Book Review: 'Rogue
Elephant' by Simon Denyer
The average Indian earns less than the average
Chinese. But it's in New Delhi—not Beijing—where you can call the prime
minister an idiot without worrying about a knock on the door.
By Sadanand Dhume in
the Wall Street Journal
Only a few years ago,
India was widely viewed as Asia's next great economic and diplomatic
powerhouse, a democratic rival capable of challenging authoritarian China's bid
to dominate the region. Then the country's economy slowed, crime and corruption
hijacked the headlines, and doubts resurfaced about the subcontinental giant.
Was sluggish old India—its legendary red tape matched only by legions of
unreconstructed socialists clinging to power—ever really going to make it?
Now optimism is back,
following May's sweeping electoral victory for the right-of-center Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP), which gave India its first single-party majority government
in 25 years. Many are hopeful that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be India's
Deng Xiaoping, the leader who unleashes his people's entrepreneurial energies
and modernizes his country's economy.
Simon Denyer is no fan
of the new prime minister, whom he blames for failure to prevent the
Hindu-Muslim riots in 2002 that claimed over 1,000 lives, the majority of them
Muslim, while he led the western Indian state of Gujarat. But Mr. Denyer's book
is not primarily about Mr. Modi. It's about some of the phenomena that led to
the Modi juggernaut: the spirited anticorruption movement of 2011; outrage over
violence against women spurred by a gruesome rape-cum-murder in Delhi in 2012;
pitched battles between farmers and the government over the acquisition of
farmland for private industry; and the decline of India's once-dominant
Congress Party.
"Rogue
Elephant" is the latest in a long list of books by foreign correspondents
seeking to interpret India for a Western audience. As a correspondent for
Reuters, and subsequently the Washington Post's bureau chief in New Delhi, Mr.
Denyer has doggedly covered many of the stories that have dominated India's
headlines in recent years, and his thorough reporting is on display here.
The author remains
generally optimistic about India's prospects. Economic reforms that began in
1991 have quickened growth. On average, GDP has grown nearly 7% a year since
then. Thanks to a media revolution that began in the 1990s and has exploded
over the past decade, a state-owned monopoly over television news has given way
to upward of 450 raucous channels that make Fox News look staid by comparison.
The author argues that together these two trends have sparked a kind of
virtuous cycle: Better-educated and better-fed Indians are demanding more from
their politicians. A take-no-prisoners media will keep them on their toes.
But to his credit, Mr.
Denyer does not gloss over India's many problems, from an out-of-balance sex
ratio in parts of the country, caused by a cultural preference for sons, to
logjammed courts and a proliferation of criminals in politics. Though plainly
enamored of the idealism of India's myriad civil-society groups, he correctly
diagnoses the weakness of their "knee-jerk distrust of private
profit" and bottomless faith in more government money as the solution to
every conceivable problem.
For many Indians, the
most pressing of those problems is corruption. Three years ago, Mr. Denyer's
hopeful model was exemplified by an anticorruption movement that ignited
massive protests across India. Angered by spiraling graft under the watch of
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, normally complacent middle-class voters took to
the streets across India's major cities demanding change.
At first, this
middle-class rage seemed likely to disproportionately benefit an entirely new
political outfit, the Aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party of a 45-year-old tax
official-turned-activist, Arvind Kejriwal. But as Mr. Denyer points out, the
stubborn will that pole-vaulted Mr. Kejriwal into national consciousness was
not enough to sustain his fledgling party. Lacking a coherent economic program,
and overly eager to buy the support of poor voters by promising even bigger
handouts than the already profligate Congress Party, Mr. Kejriwal began to lose
the middle-class support that had propelled him to prominence in the first
place. In May's election, his party won just four seats in India's 543-member
lower house of Parliament.
Ultimately, the big
beneficiaries of dissatisfaction with the status quo have been Mr. Modi and his
party. Born to neither wealth nor high social status (the prime minister
belongs to a "backward" caste of oil pressers), Mr. Modi did more
than just gripe about the fecklessness of the Singh administration. By
showcasing the pro-business Gujarat model of development—named for the
industrialized state—the BJP placed economic development at the heart of its
electoral message. Mr. Modi's thumping victory marks a turning point for India,
the first time a message centered on growth has decisively trumped the
warmed-over welfarism that helped the Congress Party dominate Indian politics
for most of the past seven decades.
The contrast that
emerges in these pages between Mr. Modi and his putative rival, the Congress
Party's fourth-generation scion Rahul Gandhi, could not be starker. Mr. Modi
offers a promise for the future; Mr. Gandhi harks back to his father's rule in
the 1980s. Indeed, Rahul Gandhi's politics are "a slightly uncomfortable
mix of his entire family's tradition, as it is filtered through his
rose-coloured spectacles."
Educated Indians can't
stop complaining about the politicians who lead them. Yet, echoing the
historian Ramachandra Guha, Mr. Denyer argues that India's main success since
its independence in 1947 has been political rather than economic. It has
strengthened its democratic institutions and nurtured religious and cultural
pluralism. Despite the fact that the average Indian earned $1,500 last year,
less than a fourth of the average Chinese, it is in New Delhi, not Beijing,
that you can afford to call the president (or prime minister) a blithering
idiot without worrying about a midnight knock on the door.
Mr. Dhume is a
resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist for
WSJ.com.
