Christ clearly enunciated that he was “The Way, the Truth and the Life” and the “Light of the World”.  Truth is the guiding light and the way for each of us to be Christ-like and for the world to attain the much sought after peace. The present depressing global and corporate scenario clearly establishes that political and corporate leaders who forsake the way of Truth in pursuit of national, corporate or personal interests have caused most major international and corporate problems of today.
       
“Satyam evam Jayate” (Truth always triumphs); the ancient Sanskrit maxim is still a good touchstone for our lives and actions. Indeed if each of us firmly resolves to adhere to Truth we will find that committing sin becomes difficult since every sin needs to be camouflaged with a multitude of lies. Truth thus becomes our best safeguard against sin and the less sin we commit the more we would be at peace with ourselves and with the world, and the world too would be more peaceful. As Christians each of us needs to be as dedicated to peacemaking as to Truth. Christ placed high importance on peace and peacemaking with his beatitude “Blessed are the peace makers for they shall be called sons of God”. There are people of goodwill in all religious communities. We need to look out for and join hands with them in promoting peace while recognising that only peace based on Truth and Justice will be durable.
        
As the theme of this important conference is ‘The Gospel and Globalisation” I shall now move from the message of Christ to that of the votaries of globalization. Most of these votaries speak about globalisation as if it was some newly discovered magic wand for eliminating backwardness and poverty. The fact however is that globalization is a very old phenomena which first emerged when the first ambitious king decided to enlarge his kingdom and power by bringing neighbouring kingdoms under his sway and thus establish an empire. Every empire was an attempt at globalisation in small or big measure. Alexander the Great, the Romans, Byzantium, the Arabs, Ottoman Turks, Portugal, Spain, Holland, France and Britain were globalisers of the past.  They brought extensive parts of the world under their sway and promoted their own cultures, political regimes and commercial practices in their respective empires and enriched themselves by exploiting the wealth, natural resources and labour of their colonial subjects and impoverishing them in this process. How this worked in practice is well illustrated by the following quotations from the eminent British economist Lord John Maynard Keynes and the contemporary American historian Paul Kennedy.  

 “The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep. He could at the same moment adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world and share without any exertion or trouble in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend.” (J.M. Keynes in “The Economic Consequences of Peace”)

“India imported a mere 1 million yards of cotton fabric in 1814, but that figure had risen to 51 million yards by 1830 and to a staggering 995 million yards by 1870. The awful result, according to one calculation, was that whereas the British and Indian peoples had roughly similar per capita levels of industrialization at the onset of the Industrial Revolution in 1750, India’s level was only one hundredth of the United Kingdom’s by 1900”. (Paul Kennedy in “Preparing for the Twenty First Century”

Globalisation in its contemporary form has emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and the apparent triumph of Western Capitalism. Since then, the G8 & and international funding agencies have made this the dominant economic credo and are constantly promoting it as panacea for the economic backwardness and poverty of East European and developing countries.

What are the requirements and effects of globalisation?  Among the first requirements of globalisation is structural reform, whereby tariff barriers and other import restrictions are brought down and/or eliminated, subsidies on domestic goods and services phased out and the public sector, particularly the loss making part of it, privatised. Subsequently or concurrently, national laws are required to be amended to accord with international requirements and to afford protection to foreign patents, intellectual property rights etc and safeguards for foreign investments.

Among the first effects of globalisation is a flood of cheap imports. The foreign imports are generally better packaged and advertised and make quick inroads into the domestic market. Depending on how big the inroads they make, they exert pressure on the exchange value of the domestic currency, which begins to depreciate. If this happens and the country has a sizable, inelastic import basket it could soon be in an economic crisis. Unless conscious and effective measures are taken to protect domestic industry, this import flood, including of capital goods, leads to domestic de-industrialisation and widespread unemployment.  

The next big challenge of globalisation is international competition. This necessitates rapid bridging of the technology gap between domestic and foreign production. This is no easy matter and costs billions of dollars, which most countries are unable to finance from domestic resources. They thus incur large foreign debt.  In their efforts to bridge the technology gap these countries are confronted with the five monopolies the advanced countries, particularly their multinational companies, possess. These are monopolies on: high technology, financial flows, natural resources (most “Arab oil” is in their hands), mass media and sophisticated armaments.

