Who is a South African?

Presented this paper last year at Stellenbosch.

Nausea

Pacing along a curvy hilly road, curvy enough to cudgel my entrails to vomit out my brunch, the bus takes 5 hours to reach Shimla. Those five hours of travel are unlike any other five hours of journey. Only those who have travelled often in these dilapidated buses across such topographies would proclaim– time is never secular. A second cannot be compared against another, a minute never moves as slow or fast as other sixty seconds, an hour can be as laborious as another day, a day can be more important than life in other times.

I am struggling with my stomach revolting against me. This realization brings me a little shame. An embarrassment slowly begins to takes control. My metropolitan existence sheds its false grandeur in the face of an uncomfortable bus ride. Is such a bus ride not meant to be a sense of adventure? Steep hills, bending roads, difficult terrain, rickety bus, congested seats, semi-civilized human forms – am I not supposed to get an orgasmic fit of rustic charm?

Alright, there it goes. It rushes up my internal biology and reveals its ugly colour and stench as it marches out of the window. The disembowelment helps me find some relief. Nausea slowly releases its hold. But no, not yet! Voices that until then had been faint emerge in a crescendo. Oh, I hear those semi-civilized rustic life forms – my metropolitan ‘self’ only half recognizes them as humans, for they do not possess the faculty of reason that Mr. Rene Descartes told me I have now by dint of my education. They speak of a certain Baba who was fasting against the government. The government had trampled down on a 100 thousand people who were fasting along with him in Delhi. They said, Baba had been hounded down by the police and he had to run for his life. The people were beaten mercilessly and many were in hospital. Their rancor against the government was palpable. How could a government beat a mass of people that it was supposed to protect? More disturbing to them however was how could the ‘Baba’, the saint who had cured them with his divine powers of yoga, be beaten by the government?

Nausea began to grip me again. Only this time the revolt was intellectual. Ah, here is the country, I thought, that remembers its ‘babas’ more than its ‘politicians’ (I remember to have read somewhere no one remembers Sri Aurobindo as a politician but everyone knows him as a saint). It is a travesty of modernity, a betrayal of unimaginable proportions. I heard this Baba sometime back on an LCD at a friend’s place in my University, and I remember how authoritatively all of us sitting there had proclaimed him as a traditional thug. ‘He was duping the people’, we were unanimous. ‘The people’ by the way we always ‘knew’ through our Marxist brains (and beards!) had a certain character, an essential feature that the granddaddy of communism - ‘proletariat’ he had named it - had revealed to us a century and a half ago. Religion was the opiate, and spirituality was its active cohort. The people…(okay, I have to investiture these ‘half civilized life forms’ as people for I need to have them as full forms in order to make my argument… to argue against a half-human is like shouting at a bull. Shouting you see is not making an argument. Only a human can make arguments. And I need to argue to exist. Descartes reframed – I argue therefore I am).

Sorry for the interruption, back to ‘the people’.

The people are blind to see that this Baba had a property worth 11000 million rupees gained through some 35 companies that enjoy tax breaks. One only has to hear him on TV to realize how illogical he can get. The other day, he squealed through his bearded frame ‘American dollar is priced so high because of the looted wealth from India. Let us get the money back and Rupee would be priced as high as dollar and dollar would be the new rupee.’ Dadabhai Naoroji would not take any claims , I am sure, if Baba were to reveal his inspiration was the text ‘The Poverty of India and the British rule.’ R.C. Dutt would for sure twist uncomfortably in his grave faced with the prospect of having preempted the Baba on this. Even dependency theorists would throw a fit at such a perversion of their own logic. The Baba by the way engages in novel economics only as a hobby. For a full time profession, he is a televangelist-cum-teleyogic. His daily doses of yoga come suffused with a polemic of rightist nationalism. The effect of the later cannot be documented, but for the former I can only remember my father jumping up and down in the verandah and breathing awkwardly (Baba calls it anulom-vilom) every morning. The powers of yoga are said to cure every disease, HIV AIDS exempted. To me, and to many of my like-minded friends, ridiculous is written all over it.

