As a result, we now know at least three things. First, for somebody who has been groomed to take a leading role in politics for his entire life, Mr Gandhi still looks woefully ill-prepared. It could be his own fault, or a failure of a team that surrounds him. Either way, his strategy at the event was strangely revealing.
Attending a business lobby, in the midst of a sharp economic slowdown, when the confidence of Indian and foreign investors is plummeting, he should have come with a plan. Ideally he should have sought to bolster Indian businesses' confidence, to get them investing, believing in rapid growth around the corner.
A sensible plan for the day would have been to reassure Indian business that promoting rapid economic growth is again a priority. Mr Gandhi could have spelled out two or three specific measures, ideally in some detail, that he would support—for example, getting an Indian-wide goods-and-services tax accepted; promoting investment in retail or other industries; or devising a means by which infrastructure could be built much quicker. If he were really brave, he might have set out thoughts on ending bureaucratic uncertainty over corruption, or on land reform.
Instead Mr Gandhi offered a range of thoughts, some earnest, many well-meaning, some apparently irrelevant and some waffle. He discussed India’s soft power abroad (evidence: yoga is popular in New York; Indian film stars are recognised in Spanish nightclubs), waxed at length on the virtues of Indian “complexity” versus foreigners’ “simplicity” and indirectly admitted that India is a terrible place in which to do business. At one point, to bemusement in the audience, he argued that if you can succeed in business in India then you will flourish anywhere, “even on the moon”. India, after two terms of Congress rule, evidently does not have the conditions right for its economy to flourish.
Second, Mr Gandhi has some interesting thoughts on India’s political system and the need for even greater devolution of power, and an unshakeable belief in democracy. Much of this was irrelevant if he was trying to promote himself as a decisive leader. But then it is not clear that he is. He repeatedly asserted that “one man on a horse” cannot save India, or that he “does not matter” as a leader, or that he is not a “hard-nosed politician” (he thinks they are sad), or that India needs to hear the voices of a “billion people”. How many times can he say, openly or not, that he has no wish to be a politician, before voters and others take him at his word?
Mr Gandhi spoke in greatest detail about getting much more decision-making shifted to the “third tier” of Indian politics, in effect to the level of panchayats, the unit of village administration. Too much of the time of the national and state parliamentarians, the 5,000 people or so who run India’s legislatures, is wasted on hyper-local matters, he says. Once local politicians have more power, somehow (he was a hazy about the means) the various energies of a billion-plus Indians will be released, and generate growth and development.
Perhaps structural reform of that sort would benefit India. Mr Gandhi wants a debate on that, and also to discuss how constitutional reform might bring about other gains. But would it really help to reduce corruption, speed decision-making, improve national policymaking? Would it do much to cut poverty quicker and create jobs? It looks to be a strange subject for Mr Gandhi to make his own, when voters face a lot of other pressing worries. Possibly it is a hangover from his years spent (to little result) trying to rejig the youth wing of the Congress party. But for business, his audience at the CII, hearing that more political power could be shifted to the villages may be an unsettling message. Is India’s problem too much centralisation of power, as Mr Gandhi argues, or rather too little effective decision-making and implementation, across the board?
Third, Mr Gandhi has some rather hostile views of China. He dismissed the big neighbour, with its immense economy and successful development as a “simplistic place”, and a “dragon”. He cited a story in which a Chinese bus driver ran over a pedestrian and drove away, presumably to show the lack of accountability there. (In India such accidents of course happen too, and sometimes mob violence is the result).
By contrast India, he suggests, is a “beehive”, complex and busy, but in the end rather robust. (Mr Gandhi’s parable of the bees, incidentally, appears to be different from the one favoured by Adam Smith). He mentioned, too, that China applies power in a blunt, obvious way. By contrast India applies power in a gentle, soft and supportive way, which he believes will be more successful in the long run.
In all it was Mr Gandhi who sounded rather simplistic about China. Anyone in the room might have pointed out China’s stunning successes in cutting poverty, improving health, promoting manufacturing and jobs, building infrastructure, and so on. Perhaps Mr Gandhi, who is fond of travelling inside India and talking to migrant workers, the poor and ordinary voters, would also benefit from a trip to China, to understand how much faster India needs to run, if it is to have a chance of exerting the sort of energy that Mr Gandhi sees in its future.
