial screws on Iran. Indeed, not extracting such a price is a good opportunity squandered.

India must get its act together on Iran. First, it is in India’s interests to ensure that Iranian oil and gas continue to provide the economy with the supply diversity that an oil-importing country needs. If this objective is inconsistent with playing responsible global citizen then so be it.

Second, given that Iran shares an interest in preventing Afghanistan from falling under the sway of a Saudi-Pakistani-Taliban nexus, India needs to continue to engage Iran.

Third, while a nuclear-armed Iran may or may not be entirely in India’s interests, it is far better to manage the consequences thereof than to countenance the use of military force in a futile attempt to stop it.

Finally, while international sanctions are unlikely to prevent a determined Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, it is geopolitically costly to stay out of the Western consensus. Unless sanctions prohibit India from purchasing Iranian oil and gas, it is better for India to be part of the sanctions regime.

Reconciling these objectives is not easy, but not impossible either. The big prize in foreign policy, however, is for India to assiduously work to bridge the divide between the United States and Iran. This—more than securing a permanent seat at the UN Security Council—is a project that is worthy of a rising global power. This task of international statesmanship requires a real leadership at South Block and the PMO. Till that time we can have day-to-day issue management, not strategy.

The new year begins with a question mark on oil imports from Iran. The larger question mark though is whether the UPA government will now realise that it finds itself in a jam over Iran because it has no ideas of its own.

The Year in India-US Relations

If the year in India-U.S. relations could be conveyed through pithy phrases, two immediately come to mind. 2010 was the year in which the wheel turned full circle, with the U.S. once again turning its attention towards India after its advances were rejected by a rising China, intent on blazing its own path on the world stage. After the heady highs of the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration’s half-hearted and confused approach towards India had been a party pooper, and even the Singh state visit at the end of the previous year couldn’t hide the perceptible decline in spirits.  Keeping President Obama’s November visit as a deadline, both governments searched high and low for the next big idea, a la the nuclear deal to bring the zing back into the relationship. The nuclear deal itself became the sum of many deals as the Reprocessing Agreement signed in March of this year was followed by the passage of the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill by the Indian Parliament. Both procedure and outcome were mired in controversy, with India then signing the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSC) to resolve concerns expressed by both the U.S. government and American companies over their liability in case of a mishap.
The other phrase that comes to mind is reinventing the wheel. June 2010 saw three Indian ministers accompanied by a phalanx of bureaucrats descend on Washington for the Strategic Dialogue that had been upgraded to ministerial level. Eighteen separate dialogues took place under the overall umbrella of the Strategic Dialogue, but they ultimately amounted to picking up the threads from where the Bush Administration had left off. Among the new areas dialogued about were co-operation in science and technology, research for clean energy and monsoon prediction, health and education, and women’s empowerment, but these were largely derided as soft issues to shift focus from an absence of dialogue on the hard issues to do with regional security. With the partnership now being tagged as “indispensible”, the million dollar question was what was so indispensible about India to the United States other than its large market? While an Indian Prime Minister had coined the phrase “natural allies” to describe the relationship, the geo-politics of the day and the shifting sands of international relations have put paid to that proposition for the time being.
It may well be said that such rhetoric is meant for public consumption, but even the most hyperbolic statement would still contain a kernel that would provide an indicator of the future direction of the relationship. But in this particular instant, even a word cloud analysis does not throw up any indicator of future trends. At best, the removal of sanctions on many Indian science entities might pave the way for increased technology sharing. (For the full wish list, go here).  The quid pro quo could well be India signing the so called foundational agreements that would enable the U.S. to sell its state-of-the-art military equipment to India. There has already been movement in this direction with reports of a bilateral technical group to look into the issues being set up immediately post the Obama visit. The visit itself saw Obamamania sweeping the country; with wall-to-wall coverage and media frenzy of the type that the President would probably have last seen on his election night.
Coming to other straws in the wind, and seeing as this has become a free-wheeling blog post, there were other sets of wheels that showed that American companies were finally making their way into the Indian mind and the Indian market. Harley Davidson made it to Indian roads, though with a little help from Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, by his own admission, and ably backed up by Wikileaks. And an American car, the Ford Figo became the new kid on the block, selling almost 60,000 units and being voted as the Indian Car of the Year. Thanks to the Figo, Ford recorded an incredible 185% increase in sales in India year on year.  Ford, like other American companies has found it a hard slough in the Indian market, but it has ultimately paid off. While the American market is an equally tough one to crack for Indian companies other than the well established ones, hopes that the Adam tablet from the Indian startup, Notionink, the first to crack the competitive high technology American consumer space were belied by delays in production that even led to talk of Adam being vapourware. Not the best way to go about being a trailblazer.
What else, the soft power of the two countries would have been at equilibrium, but for the sudden appearance of Pamela Anderson on the sets of Big Boss, the Indian equivalent of the reality show Big Brother. Hollywood films ran rampant on Indian screens, with the top ten movies, dubbed and otherwise, grossing almost $450 million in the Indian box office. Unlike 2009, however, when Avatar had beaten My Name is Khan to become the top grosser in India, this year, at least, Hindi films managed to hold their own. The Indian Diaspora in the United States contributed substantially to the bottomline of the Hindi film industry with the top ten movies grossing about $ 20 million at the American box office. One of the more bizarre suggestions that one got to know of through Wikileaks was that of harnessing Bollywood’s soft power and have Bollywood stars do the equivalent of a USO tour in Afghanistan to lift up the spirits of the locals, but one that was apparently never acted upon.
What will 2011 bring? More leaks from the U.S. Embassy in Delhi, for sure. With just 1947 out of the 251,287 cables released, there should be at least a few more to add to the 39 embassy cables that have so far seen the light of day. In the bilateral context, the cables show that Indian and American diplomats are formal in their interlocutions, judicious in their words, play their cards close to their chest, and give as good as they get.  The terms of endearment are evidently different in this still somewhat prickly partnership. But is that the reason why the wheel had to turn full circle is something to be considered as we enter the New Year.