Nausea becomes more pronounced now. These people are still rattling about this Baba. Someone, a man from the third last seat of the bus, speaks of how his relative’s diabetes was cured. Another one, just ahead of him, explains how his friend got cured of a cancer. I am beginning to wonder why is that only relatives and friends narrate such incidents of divinity. Is divinity ordained in some conspiracy? There are no personal accounts, of how ‘I’ was healed. ‘The people’ never seem to understand the logic. Do they work on their own logic, some creed peculiar to them? Or are we in our intellectual existence living out in an alien world, a world where the agony of existence is more pronounced than how it is actually is?

Nevertheless, we reach a small town where the bus stops for a small break. I instantly jump out of the bus. I can barely tolerate the double whammy. On the road however there is procession of people in support of the baba. I instantly pick up today’s local newspaper from a vendor, so that – just so – I can hear, read, imagine of something else. May be a murder, a rape – anything that is good/evil enough to catch my attention – would take me away from this nausea. Sadly, nothing helps. The Bus driver honks. We are again on our way. Nausea persists.

Reflections on Delhi's Commonwealth Games

What ‘Common’, whose ‘Wealth’, and who cares about ‘Games’ anyway? Reflecting on the ongoing Commonwealth Games in New Delhi these question jostle up in my mind immediately. Seventy one countries – not technically so considering Wales, Scotland and England participate separately [that’s another story entirely… Ed] – all brought together by the unchained melody of British colonialism. It still baffles many, why the Commonwealth stands as an ode to Colonialism exemplified in the Queen’s prerogative as the head of the organization. Why can it not be a celebration of the indigenous struggles for their own sovereignty in these various countries? Anyway, back to the Games.

To say that the opening ceremony of the games was a success would be to hide the point. It was a success when everyone was waiting for it to fail. The knives, in the international (or should I say Western, and I go by my mental ‘colonized’ maps rather than cartographic specifications by including Australia and New Zealand) media were already out. And when they did not find enough flesh to dig them in, they still made their point. In a more considerate article, Guardian reported: “After all the shameful tales of dengue fever and squalid bedrooms, Delhi finally got its chance on Sunday to show the world (or at least the Commonwealth) that India can organize things properly. And it did not disappoint.”

Indians are livid for obvious reasons. “Did not disappoint” is all you get after a 700 million rupees extravaganza that knitted together their country’s cultural diversity and displayed a blend of both India’s long history of civilization and modern reformation! And guys, we had ‘yoga’ in there too; precisely what you have always loved about India.

Or they ask – ‘Did not disappoint’, oh - what did you expect? Did you think we would have ‘Mogli’ shooting out of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Jungle Book’ especially after threats of dengue? Did you expect a country of ‘snakes and charmers’ on display? We did that as well - snake-charmers were there right in the beginning if you noticed. Frankly (wink!!), even we are surprised at our ability to ‘organize things properly’, we pulled it off (hurray!!)

For India, uncomfortable questions for now can hibernate until Mani Shakar Aiyar, the former Indian minister and Congress party MP known for his slight leanings towards the left, shoots his mouth, as promised, after the Games. To preempt him, we all know, he would point towards enormous corruption and unmitigated wasteful expenditure on the Games in a country that still has a huge percentage of some of the world’s poorest people. His detractors would raise a counterpoint describing how the Games have proven economically helpful with massive investments, employment opportunities and infrastructure development (only in Delhi). Nothing however would trip, they would confidently say, the augmentation of ‘brand’ India. “India”, as Suresh Kalmadi stated in his speech in the opening ceremony, “has arrived” and the world knows about it now.

This debate aside, there are other things that are even more ‘stale’. Driving through Delhi’s roads, I can see the massive clean up exercise seeking to white wash poverty. Roadside beggars have somehow gone missing, billboards of CWG and ‘Shera’ (the official mascot for the Games) wishing namaste serve the purpose of hiding slums behind their back (exemplifying how Delhi has turned its back on the poor, not to say that they were at any time welcomed), more than 300,000 people were evicted from their homes for CWG, and Blueline buses (people’s transport in Delhi) have been taken off the roads leaving Delhi’s poor and middle classes to fend for themselves (though to the government’s credit, it has taken the Metro rail to most parts of the city relieving some of people’s problems). The idea of ‘filth’, especially after the international outcry over it, is so despising that it better be hidden; the desperation was so palpable, that one CWG official stuck both his feet in his mouth by saying that ‘Indians have different standard of hygiene’.