Another notable effect of globalisation is that it benefits the strong rather than the weak. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer both domestically and globally. In two years of its globalisation programme Mexico produced 11 billionaires and acquired the fourth place in the world (after the US, Germany and Japan) in this category. Mexico’s peasant uprising and 1994 economic debacle is the direct outcome of this.

Foreign investments, the great “lollipop” of globalisation, are mainly from multinational corporations. Dealing with them is not easy in view of their size and economic/technological strengths, and also their media/advertising clout. Besides, in the long run outflow in the form of repatriated profits is generally larger than the initial inflow of investment capital. Also, foreign capital inflows are quite often portfolio investments rather than for creation of new productive assets and these investments are easily transferable in a crisis situation as happened in Mexico in 1994 and in the ASEAN countries in 1998. National governments are unable to control such capital movements as these evade countries that seek to control them. In cases where foreign investments are in the productive, fixed assets they are generally in low technology soft drinks and consumer goods rather than in high technology areas.

The well-known American MIT professor Noam Chomsky takes a dim view of globalisation, which he describes as “the extension of trans-national corporate tyranny. These are tyrannical, totalitarian institutions, mega corporations. They are huge command economies, run from the top, relatively unaccountable and interlinked in various ways. Their first interest is profit. But it is does not end there. It deeper objective is to construct an audience of a particular type, one that is addicted to a certain lifestyle with artificial wants.”

Gandhi expressed the idea about “an audience of a particular type” somewhat differently by stating, “Formerly men were made slaves under physical compulsion. Now they are enslaved by temptation of money and of the luxuries that money can buy.”

What have been the effects of India’s globalisation, which was imposed on it by international funding agencies in 1991 because of the foreign exchange crisis that confronted it at that time? The Narasimha Rao government made ‘virtue out of necessity’ and went headlong into the reform and liberalisation process. Trade and investment policies, and most economic sectors, were opened up within a short time. Import duties were substantially brought down and numerous non-tariff barriers eliminated. Even import of second hand capital goods was permitted.   This caused much damage to domestic industry.  BHEL, one of the world’s top fifteen producers of power generation equipment, was the first to suffer. Others adversely affected were HMT, SAIL, Fertilizer Corporation of India and Chittaranjan Locomotive Works. Numerous private Indian manufacturers of capital goods also suffered. Another result of this liberalisation was that within its first two years 30 MNCs, among who were Hindustan Lever, Proctor and Gamble, ABB, Phillips, Brooke Bond and Maruti, raised their equity in Indian partner firms to over 51% and took management control over them.

The most amazing development was the Government of India decision to guarantee minimum returns to seven foreign investors in the power sector. Never since East India Company days, when British investors in the Indian railways were assured guaranteed returns of 12% had anybody enjoyed this extraordinary concession, which incidentally no Indian corporate has ever been offered.

The most deleterious effect of liberalisation and globalisation in India has been on labour and employment, particularly in the small scale and rural sector. A special group on employment opportunities constituted by the Planning Commission reported in 2002 that the rate of employment growth had declined from an annual average of 2.7% during the 1983-93 period to 1.07 percent in the 1993 –2000 period despite the economic growth rate rising from 5.2% to 6.7% during the same period. The latest National Sample Survey (NSS) figures also reveal the same unfavourable trends. In 1990, the total employment in the organized sector was 26.35 million with the public sector accounting for over 71 % of the total. As the decade wore on, organised employment increased marginally peaking in 1997. Since then there has been a decline both in public and private sector employment. The 2001 figures indicate public sector employment has dropped to under 69% of the total employment of 27.9 million. The other notable trend is “casualisation” and “contractualisation”. In 1983, the “usual status” of 31.5 per cent of the workers was recorded as casual. In comparison 7.5% were salaried and a substantial 61% self-employed. The latest round of NSS figures indicates that the percentage of casual workers had increased to 37.3% in 1999-2000. Together with rapid casualisation of labour there is increasing evidence of growing gender disparities and the persistence of the scourge of child labour. The figures for 1991 and 2001 in respect of female work participation were 22.3% and 25.6%. Much of this was in the rural sector, in circumstances of compulsion rather than choice. The 1999-2000 figures for child labourers were 10.2 million. 