If the year in India-U.S. relations could be conveyed through pithy phrases, two immediately come to mind. 2010 was the year in which the wheel turned full circle, with the U.S. once again turning its attention towards India after its advances were rejected by a rising China, intent on blazing its own path on the world stage. After the heady highs of the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration’s half-hearted and confused approach towards India had been a party pooper, and even the Singh state visit at the end of the previous year couldn’t hide the perceptible decline in spirits.  Keeping President Obama’s November visit as a deadline, both governments searched high and low for the next big idea, a la the nuclear deal to bring the zing back into the relationship. The nuclear deal itself became the sum of many deals as the Reprocessing Agreement signed in March of this year was followed by the passage of the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill by the Indian Parliament. Both procedure and outcome were mired in controversy, with India then signing the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSC) to resolve concerns expressed by both the U.S. government and American companies over their liability in case of a mishap.

wordcloud

The other phrase that comes to mind is reinventing the wheel. June 2010 saw three Indian ministers accompanied by a phalanx of bureaucrats descend on Washington for the Strategic Dialogue that had been upgraded to ministerial level. Eighteen separate dialogues took place under the overall umbrella of the Strategic Dialogue, but they ultimately amounted to picking up the threads from where the Bush Administration had left off. Among the new areas dialogued about were co-operation in science and technology, research for clean energy and monsoon prediction, health and education, and women’s empowerment, but these were largely derided as soft issues to shift focus from an absence of dialogue on the hard issues to do with regional security. With the partnership now being tagged as “indispensible”, the million dollar question was what was so indispensible about India to the United States other than its large market? While an Indian Prime Minister had coined the phrase “natural allies” to describe the relationship, the geo-politics of the day and the shifting sands of international relations have put paid to that proposition for the time being.

It may well be said that such rhetoric is meant for public consumption, but even the most hyperbolic statement would still contain a kernel that would provide an indicator of the future direction of the relationship. But in this particular instant, even a word cloud analysis does not throw up any indicator of future trends. At best, the removal of sanctions on many Indian science entities might pave the way for increased technology sharing. (For the full wish list, go here).  The quid pro quo could well be India signing the so called foundational agreements that would enable the U.S. to sell its state-of-the-art military equipment to India. There has already been movement in this direction with reports of a bilateral technical group to look into the issues being set up immediately post the Obama visit. The visit itself saw Obamamania sweeping the country; with wall-to-wall coverage and media frenzy of the type that the President would probably have last seen on his election night.

Coming to other straws in the wind, and seeing as this has become a free-wheeling blog post, there were other sets of wheels that showed that American companies were finally making their way into the Indian mind and the Indian market. Harley Davidson made it to Indian roads, though with a little help from Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, by his own admission, and ably backed up by Wikileaks. And an American car, the Ford Figo became the new kid on the block, selling almost 60,000 units and being voted as the Indian Car of the Year. Thanks to the Figo, Ford recorded an incredible 185% increase in sales in India year on year.  Ford, like other American companies has found it a hard slough in the Indian market, but it has ultimately paid off. While the American market is an equally tough one to crack for Indian companies other than the well established ones, hopes that the Adam tablet from the Indian startup, Notionink, the first to crack the competitive high technology American consumer space were belied by delays in production that even led to talk of Adam being vapourware. Not the best way to go about being a trailblazer.

What else, the soft power of the two countries would have been at equilibrium, but for the sudden appearance of Pamela Anderson on the sets of Big Boss, the Indian equivalent of the reality show Big Brother. Hollywood films ran rampant on Indian screens, with the top ten movies, dubbed and otherwise, grossing almost $450 million in the Indian box office. Unlike 2009, however, when Avatar had beaten My Name is Khan to become the top grosser in India, this year, at least, Hindi films managed to hold their own. The Indian Diaspora in the United States contributed substantially to the bottomline of the Hindi film industry with the top ten movies grossing about $ 20 million at the American box office. One of the more bizarre suggestions that one got to know of through Wikileaks was that of harnessing Bollywood’s soft power and have Bollywood stars do the equivalent of a USO tour in Afghanistan to lift up the spirits of the locals, but one that was apparently never acted upon.

What will 2011 bring? More leaks from the U.S. Embassy in Delhi, for sure. With just 1947 out of the 251,287 cables released, there should be at least a few more to add to the 39 embassy cables that have so far seen the light of day. In the bilateral context, the cables show that Indian and American diplomats are formal in their interlocutions, judicious in their words, play their cards close to their chest, and give as good as they get.  The terms of endearment are evidently different in this still somewhat prickly partnership. But is that the reason why the wheel had to turn full circle is something to be considered as we enter the New Year.