However, what sounds scary to me is the fact that we have internalized the idea of ‘order’ so uncritically that any remnant of disorder, mess and poverty seems hazardous for a country’s image. The cleanliness, silence of order is not necessarily a virtue; for it is always a culmination of centuries of bloodbath. Danse macabre in the colonized countries, to bring back the memory of British Commonwealth, led to clean, silenced order in the west. How often have we not seen poor, not poverty, erased from the face of the earth in the name of development? The idea that people, actually poor people, have to pay the price for development for the sake of the country is revolting precisely because it makes more sense to extract out of the ‘haves’, not ‘have-nots’. Order may look beautiful, but it always has an ugly underbelly.

Delhi-o-Delhi, I love you even for your ‘filth’ because these clean roads stink much more.

[Article originally appeared on www.RogueDiplomat.Com - International Affairs, Culture & Travel (http://www.roguediplomat.com/).]

Bringing Nehru Back In - Examining India's Foreign Policy

More than half a century ago, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, when asked about India’s role in the international sphere, stated that considering India’s civilizational heritage it can either be a major player or perish. He was confident that between these two extremes; there was no fringe role for India. Aware of India’s lack of material capabilities, he had put almost all his fruits in one basket – Non-alignment. Non-alignment, often misunderstood, was a new approach to world politics and one that sought to re-balance the world, not based on claims to power but instead on the basis of claims to empowerment of the erstwhile emaciated colonized nations. This however is a topic to be discussed elsewhere, and for now the focus ought to go back to Nehru’s assertion about India’s role in world politics.

Post-Nehru, as Western prophecies about end of India gained ground, the focus definitely shifted from salvaging the country itself rather than salvaging its pride outside. With Nehru’s death, India also lost its only world statesman and thus the focus shifted inward. Surprisingly, the Indian juggernaut kept rolling with occasional hiccups. In between, India kept the world aware of itself with events like 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan and 1974 Pokhran test, when it conducted its first underground nuclear weapons test.

The epiphany, it is said, came in 1991, though not necessarily after great thought. Necessity, as the cliché goes, is the mother of invention. That was the year India adopted economic reforms after it was pushed to the wall by the implosion of its all-weather friend USSR and financial bankruptcy. As India opened its economic gates to the world, although one must confess pretty consciously, the world had got another China – a huge market. The rest as they say is history, and two decades past India stands at the threshold of great power status.

In this run down of sixty years of India’s existence in world politics, one can clearly see that while India has redeemed its place in the international sphere, or even gone much ahead of where Nehru had taken India, as some would like, the levers of Indian foreign policy have changed. Nehru’s India, as both his critics and his followers suggest, was attempting to be the spiritual leader of the world. Material capabilities in Nehru’s calculations seldom figured in, partly because India did not have them and partly because he felt India had much better resources in form of civilizational knowledge and acclaimed anti-colonial struggle that could help the world. The India of 21st century makes no pretences about its moral role, apart from of course when it becomes necessary as in case of harping on its commitment to non-proliferation to gain a back entry into nuclear club, and is more than ready to play the power game.

In this bargain, the gains are often played out loud. Strategic partnerships with the US, Russia and European powers, leadership of the developing world, de-facto nuclear status, a high table seat in all emerging international regimes as well as legitimate claims in the old ones, software-hub of the world and along with China the new deadly two combo. However, a little reflection is never a bad idea. From being the champion of non-alignment, it is surprisingly India itself which has come to conclude that obituaries of non-alignment were long due. Coming from this pretence, it is only natural that India has for long discouraged any efforts to institutionalize the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM). Even though countries like South Africa have long demanded the NAM be institutionalized to lend it more credence, India has continued with the same pill that it believed was apt for the patient 50 years ago. No wonder, the patient is at deathbed.

