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| India at the centre of Arkansas ballot battle |
| Indira Kannan / New York May 30, 2010, 00:36 IST |
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Bill Halter has been charged with becoming a multi-millionaire by outsourcing jobs to India.
India continues to feature prominently in an election campaign in Arkansas, the home state of Bill Clinton. The former US president’s oft-proclaimed fondness for India is well known, but the attention paid by his fellow Democrats in the southern state’s US Senate primary are less flattering. Incumbent Blanche Lincoln faces a tough primary fight from the state’s Lieutenant Governor, Bill Halter, on June 8. Her campaign fired off a press release on May 14, alleging that Halter “became a multi-millionaire by outsourcing jobs to India”. A few days later, a campaign commercial continued the attack on Halter: “Instead of creating jobs in Arkansas, his company outsourced jobs to India.”
The allegation centres around Halter’s tenure from 2003 to 2007 on the board of WebMethods, during which the company opened an office in Bangalore. Halter has defended his record on his campaign website, stating that WebMethods may have added jobs in India, but not at the expense of US jobs. This exchange was actually Round Two for Lincoln and Halter, and seems tamer compared to Round One, played out before the state primary on May 18. Lincoln failed to get 50 per cent of the vote in that primary and was forced into the run-off against Halter on June 8.
In the run-up to the primary on May 18, Halter was the target of similar attack ads from both Lincoln’s campaign and an outside group, Americans for Job Security (AJS). Injecting some unintentional humour into the fight, AJS sent out printed mailers that read “Thank you Bill Halter for sending US jobs to Bangalore, India”, but added a Hindi version that unfortunately translated his surname as well, declaring, “Aap Bill Lagaam shukr Bangalore, Bharat ko rozgaar bhejne ke liye.” Whether Lincoln’s strategy of using outsourcing to India to attack her opponent pays off or not, the campaign has introduced the issue in this year’s election season, leading up to the Congressional and state-level elections in November.
“It’s a naïve view of outsourcing,” sighs Ben Trowbridge, CEO of Alsbridge, a Dallas, Texas-based benchmarking and outsourcing consultancy company, adding that outsourcing is driven purely by business needs. But, he points out the flip side of the attack ads: “From a marketing perspective for India, it’s a compliment.” If India is usually the target of politicians attacking outsourcing, it’s not without a reason. India continues to be the top destination for outsourcing from the US, drawing between 40 to 50 per cent of new businesses, across various sectors including information technology (IT), business process outsourcing (BPO) and finance & accounting.
But it’s not a one-way street. “Why,” laments Ron Somers, president of the Washington DC-based US India Business Council, “are we not talking about Bharti Airtel’s $2-billion outsourcing contract to IBM, which will bring jobs to the US?” He wants to remind the US lawmakers and their constituents that India is a large and growing market for American goods, including Boeing aircraft, GE turbines and locomotives.
Neither Trowbridge nor Somers expects the political rhetoric to have any actual impact on business. “This happens every two to four years,” points out Trowbridge and says politicians trot out the issue in various ways “depending on whether their audience is Joe Sixpack or Peter Chardonnay”. Somers believes the rhetoric was actually more inflammatory during the 2004 election and that the US voters have become more mature and appreciative of doing business with India over the past six years.
Lincoln and Halter’s campaigns did not respond to queries about their dispute. In the end, however, all the fire and fury over outsourcing to India could prove pointless, come November. According to most polls, the Republican candidate John Boozman comfortably leads in potential match-ups with both Lincoln and Halter.
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