India seeks better seat on globalization train

The Wall Street Journal had a front-page story last Wednesday that caught my eye. It was about how the anti-globalization movement seemed to be losing steam, with police not expecting the sort of violent protesters of the late 1990s to show up at the G-8 summit in Sea Island, Ga., this week. If you want to understand why the anti-globalization movement — which was always a mishmash of groups and ideologies — has lost its edge, you should study the recent Indian elections. And if the anti-globalizers want to understand how they could again become relevant, they should study those elections as well.

To everyone's surprise, India's elections ended with the rightist Hindu nationalist BJP alliance being thrown out and replaced by the left-leaning Congress Party alliance. Of course, no sooner did the BJP — which ran on a platform of taking credit for India's high-tech revolution — go down than the usual suspects from the anti-globalization movement declared this was a grass-roots rejection of India's globalization strategy. They got it exactly wrong. What Indian voters were saying was not: "Stop the globalization train, we want to get off." It was, "Slow down the globalization train, and build me a better step-stool, because I want to get on."

"Every time an Indian villager watches the community TV and sees an ad for soap or shampoo, what they notice are not the soap and shampoo but the lifestyle of the people using them, the kind of motorbikes they ride, their dress and their homes," says Nayan Chanda, the Indian-born editor of the invaluable YaleGlobal online magazine. "They see a world they want access to. This election was about envy, anger and aspirations. It was a classic case of revolutions happening when things are getting better but not fast enough for many people."

Indeed, Indian villagers and farmers are just like all other consumers today — better informed. And they seemed to know, at a gut level, exactly why the BJP's stress on information technology was not delivering for them. It was because local governments in India have become so eaten away by corruption and mismanagement they cannot deliver for the poor the schools and infrastructure they need to get a fair share of the pie. The Indian masses didn't vote for an anti-globalization strategy, they voted for (among other things) an effective globalization strategy. Sonia Gandhi, the Congress Party leader, seemed to understand this when she chose as prime minister Manmohan Singh, the former Congress finance minister, who first put the Indian economy onto a globalization track in the 1990s. His task now is to make globalization work for more Indians by making government work for more Indians.