The world, to say the least, is an interesting phase of history. Apart from the famed decline of American hegemony, there are clearly three discernable patterns visible in the dynamics of international politics:

First, for the first time in modern world, power is being distributed across continents. So while China and India are emerging as the hardware and software superpowers of the world, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico and Saudi Arabia are also becoming increasing stakeholders in the upcoming world, not to forget the already-there claimants – Russia, Japan and the European Union. Dr Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations think-tank describes this current situation as a non-polar world (as opposed to the commonly held view that the cold war had a bipolar world caught between the USA and the USSR).
Second, for the first time in history, raw power, in terms of pure military capabilities, is no more the preponderant factor in ascertaining the power potential of a country. The term security itself has in fact been broadened to include economic, energy and welfare needs. For example, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela positions as energy powers hold sufficient screws to twist other nations to their tune.
Third, with so many emerging powers, it is pretty natural that the permutations and combinations that add up to gauge potential alliances would even baffle mathematicians. Scholars and practitioners of international politics, for that matter, are even less equipped. The proliferation of forums like NATO, SCO, BRIC, GCC, IBSA, APEC et al., as against the static bloc politics of the cold war or the great power club just before World War One, has a double effect of enticing states into networked relationships thus giving more space for deliberations and also increasing the number of potential flashpoints. The geographical spread of the new power architecture, proliferation of power-determining variables and the volume of emerging powers all contribute to the novelty and complexity of the current international system.

In such a scenario, India’s choices are not as constrained as strategic experts make out to be. Power and interest, in the new emerging world, do not still remain confined to Morganthau’s six principles. In this there is ample scope to bring the Nehruvian thrust back into India’s foreign policy. Democratisation of global governance structures, an equitable relationship between the developing and the developed world, disarmament etc. are still the declared primary aims of Indian foreign policy but how far India lives by it is a matter of contention. Of late, going by India’s stances on major issues of World politics, one gains an impression that India is only concerned about these issues so long as it affects India directly. Whenever these ideals are pitted against India’s narrowly defined interests, looked at through American-made glasses, it promptly shifts side, such as India’s repeated voting against Iran and its stance on nuclear issues.

Although on specific issues, there are common synergies between developing countries which India tries to tap into by forming and often leading developing country blocs, a major platform like NAM which looks to develop holistic ties among developing countries is lacking. A platform like this also becomes the incubator of alternate visions and alternate futures for the world. It is in formation of such a platform that India along with other developing country leaders like South Africa and Brazil should come together. Sadly, IBSA only looks like a combined effort by third-world countries to get an entry into the first world.


Source: Rogue Diplomat (http://www.roguediplomat.com/)

India-South Africa relations: through the shadows of Nehru and Mbeki

Mzukisi Qobo and Vineet Thakur (At http://www.politicsresearch.co.za/archives/489)

This year marks 150 years of the arrival of Indians in South Africa. This historic bond continues to shape relations between the two countries. Recently, President Zuma led a high-powered delegation that included 200 businessmen to India, signaling the seriousness with which South Africa takes its foreign relations with India.

Similarities between the two countries are difficult to ignore. They both boast a rich history of liberation struggle. Race and ethnic plurality characterise their societies. And they are vibrant democracies that command international standing.

As the two countries reflect on the 150-year history they share, it might be useful to trace the parallels between the two through the legacies of Thabo Mbeki and Jawaharlal Nehru; two leaders who had a major influence on their countries’ foreign policies post-independence. Both men were driven by ideas and viewed themselves as possessed of a historic mission to change the international order.

Nehru and Mbeki had the fortune of standing on the shoulders of giants such as Gandhi and Mandela, respectively. Much like Mbeki blossomed after Mandela left office, Nehru was able to come out of Gandhi’s shadow only after the latter’s unfortunate assassination. Paradoxically, both Mbeki and Nehru, though admiring of their predecessors, were more ideologically apart from them.

These two leaders completed their education in Britain and were strongly influenced by the leftist Western ideologies, Fabianism in the case of Nehru, and Marxism for Mbeki. However, both were deeply aware of their own cultural histories – a dynamic that framed their responses to colonialism.