A reform of India’s economic system, which over the previous four decades had developed distortions and rigidities, was definitely called for, but this reform should have been carried out within the established socio-economic framework rather than being discarded altogether. A good example of ‘intra systemic reform’ is that of China, where state regulation has been considerably relaxed but the basic economic system remains intact.  However even in China there have been growing social and regional inequalities and a significant growth in corruption at all levels.

Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen is quite a strong critic of India’s globalisation process. While acknowledging that “The ‘license raj’ did make economic initiatives difficult, produced lots of inefficient industries and led to many allocational distortions” he has held that “an under-active government in the social sector has bestowed on India the dubious distinction of having the largest number of poor in the world and also the largest middle-class on earth” and added that China’s success story would not have been possible if it had not dealt with its educational and health challenges prior to embarking on economic liberalization. Sen emphasises the importance of democracy and holds that it was one of India’s greatest assets. He rejects the argument that democracy is an obstacle to rapid economic development and holds that democracy cannot be judged in terms of its economic or material benefits but from its intrinsic value in bestowing freedom to citizens and politicising issues concerning the people. 
    
Since Gandhi had promoted “swadeshi” there is a widespread feeling that he was India oriented and protectionist. However, Gandhi was neither a narrow political or economic nationalist but a Universalist. His was an all-inclusive worldview. “My Nationalism includes the love of all nations of the earth, irrespective of creed…for me patriotism is the same as humanity. I am patriotic because I am human and humane. I will not hurt England or Germany to serve India.”  Proof of this is that having launched a boycott of foreign cloth in India, Gandhi used the first opportunity (when he went to London for the 1931 Round Table Conference), to visit and explain this action to the Lancashire textile workers whose jobs had been affected by this boycott. As for India’s programme of liberalisation and globalisation he would undoubtedly have been distressed by its adverse consequences on the employment and welfare of the working classes not only in India but worldwide and would have made efforts to devise some counter measures.  He would have insisted on a linkage between lowering of tariff barriers in developing countries to reciprocal measures from developed countries, either bilaterally or through global negotiations. He would have emphasised the need for investments in agriculture, rural industries, education, housing and health sectors as also for reducing administrative expenditure, eliminating wastage and corruption and mobilizing domestic savings and gold holdings. He would have urged unity among workers and trade unions in each country so as to acquire adequate negotiating power vis-à-vis domestic industrialists and multinationals, as also unity of action among developing countries in their negotiations with developed countries and international funding agencies. He would have applauded the 1997 action of President Nelson Mandela in importing low cost drugs for AIDS patients in South Africa in open defiance of the patent rights and monopolies of pharmaceutical multinationals, and Brazil’s insistence that either these multinationals manufacture their drugs there at controlled prices or else permit its companies to do so. He would have made quite clear to all concerned that globalisation which gives all countries an equal chance to trade their goods and services in the global market place was welcome but that the contrary approach whereby the strong impose their will on the weak and reap most of the economic benefits of international trade and investments, was unacceptable and would be resolutely opposed.        

If globalisation is actually to become the magic wand it is claimed to be by its votaries, and bring about global prosperity and progress, the developed and historically “Christian” countries would have to wholeheartedly adopt, and practice, the Gospel of Christ and Jesus’ commands “Love your neighbour as yourself“ and “Do to others what you would have them do to you”, and ensure that globalisation gives all countries, particularly the poor and weak ones, an equal chance to trade their goods and services in the global market place at equitable prices, that foreign aid given and foreign investments made in these countries, build up their respective productive capacities in the agricultural, industrial, human and natural resources sectors and enable them to attain self sustaining growth in all these sectors within the next two decades. Africa and South Asia where the majority of the world’s poor live is an appropriate part of the world to commence this “Good Samaritan” effort. However, until this desirable scenario comes to pass, we need to keep in mind that globalisation in its present form functions through privileged political and economic elites in each of our countries. It is them we need to confront to ensure that the interests of the poor are safeguarded and that they are not further impoverished. It is also our duty as Christians to ensure that the poor are educated and empowered so that they are enabled to boldly stand up for their rights. As Gandhi said “Real Swaraj will come not by the acquisition of authority by a few, but by the acquisition of the capacity by all to resist authority when it is abused. In other words, Swaraj is to be obtained by educating the masses to a sense of their capacity to regulate and control authority”. That is the challenge of leadership which each of you, young Christian leaders of South Asia have to take up and fulfil in your respective countries. May our Lord Jesus Christ inspire, guide, and enable you to do this.