BACKSTORY 54.4 - Adani, Resorting, and India as the Wild East
Written by Wade Rathke
ACORN’s crack regional director for Ontario is doing us a great service by agreeing to go to India soon to train as many of our new organizers in Bengaluru, Delhi, and Mumbai as she can by visiting each of our affiliate offices for an intensive week. Never having been there, she has a mixture of excitement and trepidation at the journey, as she applies for a visa and we lockdown the plane ticket. The head organizer of ACORN Canada in an earlier period of her life had traveled around India for many months, so was able to give her some assurance and advice about safety, food, and other tips. Having visited India many times over the last more than twenty years, I was able to brief her on our affiliates, and what they might need and expect.
All good, but to prepare her for how overwhelming India can be for a first timer, or, more importantly, getting her ready to understand India is a harder and more complicated task. I have settled on a description that borrows from the classic American understanding of the Wild West. She needs to understand that India is the Wild East. It’s not perfect, but at least it comes closer than most ways of getting her acculturated.
This hit me in the early days when we first were supporting organizing there and we sat at a coffeehouse on a comfortable couch and chairs and went around the room introducing ourselves and how we came to community organizing. One of our team without a hint of reservation introduced his remarks by reporting that after university he and his comrades had abandoned “armed struggle” as not making progress and felt like they weren’t making social change by helping one of the party’s gang rush polling stations and steal ballot boxes in his home state, so he had come to seek the kind of organizing we were doing. Like I said, the Wild East!
Today is little different than he described from his own experience twenty years ago as a younger man. There was a recent story in the New York Times that described the current practice of the ruling party using something called “resorting” to take over municipal and state parties. In Canada or the USA, most of us would call this kidnapping, since it involves forcibly taking an elected official out of state and away from home and putting them on ice at a resort until either their party was able to do its dirty work back home, or until they pressured the official they had “resorted” to switch to their side. In fairness, the article made clear this was not a tactic unique to the current ruling BJP under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but simply an old school maneuver they had taken to a new level and perfected.
Currently, the other example that seems a mixture of crony capitalism and India’s program of supporting soft power in its partnership with politically-advantaged billionaires both domestically and internationally involves Gautam Adani and his Adani Group, which has its feelers in coal, ports, and huge infrastructure and development projects, from airport construction to the redevelopment of the Dharavi slum in Mumbai. Adani, his son, and companies have now been charged by the US Department of Justice and the Security Exchange Commission with violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and misleading investors. Amazingly, it seems that they recorded more than $250 million on their books as “incentive” payments in order to get Indian states to buy the more expensive solar power they were producing from a record setting contract from Modi’s government. The simple fact that the officials were depositing these millions in their personal accounts made it clear these were unmistakenly bribes. Kenya has reversed an agreement with Adani to modernize its airport. Sri Lanka has backed away from allowing Adani to modernize a port. Bangladesh has paused and turned back Adani projects. USA investment in some of these infrastructure projects has also stopped. US and Canadian public employee pension funds invested in Adani projects have lost close to a billion dollars as companies have been delisted due to this scandal. Why anyone would feel safe with their money in an Adani enterprise is beyond my imagination.
India is one of the world’s largest economies and growing bigger all the time. I could just tell the organizer that and let her muddle through as she tries to help people develop organizations and campaigns on their visit. Somehow that doesn’t prepare someone to visit and work in India where these kinds of Canadian norms are unknown, and likely to continue to cross the line now, as if no one outside of India will pay attention to the standard operating procedures there. I can remember a friend from Delhi telling me how confused he was in San Diego in understanding a problem his uncle was having with zoning regulations on a house he was building. He had naively asked, “are the usual bribes not working,” and had to be schooled that California wasn’t India. As a Kenyan nonprofit focusing on accountability in public budgets, said “The bottom line is there has to be an assurance of the safeguarding of public interest in all similar future agreements.”
Recently Prime Minister Modi said the government is going to delist any nonprofit that opposes development as being anti-India. For now, make no mistake, India is still the Wild East.