Thus, a natural endearment to Western thought and a strong consciousness of local histories resulted in their characteristic ambivalence towards the West: they were at once enamored with the West, yet harboring skepticism towards it; they were deeply critical of it, yet greatly influenced by the streams of knowledge flowing from the West.

It is mainly in the foreign policies of their countries that Nehru and Mbeki’s imprints are of lasting significance. Both leaders navigated a foreign policy space in an international system going through major changes. Immediately after India attained its independence in 1947, the country was faced with the prospects of choosing between the two world poles at the time: the US-centered Western bloc, and the Soviet Communist bloc. South Africa, too, experienced its democratic moment at a time when the global system was going through seismic shifts from a bipolar order to a transient unipolar world dominated by the US, and with Western-driven globalisation as the only game in town.

In such a constrained international system, India and South Africa’s foreign policies under Nehru and Mbeki, respectively, cut an independent course. Nehru propounded a grand idea of non-alignment; Mbeki opened a whole new discourse on African renaissance, creating space for confident engagement with the West while contributing to setting out new outlines of the emerging global order that places emphasis on multilateralism.

Yet both leaders were misunderstood in their countries and abroad, and their ideas did not lend themselves to easy acceptance. Non-alignment for a lot of people, including the then US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, was read as neutrality – something of a crass reading. For others it was pure utopianism that did not stand a chance of success in a world that was seen as an anarchic jungle.

On the contrary, Non-alignment was a call for active engagement by the decolonized states in world affairs, and this was different to the kind of neutrality professed by the Swiss and the Scandinavians. It had a transformative thrust. Its main preoccupation was to effect changes in the international order in ways that did not conform neatly to either of the two superpowers.

Similarly, Mbeki’s African renaissance has been a greatly misunderstood idea. While some saw it in terms of essentializing Africa and as a return to tradition, others merely frowned upon it as another neo-colonial agenda. Both perspectives are wrong. African Renaissance was an organic concept encompassing political, economic, cultural, social and psychological dimensions.

African Renaissance did not concern itself with taking Africa back to nostalgic old times. Neither did it romanticize the post-colonial era. On the contrary, it sought to draw lessons from Africa’s traditions and its past, while also seeking to integrate the continent into global structures of production and trade, on more beneficial terms. Mbeki evoked the past to magnify the contradictions of the moment either along race or along North-South divide, and to make a case for a different future.

The similarities between Mbeki and Nehru do not stop there. Their vehement quests for an enhanced international pedestal for their respective countries often seen as ‘punching above their weight’, their natural comfort at international stage, their nuanced understanding of power, their efforts to write their own different scripts of international power relations, and their appreciation of democracy and modernity are some of the common threads that link them. Indeed these two leaders shaped their countries’ foreign policies in the most powerful ways.

Just as Nehru made India an important player in the world, Mbeki secured a similar status for South Africa. By elevating South Africa to the global stage, through active participation in forums like India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA), World Trade Organisation, the G-8 outreach process with developing countries, and the G-20, Mbeki has ensured that South Africa is a respected global actor. These two leaders left a repository of knowledge and a sterling legacy that both India and South Africa can continue to draw upon as they traverse treacherous foreign policy course in a world that is becoming complex and fluid.

Learning from South Africa

Little over a week before the world cup carnival set off in Johannesburg, South African President Jacob Zuma undertook his first state visit to India. President Zuma, much like his predecessors Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, has been an active traveler in the first year of his assuming office. It was only fitting that India became his last destination before the world cup.

South Africa, for Indians, has always been a special country. It was the place where Gandhi received his political education and tested all his weapons of non-violence before employing them in Indian freedom struggle. South Africa also has a very influential Indian community, in fact the largest outside India. Even before India got independence, Jawaharlal Nehru’s interim government raised the issue of discrimination against Indians in South Africa at the United Nations and for the next four and a half decades, India’s was the loudest voice against the heinous system of Apartheid at all World forums. The African National Congress has, since the 1960s when it was only a liberation movement, continued to maintain a representative in New Delhi. Relations between the two countries are very warm.

