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India is a tonic and a shock to the system – and the world ignores its rise at its peril

India is a tonic and a shock to the system – and the world ignores its rise at its peril
Front page P1 02 September 2023 Page 1
Rebecca Davis
By Rebecca Davis
4 Sep 2023
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It appears that India is on course to become a global superpower. But can the country’s bellicose nationalist energy be controlled?

At a lunch in Delhi recently, I asked a government official if India had much of a “work-from-home” culture. He shook his head and explained that it had become a major problem during the pandemic, since so many Indians took advantage of the situation to take on additional jobs.

As we quickly learnt during a 10-day media tour as guests of the Indian government, a lot of things told to us needed to be fact-checked. But this one proved totally true: the “moonlighting problem”, as it is widely known in India, caused significant issues in particular for IT firms worried about client data privacy.

It’s a story that captures something incredible about modern India. In large parts of the rest of the world, working from home is being rolled back as data shows clear drops in productivity. In India, it had to be ended because so many people took the opportunity to do more work.

That is India in a nutshell. Its greatest asset is undoubtedly its people, a breathtaking 1.4 billion of them, who – at the risk of painting in meaninglessly broad strokes – sometimes seem propelled by a superhuman drive and energy. It’s a kind of dynamism that can be intoxicating coming from a country like South Africa, where increasingly one looks around and sees, simply, depression. It is evident everywhere here: from the dwindling voter turnout to the figures for those who have given up on job-hunting  and the low number of people who report planning to start a business.

Voice of the Global South 


Coming from South Africa, India is a tonic – and also a shock to the system. And it is a country increasingly positioning itself in global politics in a place that once looked possible for South Africa to occupy. The voice of the Global South. A bridge between North and South, straddling developed and developing worlds, poised between advanced economies and emerging markets: these were all descriptions given to us international journalists during our recent Indian tour.
Organisers were also not keen on questions from pesky journalists regarding the undoubted pall the Ukraine conflict is casting over the G20.

Of course, South Africa still has pretensions towards this kind of role in international affairs, as the recent BRICS Summit showed. But we also have little with which to back it up.

India just overtook the UK as the world’s fifth-largest economy. It has a strongman premier who can afford to speak English on vanishingly rare occasions and is still accorded the highest diplomatic welcome in Washington. Narendra Modi is telling his country that the next 25 years belong to India – and the world ignores it at its peril.

G20 fever


India is currently in the grip of G20 fever. A total of 190 G20 meetings have been held so far across 57 Indian cities throughout the year, as part of a savvy initiative to spread the economic impact and tourism benefits as widely as possible. Another aspect of the project is to build public enthusiasm for the G20: the logo for its Indian hosting was developed via crowdsourcing.

There are special G20 check-in desks at airports. The “impeccable logistics” of the event were showcased to our group of 27 journalists from G20 countries at deadening length at the G20 Secretariat. Not mentioned: the initiatives to “beautify” Delhi, involving razing slums, removing street dogs and generally trying to hide evidence of poverty around this chaotic city of almost 35 million inhabitants.

Organisers were also not keen on questions from pesky journalists regarding the undoubted pall the Ukraine conflict is casting over the G20, including a stalemate on unanimous declarations. In an engagement with Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, he said there was a feeling that the previous year’s G20 in Indonesia had been “preoccupied with Ukraine” to the exclusion of other concerns, particularly from the Global South.

But Jaishankar maintained that India had “good, strong relations” with both Ukraine and Russia. These days, he said, India was moving away from the “nonalignment” that marked its foreign policy in the latter ­decades of the 20th century towards “multi-­alignment”.

India, in other words, is playing the field.

All over Delhi were roadside hoardings proclaiming India as the “mother of democracy”, ahead of the G20 leaders’ summit to be held this month. It was tempting to be seduced by the celebratory rhetoric – until one noticed reports in The Times of India and other newspapers of the shutdown by police of a sideline conference of activists and academics called the We20, slated to give a platform to dissenting voices to discuss global issues.

One of the country’s proudest claims is that it is “the world’s largest democracy”, which is true up to a point. Freedom House’s annual scorecard of nations on political rights and civil liberties has awarded India a ranking of “partly free” for 2023, noting “a rise in persecution affecting the Muslim population” as well as “harassment of journalists, NGOs and other government critics”, increasing significantly under Modi.

But one aspect of Indian democracy to which Freedom House awards a perfect score is its electoral process. Our group of G20 journalists was taken to the Electoral Commission of India for a briefing on the mechanics of Indian elections, which are mind-blowing in scale.
The elections body, in other words, becomes a kind of de facto government during election season. All of this is unthinkable to a South African.

A total of 955 million voters; 2,800 political parties; one million polling stations; more than 300,000 voters older than 100. Voting takes place in some of the harshest environmental conditions globally at some of the highest and wettest places on Earth.

How do they pull it off? Through provisions that would seem horrifyingly anti-­democratic in a place like South Africa.

The Electoral Commission, we were told by chief commissioner Rajiv Kumar, can give directions “which have the force of law”.

Its powers are simply enormous: in the run-up to an election, all security forces are deputised to the Electoral Commission.

The elections body, in other words, becomes a kind of de facto government during election season. All of this is unthinkable to a South African.

And how much do elections cost?

“For preserving democracy, it’s no cost,” Kumar told us, in the characteristically charming way of Indian officials intent on not revealing particular bits of information to foreign journalists.

At a dinner with Indian journalists, I bemoaned the difficulty of prising direct answers out of the Indian government. “Imagine how we feel,” came the retort. I felt something I almost never experience: a fleeting gratitude towards South Africa’s government spokespeople, as slow and intransigent as they can often be.

Next 25 years for India


At Delhi’s Red Fort, we attended the country’s annual Independence Day celebrations, which is also the occasion on which Modi lays out the priorities for the year ahead.

This year, he was forced to start by addressing one of the most dangerous aspects of his premiership: the rise in aggressive Hindu nationalism that has seen attacks not just on Muslims, but also, increasingly, on Christians.

Read more in Daily Maverick: India hits Daily Maverick with malicious cyberattack after report on Modi’s ‘tantrum’

This is the dark side of the muscular Indian identity Modi is cultivating both at home and abroad. It goes hand in hand with the rest of the rhetoric from his Red Fort address: one in which he declared, as he has before, that the 25 years leading up to the 100th anniversary of Indian independence will be the country’s golden age.

Whether Modi is right may depend on whether the bellicose nationalist energy he has cultivated and fomented can be controlled – or whether, as history suggests elsewhere, it must inevitably explode.

But being on the ground in India, even just as an observer, one senses the power of the movement of this nation.

Landing back in South Africa, I was greeted by the news that India had successfully landed its first spacecraft on the moon. “This is a victory cry of a new India,” proclaimed Modi in response. It is only likely to get louder.

AB de Villiers: ‘a living god’


As a South African in India, you quickly get used to talking about one subject more often than any other. My first introduction: a young Indian man at a bar approached me and said he would like to discuss “the greatest South African who ever lived”. Nelson Mandela? No. AB de Villiers. The South African cricketer was described to me by Indians as “the only person who might be able to beat Modi in the next elections”, and also as a “living god”. De Villiers has cultivated a truly fanatical Indian following as a result of his career in the Indian Premier League, notably with the Royal Challengers Bangalore team. DM

Rebecca Davis travelled to India in August as a guest of the Indian External Affairs Ministry on a familiarisation tour for journalists from G20 countries.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R29.

Front page P1 02 September 2023 Page 1

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