Lessons India can learn from 'lesser' tigers like Bangladesh and Indonesia

While the former is miles ahead in healthcare and job creation, the latter has responded to Joko Widodo's leadership in containing terror and communal tension

Mari Elka Pangestu, Indonesia’s hugely impressive former minister for trade and later tourism and creative economy in the previous government, speaking at a conference organised by The Economist in Jakarta this month on Indonesia and technology, briefly praised India as a country that had leapfrogged and created an alternative to the banking system. It took me a minute to realise she was mistakenly lionising Chinese-owned Paytm, largely the beneficiary of central bank diktats and bizarre government-induced cash shortages. 

Her comment made me wonder about the sort of country India could learn from; an alter ego with similar problems. Pointless parallels are drawn with China of course, but other than India and China’s one billion-plus populations and their current leaders’ preoccupation with exploiting historical grievances, we have little in common. China is a sophisticated, if sinister, totalitarian state, and in economic terms about a hundred years ahead of India.

Indonesia, a diverse democracy with a bureaucracy almost as unwieldy as India’s, is a better development template. Under President Joko Widodo, universally underestimated yet the most capable leader in Asia, Indonesia since 2014 has been tackling reforms head-on. The government has tried a tax amnesty with mixed results followed now by the threat of fierce tax audits in a country where evading taxes is also an Olympic sport. The government used cheap oil of the past couple of years to cut subsidies on fuel and electricity for even the lower middle class and redirected the savings to health and education. 

In April 2017, I had arrived in Jakarta on the day the Christian, ethnic Chinese incumbent Jakarta governor had been defeated. In the lead up to the election, tens of thousands had marched in demonstrations against him in November and December 2016, apparently believing a doctored video showing the incumbent had insulted Islam. Last year, the president, a moderate Muslim, met the heads of the largest Islamist social organisations and asked them to work with him to cool things down. On a visit to headquarters of the special forces, he said “that in his capacity as Indonesia's commander-in-chief, he could deploy the country's most revered military division anywhere in the country to quell threats to the state's pluralistic status,” the editor of the Jakarta Post wrote approvingly last year.

Indonesia is a country of 250 million people where religion is as much a part of life as in India, and terrorism a greater threat, but the country appears to have responded to such leadership. A year on, communal tensions seem much diminished. Looking ahead to the national election in 2019, an opinion poll showed Jokowi had nearly 50 per cent support, twice that of his challenger. 

The other country we must seek to emulate is… Bangladesh. In the seventies, that word was so often paired with ‘basket-case’ that together they seemed a weird, hyphenated name for a new nation. Bangladesh has since left north India behind on parameters ranging from reducing open defecation massively to the widespread use of oral hydration remedies to prevent infants from dying of diarrhoea. Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen in India and its Contradictions pointed out that the participation of girls in schools there was higher than boys. Bangladesh’s garment industry employs 4.2 million people, 80% of whom are women. 

Y R Wilson, senior executive director of the garment manufacturing giant Epic Group, which employs more than 20,000 people in Bangladesh, predominantly women, told me that women are “torch-bearers…highly committed and conscientious employees because they know their economic contributions” improve their families’ lives. The higher social status of women in Bangladesh thus has not only led to lower infant mortality as in south India, but because of  labour laws that make it easier to hire and fire than in India, women’s emancipation has enabled the country to create an export powerhouse in the past decade.

From the time India’s reforms began in 1991, economists and business journalists have made the case for looser labour laws in India to no avail. We already had the example of South Korea, Taiwan and south China. In 1994, I remember as a young reporter for Fortune magazine in New York having my question about quickening the pace of such reforms swatted back by that supposedly great reformer P V Narasimha Rao in 1994. “Each country has to find its own rhythm and pace,” he replied. “I am depending on sound judgment rather than induced fantasies.”

It really is a fantasy to think that India’s political class will ever concede the country has anything to learn from the world. As N R Narayana Murthy observed in a lecture in 2002 on what India could learn from the West, even the  great medieval astronomer and mathematician Al Biruni found that the few Indian pundits who would even listen to him “invariably asked him which Indian pundit had taught him these things.” This government may be among the most tragic-comic ever in having a junior minister who insists that an Indian invented the aeroplane one moment and a Tripura chief minister who declares the Mahabharata confirms that India invented the internet a couple of thousand years ago the next, but we have been almost as arrogant for more than a thousand years now.