The African National Congress and the Indian National Congress have also traditionally shared a close relationship, and both show many parallels in terms of their own evolution, ideologies, methods and eclectic membership both during their pre- as well as post-liberation phases. It is for no reason that Nelson Mandela is often equated with Gandhi in India.

In a way, in the post Cold war era as India’s foreign policy eschewed its normative bias in favour of more pragmatic shores; South Africa has taken up the mantle of being the normative voice of the developing world, especially Africa. Nelson Mandela, in his Presidential term, was the conscience keeper of the world much like how Nehru during his hey days was. Mandela’s successor Thabo Mbeki was an intellectually powerful statesman who, almost fanatically, worked to bring Africa into the world centre-stage. This, however, contributed to his undoing, and ultimate ouster from power in 2008, as his policies on Aids and Zimbabwe were almost universally condemned. Nevertheless, President Zuma has inherited a South Africa which usually ‘punches way above its weight’ on world forums and is generally respected as a ‘good global citizen’. It has often positioned itself as the mediator between the North and the South, and has employed innovative diplomatic skills to extract healthy bargains from both sides a number of times.

India and South Africa are also joint stock holders in the new emerging dynamics of the world system. IBSA, originally formed in 2003, has become an important platform for these two along with Brazil to come up and explore all avenues of fruitful partnership. However, one also has to be conscious of burdening this nascent forum with inflated rhetoric of third world leadership and bringing change in the world. Exclusion of South Africa from BRIC, meanwhile, also makes less and less sense since it is not only a very prominent emerging power but also the most promising from Africa.

Very interestingly, and also in a complete contrast from how India is perceived by its neighbours, South Africa is considered a benign hegemon in southern Africa, and also the larger African continent. It has to a great part eschewed employing hard power tactics in the region and encouraged consensual decision making, sometimes even to its own great disadvantage. What better example could one gather than the ongoing tussle for a seat in the UN Security Council? Nigeria and Egypt have openly advocated their own candidature based on their historical greatness and sidetracked South Africa as just a new kid on the block. South Africa, in contrast, has campaigned rather discreetly; often not being ready to push the limits and damage its image. In fact, it has gone the other way and campaigned not for itself but for Africa on all international forums. It has fathered initiatives like Nepad (New Partnership for Africa’s Development) with dreams of African Renaissance, and has been extremely willing to share its own resources – political, economic, military and diplomatic – with the rest of the continent. It has sold its own international mega-events, such as its failed bid for Cape Town Olympics in 2004 and the 2010 Soccer World Cup as African, not merely South African, events. As one political commentator has argued, it follows a peculiar strategy of ‘leading from the back’.

Another interesting aspect, sometimes overlooked, and also of great learning to India, is how South Africa has made use of these international events for nation building. In a short span of 16 years, it has conducted three grand sporting events - Rugby, Cricket and now Soccer world cups. All three of them are traditionally identified with the three racial categories. Rugby is traditionally an Afrikaans game, cricket an English sport and Football is played predominantly by the blacks. In 1995, when Rugby World Cup was held in South Africa, the sport for black South Africans was an apartheid legacy. For Afrikaans, it was central to their identity. It was also the period when Mandela’s Rainbow Nation had just been born.

Despite Mandela’s great act of forgiveness, the whites feared for their identity and the blacks resented the past atrocities. The society was fragile and a great bloodbath looked imminent to many. ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man'. When Mandela famously rejoiced, danced and lifted the cup after South Africa won, many whites for the first time stated with tears in their eyes ‘this is my president!’ Even for the black majority, the game of rugby was transformed overnight into a specter of national reconciliation, and who else could play this game better than Nelson Mandela.

Disconcertingly, sixteen years after Apartheid ended, reconciliation seems to be a fading chimera for many, as socio-economic incentives have not percolated down to the black populace. Black empowerment has benefitted only a miniscule black elite and they along with whites still control most resources. This has resulted in a growing dissent in the black majority which is threatening to expose the delicate stitch-work that ‘Rainbow nation’ and ‘Reconciliation’ had attempted. Recently, an Afrikaans conservative leader Terre Blanche was killed in his farm, which, some associated with the violent language contained in the black apartheid revolutionary song ‘Kill the Boer’ that had recently become popular until it was banned by a High Court.

