US experts hail Indian democracy
Jyotirmoy Datta
November 4, 1999, 10:45 Hrs (IST)
New York: American experts have hailed the deeply "entrenched" democratic system in India, saying the newly elected government now has a chance to speed up economic reforms.
Politically, the recent parliamentary polls had confirmed that democracy in India is so well entrenched that elections are taken as routine, the experts said in a discussion at the Asia Society here. Economically, it assured the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government stability, enabling it to take the harder decisions needed to achieve a take-off rate of growth.
In international relations, it marked the climax of 18 months of intense and in-depth diplomatic interaction between India and the United States, leading to greater closeness and understanding than ever before in the history of the two democracies.
Frank Wisner, the former US Ambassador to India and vice chairman of the American International Group, said: "The United States and India, which found themselves at a turning point in their relationship in the '90s, are approaching a point of convergence as the decade comes to an end."
Wisner said, following the vote India has emerged as more assertive, clearer in its goals and more confident. He described US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and India's External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh as "world class diplomats" who had been engaged in "true practical diplomacy" for 18 months under the previous Vajpayee government.
He said India and the US have found ways to work together quietly - and that is the way it should be. While India had its own views about nuclear independence, it had a number of vital shared goals, he added. India did not export revolutions or terrorism and did not have territorial ambitions. "The most interesting moment in the horizon is President (Bill) Clinton's trip to India," he said.
Philip Oldenburg, associate director of Columbia's Southern Asian Institute who moderated the panel on politics, said the recent vote had shown that the commitment to democratic functioning in India is at a very high level.
Author of an insightful update on the election published by the Asia Society, Oldenburg said: "It is cause for celebration that India's democracy is so entrenched that elections are routine and that the domestic and foreign policies of the various parties have begun to overlap to such an extent that wild swings are no longer likely."
Joydeep Mukherji, associate director of Standard & Poor's and moderator of the economics panel, said he was "cautiously optimistic about stronger reforms." Responding to him, W Bowman Cutter, managing partner of E M Warburg Pincus and Company, said if somebody who had experience of the Indian economic scene in the '80s had gone to sleep and woken up 10 years later, he would have considered the changes almost miraculous.
"We are the largest investor in India and while our experience has not been devoid of frustration, it has been most of the time fairly good," said Cutter. "The BJP has now the opportunity to step up the rate of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth from six to eight or nine per cent."
Deepak Parekh, chairman of the Housing Development Finance Corporation (HDFC), and Narayanan Vaghul, chairman of ICICI, were however, strongly critical of the "philosophy of gradualism" inherited from former Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao's 1991-1995 government. Parekh said there was no option but privatisation on a massive scale. That was not just a means of raising additional revenue, it was the only way to make the Indian economy competitive, he added.
"Public sector enterprises, that is 30 to 35 per cent of the economy, are operating at a sub optimal level...(and) have to be sold off right away. Not gradually, but right now," said Vaghul. Just as the Rao government had been forced to embark on liberalisation because of the foreign exchange crisis, the need for very substantial involvement of the US in the Indian economy in the next three to five years makes tough steps imperative."
Marshall Bouton, executive vice president of the Asia Society who moderated the panel on international relations, noted that instead of any wild swing, there was a high degree of continuity following the vote, with Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee keeping four key ministers in their old posts.
(India Abroad News Service)
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