Why the Occupy Wall Street protests aren't for us Indians

In the month since the Occupy Wall Street protests started off (with this innocuous call ) in New York City as a “people’s power” movement against the government’s pandering of fat-cat corporates and Wall Street firms, they’ve spread all the way around the world.

Over the past weekend, similar Occupy rallies were held in nearly 1,000 cities worldwide in over 80 countries across North America, Europe, Asia and even Africa. Even cities like Hong Kong and Tokyo that have benefited enormously from the global capitalist free-market system, and have no strong record of Leftist radicalism, have curiously witnessed rallies in solidarity with the uprising in America.

Yet, although India too is wracked by many of the socio-economic problems that underlie these protests in the US and elsewhere - such as widening income disparity, a sense of mass alienation from government policies, and a perception that the system works only for the rich and the powerful - we haven’t seen in India the same sense of outrage against “crony capitalism” and the excesses of a model that rewards the rich disproportionately at the cost of the poor and the middle-class.

If anything, we’ve only witnessed among some commentators a sense of gloating at the slow-death of the developed economies, as represented by these unprecedented social tensions that are more typical of Third World countries, and the perceived relative rise of India.

Blind to corporate gaming

It’s true, of course, that the anti-corruption movement led by Anna Hazare tapped into some of this middle-class angst over monumental corruption, as exemplified by the scams that tumbled out of sarkari cupboards last year. Yet, the exertions of even this high-decibel, high-visibility movement were directed rather more at “corrupt” politicians and rather less at corporate gaming of the system to their own advantage.

And although some of the leaders in the Anna-led campaign were reflexively of a socialist bent of mind , the broader movement, with its big-tent focus on corruption, wasn’t characterised by any of the Left-leaning “class warfare” rhetoric that has now come to distinguish the Occupy Wall Street protests and the solidarity rallies around the world.

And while Anna’s band of anti-corruption activists were uninhibited about banging pots and pans outside the homes of politicians across the spectrum (to pressure them to support the Jan Lokpal Bill), they did not embarrass “fat-cat corporates” or Dalal Street moneybags in a similar way.

If anything, the Anna Hazare campaign has been criticised by far Left liberals like Arundhati Roy as fronts for the right-wing and as agents of a World Bank-Western power axis that did not represent the poor.

There is one critical reason that may account for why Indian cities and towns have largely been untouched so far by any resonance in solidarity with the leftist “class war” raging in the US and around the world.

For one thing, although the problems in India and in the developed economies - widening income disparity and corporate indulgence at the cost of the common folks - are similar, India is approaching the issue from the opposite direction as the US.

Fixing a broken system

In the US, for instance, the protests mark the realisation of a generation that grew up in a time of prosperity that finds that the promise of the American Dream, ostensibly driven by the free market, no longer holds true for “99 percent” of the US population . As these stunning statistics show up starkly , the same free trade economics that drove up corporate profitability, particularly in the past 30 years, by shipping jobs overseas, has seen a hollowing out of Middle Class America.

Continues on the next page

Indicatively, from 1981 to 2008, average incomes in the US still grew by $12,000 a year. But strikingly, nearly 96 percent of that growth went to the richest 10 percent of Americans ; the other 90 percent had to scramble for the remaining 4 percent.

CEO compensation in the US is now 350 times the average worker’s pay, up from 50 times during the period 1960-85. After adjusting for inflation, hourly average wages haven’t increased in nearly 50 years. Wages as a percentage of the US economy is at the lowest it’s ever been.

A generation and more of deregulation of Corporate America and Wall Street firms has seen them milk the system for everything they can get, walking away with big bonuses and tax breaks in good times and “socialising their losses” through bailouts when times got rough.

As Arianna Huffington notes in Third World America , “America’s middle class, the driver of so much of our creative and economic success…, is rapidly disappearing, taking with it a key component of the American Dream: the promise that, with hard work and discipline, our children will have the chance to do better than we did…”

If that broken system is to be fixed, the US has to move away from the excesses of deregulation that favours corporates and WallStreet firms and towards greater social equity. It is this that accounts for the assertion of the disenfranchised and systematically neutralised Left as manifested by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Such a ‘socialist’ prescription may be exactly what the doctor ordered for the US.

We don’t need the bad old days

On the other hand, India, over the past 30 years, has been moving in the opposite direction -from the excesses of a shackled, socialist-leaning economy to one that has opened up (even if not by a lot) and has profited from that transition. The same forces of globalisation that haven’t worked so well for the US Middle Class have, if anything, given Indian entrepreneurs and professionals a chance to spread their wings.

And, although income disparity (and abject poverty) in India is far more acute than in the US, and corporate gaming of the system is far more absolute (to the point where a single stroke of a bureaucratic pen could potentially have brought Rs 81,000 crore in windfall profits for India’s leading corporate house), the opening up of the economy has enabled the Middle Class in India to dream of an Indian Dream, even if it isn’t as flamboyant.

Even the monumental corruption scandals of recent years are seen more as the outcome of the remnants of a licence permit raj. Few other than the far Left are enamoured at the prospect of a return to the old days of red tape or see it as the answer. The fact that Communist Parties (which at least have a space in the political spectrum, unlike in the US) have in recent years been in political retreat offers telling evidence of that.

Which is why for all the widespread angst over corruption and the reality of corporate lobbying to appoint pliable ministers in place, India is unlikely to give much traction to a left-leaning protest movement like the Occupy Wall Street.

We’ve seen the “socialisation of misery” during the licence permit raj days, and we’re now experiencing the fruits of middling prosperity in an era of greater opening up. Sure, things could be better, but they will only be a heck of a lot worse if we go back to those bad old days.