Against this gloomy background, the World Cup 2010 has generated the right energies and is acting as a great unifying force for the nation. Furthermore, the event is being sold as ‘African games’ with an eye clearly on increasing the South African weight on the continent and also subtly projecting itself as a leader of the continent. India has lessons to take for its own commonwealth games, which up till now doesn’t seem to have generated much national pride, leave alone a South Asian pride which no one has even thought of.

The article was published on Zee News website. At http://www.zeenews.com/FIFAWC2010/story.aspx?aid=634703 on 17 June

Two Obstacles Stop Us Tapping into Powerhouse India

Here is my opinion piece co-authored with Dr. Mzukisi Qobo in South African Newspaper The Sunday Independent 6 June.


South Africa has stated its strong preference for building relations with emerging economies of the South rather than singularly focused on established powers from the North. This is one of the important lessons that the global financial crisis, as well as the Eurozone crisis has taught many countries in the world – to diversify economic relations. Crafting a strategy targeted at emerging powers, generally known as South-South strategy, is in line with the reality of global power shifts from the West to the emerging Asia and Latin America. Zuma’s state visit to India should, therefore, be seen as an important step in consolidating South-South strategy.

The level of importance attached to this India visit is demonstrated by the size of the business delegation, which has over 200 participants. This powerfully underlies the fact that foreign relations today are no longer just a matter of deepening political relations, but the touchstone of their endurance is the extent of commercial relations between countries. Economics, and not just politics are the essence of international relations in the 21st Century global system.

There is a lot that the two countries share in common. One of the most influential and dynamic minorities in South Africa has an Indian lineage. It was India that was a prime mover in cutting diplomatic ties with the apartheid South Africa in the late 1940s. When the winds of change swept across the country, India was quick to extend a hand of friendship in 1993.

Then India’s Prime Minister, Shri Atal Vihari Vajpayee, was one of the first leaders that the then South African President Mbeki consulted with over the formation of a club of influential developing countries from the South, the G-South in 2000. This was a group of like-minded countries that were to counter-balance the G8 and push for the reform of the global economic order - an idea that never took off at the time, but was later realised in the form of the India-Brazil-South Africa Forum (IBSA).

As a rising power that has strong historical affinities with South Africa, India should thus occupy an important place in South Africa’s foreign policy. Indeed, trade and investment activity between these two countries have been on the rise for the past 3 years. There are commercial flows in both directions, with big Indian companies making their presence felt in South Africa; and South African businesses involved in a diverse range of sectors in the Indian economy, including in financial services, property development, and energy.

Trade between the two countries current stands at US$4.5bn, and with massive potential for further growth. This falls short of the US$7bn target that was set three years ago. Nonetheless it is much higher than when India renewed diplomatic ties with South Africa in 1993. At that time, trade between the two countries stood at US$45 million. Investment stock is at US$6bn, with companies Tata, CIPLA, Mahindra&Mahindra having established their roots in South Africa. On the South African side, groups such as Nandos, Tiger Brands, SAB Miller, Bidvest, Old Mutual, Standard Bank, and the First Rand Group have cast their net in India’s market.

To give effect to the goal of strengthening ties between the two countries, deepening trade and investment ties dominated much of the discussions at the Mumbai meetings between the Business Unity South Africa (BUSA) and its Indian counterpart, the Confederation of Indian Industries during Zuma’s state visit.

What these meetings yielded include the signing of the new terms of reference between the two business groups, with the CEO Forum co-chaired by Patrice Motsepe and Ratan Tata relaunched. Further, in a business-like fashion, one-on-one meetings took place between business leaders covering sectors such as finance, maritime and construction.
It is clear to South Africa that engagement with India has to be raised to a much significant level. President Zuma has set the target of growing trade flows to US$10bn by 2012, and with the export basket on the South Africa side composed of value-added goods, an objective that is in line with South Africa’s trade and industrial policies. This is one of the factors that make pursuing commercial relations with emerging economies more attractive over established industrial countries – they can generate better market opportunities for diversified products. India’s massive growth potential, the stability in its political system, and commitment to the rule of law makes it all the more attractive.

