07 November 2012, 04:01 PM IST
Global interdependence has grown to an extent where it's meaningless to judge the impact of American presidential elections on India narrowly on the basis of what the new president's policy would be towards India. Apart from foreign policy, domestic policy and what it means for the US economy and society are of huge significance for the rest of the world, including India. On the count of domestic policy, primarily, Obama's re-election is good news.
The conventional wisdom in India is that Republican presidents are more pro-India as compared to Democrats. There is no gainsaying that Republican George W Bush went out of his way to give India quasi-admission to the nuclear club, laying the ground for removing a long regime of technology denial that had kept India hammering away at reinventing the wheel instead of working on the cutting edge of dual use technologies. This will make a huge difference to India's strategic capability and economic strength in the years to come, and might also be useful in augmenting our nuclear power generation capacity. And Republicans tend to less hawkish, when it comes to outsourcing and other trade related matters.
In the wake of sustained joblessness in the US, quite a bit of it structural, arising from outsourcing of manufacturing and increasingly of service sector jobs to foreign shores, it is not surprising that US politicians pander to protectionism. Obama is more guilty on this count than Mitt Romney. But outsourcing is an integral part of the world economy and cannot be reversed, whether politicians like it or not. I am willing to take a bet that before the decade is out, even haircuts would be outsourced. Robotic trimmers and scissors, guided by an operator who sees the customer under her charge from thousands of miles away through cameras that send their images over the internet are entirely feasible. There is no threat to India's outsourcing industry except from our own education system and its failure to produce talent and creative imagination.
The new US president's foreign policy obviously is of great concern to the rest of the world, including India. Obama has been less aggressive than his predecessor, has been willing to 'lead from behind' as in Libya and has ended wars, not started new ones. But Obama under-delivered on the great expectations his election as the US president had aroused about making peace with the Muslim world. The Arab Spring offered a wholly unexpected and exciting opportunity for the Arab world's emancipation from the time warp in which Cold War politics had trapped it, choking off democracy and economic modernity and the insidious overthrow of religion and custom these two combine to foster. But the Obama administration did not quite rise to seize the opportunity.
But the most pressing reason why Obama's re-election matters to India is that it is good for America itself. Obama offered a vision of an inclusive society which invests in equality of opportunity by making education and healthcare affordable, which makes space for immigrants, amends the perversion of the ultra-rich being taxed less than the middle class. The Democrats' vision, articulated better by Bill Clinton than by Barack Obama, is of a society where people matter to other people as human beings, not just as elements of an invisible, elaborate division of social labour. The ideological vision of the Republicans, in which the size and role of the government should be shrunk as much as possible while the entrepreneurial energies of the rich unleash creativity that will touch everyone's lives, translate into policies that widen inequality and increase inequality of opportunity.
On fiscal policy as well, Obama and the Democrats have much more credible a plan, as compared to the tax-cut mantra of the Republicans.
Obama understands that creating jobs in the US means elevating educational standards even higher for the average member of the workforce, investing in new technologies and new energy forms that impact global climate less and retaining the lead the US has in new advances in science and technology.
While the rest of the world has no stake in the US being at the head of the innovation league table, it does have a huge stake in the world's most innovative economy continuing to sustain an ecosystem that encourages innovation. It is not just the US economy and American workers who gain from such US achievements, but the entire world.
The world is interdependent. The internet and the iPad originated in the US but changes lives all over the world. The Chinese peasant was forced to tighten his belt to produce China's 50% plus savings rate, the savings were deployed in the US which then became a centre for intermediation of savings to the rest of the world. Horribly lax regulation produced the crisis of 2008. But the global deployment of national savings from very many countries with more savings than they can absorb domestically has been a great boost for entrepreneurship, particularly in India.
Obama's re-election feeds the interdependence in a positive fashion. We in India can raise a toast.
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