Whose Game?

Indian leaders never tire of hearing Westerners admiringly declare that ‘they are beating us at our own game’. This means that they are enjoying a higher rate of economic growth than the Western economies. The admiration expressed is, no doubt, tempered by the realization that it remains in fact ‘our game’, and that ‘we’ determine the rules and terms on which it is played.

There is therefore something disingenuous in the admission, a false modesty in the acknowledgement that the ‘best man is winning.’ It all has a wonderful sporting quality, the very best fair play for which the British are famed throughout the world. But the economy is not cricket.

It suggests that India and other competitors with the West have no game of their own. What would it mean if ‘we’ (Britain) were beating India at its own game? Clearly, it doesn’t have one. If it did, it would almost certainly not be the crude measure of economic growth which has the politicians of India bursting with self-pride. If there were an Indian game, perhaps it might be one of a sparing frugality and the careful husbanding of resources, in such a way that, despite all the disabilities of caste and ancient inequalities, these might, in the modern world be mitigated rather than made worse.

The truth is, no one knows how many poor people there are in India, and none can calculate how many years of double-digit growth it would take for poverty to be eliminated, for there is no known causal relationship between a given economic growth-rate and the elimination of poverty. If there were, poverty in the USA, Britain and other places where the game was conceived and invented, would long have been abolished. And if poverty were to be consigned to history in India, under the present system, how rich would the richest have to become? How many Mukesh Ambanis would there be, and how many multi-storey mansions would they have to construct in India’s megacities to satisfy their vanity before the hungriest peasant is able to satisfy her meagre appetite?

Somewhere, beneath the surface of the breathless astonishment at the emergence of a 200-million (or is it 300 million?) middle class in India, lies a quiet satisfaction that ‘we’ have managed to lay to rest the threat of any alternative to ‘our’ economic system. The consumers of India have shown no eagerness to depart from the tutelage of their sometime betters in appreciation of the good things of life – the fast cars, high fashion, alcohol, luxury living and celebrity – and have indeed, shown themselves to be accomplished mimics in the process. 

In their congratulations to India on its success, the leaders of the West are careful to suppress their even deeper satisfaction that heretical ideas, such as Gandhi’s sarvodaya – the uplift of all – have been safely interred in the graveyard of unworkable ideas; that extensive burial-ground in which all criticisms of the only game in the world lie in unmarked tombs. This has been a considerable accomplishment, particularly in the presence of the intractable poverty of India. The present enrichment of the middle class ensures that India is now identified primarily, no longer with the begging-bowl, but with conspicuous consumption. This creates the impression that poverty is being overcome: after all, the dominant images out of India are now Bollywood, expensive tracts of urban real estate, shopping malls and luxury, and these easily eclipse the fate of the hungry and uprooted, those who live in unvisited villages, forbidding slums and remote tribal areas, and who pay with their livelihood, their way of life and sometimes their lives, the costs of the showy triumphalism of the rich.

The fact that it remains ‘our game’ has fateful implications for the poor of India and elsewhere. Since the creation of wealth, and not the relief of poverty, is the principal concern of a global system, the rich have become objects of veneration rather than the despised monopolists of the necessities of the poor. The rate of growth takes precedence over the diminution of poverty, and indeed is proclaimed as a substitute for it. In this scheme of things, the rich must become vastly richer if the poor are to become a little less poor. This is the most clumsy, wasteful and unsustainable form of poor-relief ever devised by human ingenuity, for it depends upon the generation of exorbitant quantities of wealth before relief reaches the deepest misery. It would require limitless growth for an indefinite future to lift up the poorest, and feed the most prodigious discontent among the well-to-do and middle classes, who have entered into the circumscribed liberties of capitalism’s realm of freedom. 

That India should have bought into this ‘game’ represents a long-term triumph of colonialism, and its victory in this sombre sport is likely to be temporary and short-lived. Even while the paeans of praise from Western politicians and business luminaries is ringing in the receptive ears of elites, the discontent of the excluded and marginalised turns to the only form of protest which has any effect upon the reach-me-down visions of a future borrowed from countries which actually grew rich by the plunder of India. 

The peaceable progress of limitless wealth trickling down to the dispossessed is illusion; for as it does so, new, unappeasable hungers are kindled in the hearts of the well-to-do, fresh desires unleashed, a longing without end, which have no answer in the material world. This version of wealth-creation is a violent, extractive process; as it strikes against the carrying-capacity of the planet, India and China will almost certainly be the sites on which this great irreversible experiment will prove whether or not it is a unique movement for the liberation of humanity or an unsustainable fantasy. If it turns out to be the latter, who will then want to claim ownership of the great test-match of globalism?