The Minister of Trade and Industry, Rob Davies invited Indian companies to set up manufacturing units in green energy, automobiles and pharmaceuticals. South Africa being the country with largest cases of HIV/Aids would benefit immensely from advances in Indian pharmaceutical industry especially their cost advantage. Technology spillovers can also be harvested.

Similarly, Sasol’s coal-to-liquid fuel technology can revolutionize the Indian energy sector considering India’s growing energy needs and its dependence on coal for energy. Accordingly, Sasol has entered into a joint venture with Tata Steel for $10 billion, and the venture would be operational by 2018.

Indeed, since launching its major economic liberalization in 1991, India’s economy has been on the upward rise. Some estimates suggest that within two decades it could overtake China’s economy as the high performing emerging economy. As the Goldman Sachs 2007 Report, ‘India’s Rising Growth Potential’ points out, ‘the 21st century is set to become India’s ‘urban century’, with more people living in cities and towns than in the countryside for the first time in history’. India has 10 of the 30 fastest growing urban centers in the world, and with an estimated 700 million people moving to cities by 2050. This certainly signifies a huge market potential.

Driven by its buoyant services and skills-intensive manufacturing sector, and a fast growing middle class, India is sure to make a splash as a motor of the global economy. It is a country that South African cannot ignore. However, problems abound in both countries. While India’s investment climate has improved significantly compared to two decades ago and infrastructure is being rehabilitated, India is not an easy country to do business in.

India ranks poorly at 169 in the World Bank assessment on the ease of doing business. South Africa is at a much better level at 32, and not without its own regulatory constraints in the area of network infrastructure. In India constraints in the business environment is further compounded by bureaucratic corruption and regulatory burdens. Caps on foreign direct investment in certain sectors dampen business confidence. For example, some critical services sectors are overlayered with restrictions with regards to the percentage of foreign ownership caps: it is 26 percent in the insurance sector; 49 percent in telecoms; and 49 percent in banking. Some sectors are impenetrable fortresses.

Similarly, the Broad-based black economic empowerment programme (BBEE) in South Africa does not lend itself to easy grasp by foreigners, and is often seen as a cost to doing business. The inefficiencies in the Company and Intellectual Property Registration Office (CIPRO) do not suggest a propitious business climate. South Africa is also not immune to the disease of corruption. Indian business people face visa problems. Recently India has also made its visa procedure stringent. The problem of high crime levels is an investment deterrent that cannot be underplayed.

Despite these challenges, both countries boast a stable political environment, a predictable macro-economic environment, and commitment to the rule of law. No doubt, there is a lot that the two countries can benefit from increased trade and investment relationship, especially if two major hurdles can be addressed. The first has to do with clarity on the status of South Africa’s bilateral investment treaty. In the past two years the South African government has been reviewing conditions under which it signs up to bilateral investment treaty.

As such signing new bilateral investment treaties has been put on ice until Cabinet approves the proposed policy framework before it. Indians have been insisting on signing a bilateral investment treaty with South Africa so as to lend a strong weight to the stated commitment between the two parties. The sooner a new framework is approved the better.

The second challenge has to do with the stalled SACU-India bilateral trade relations. It is difficult to see major improvement in trade and investment relations whilst these two instruments are still mired in ambiguity. In the case of the SACU-India preferential trade agreement, South Africa’s economic sovereignty is constrained, as it has to work through a tortuously slow SACU process, and be dictated upon by smaller countries such as Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia and Swaziland in the ‘democratised’ SACU arrangement.

This creates serious competitive disadvantages for South Africa in a dynamic global economy that will not wait for it. SACU is an impediment that South Africa may need to cast away so that it can be free to strongly reorient its global strategy towards emerging economies, and play fully on the global economic stage. Such a move holds better prospects for increased trade and investment opportunities. Hopefully, Zuma’s trip to India will create a new sense of urgency in defining a clear and coherent South-South strategy.

Mzukisi Qobo is Head: Emerging Powers and Global Challenges at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), and a member of the Midrand Group; and Vineet Thakur is a Researcher with the Foundation for National Security Research and a doctoral student at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, India.