Speaker 1: India is often cited as the next rising Asian power,
Speaker 1: right thereafter China. Its balls say India as ascendant because
Speaker 1: of its growing population, tech savvy, d'aspora, and democracy, among
Speaker 1: other things. Few discussions of Asia's future are complete without
Speaker 1: the obligatory reference to China and India, often in the
Speaker 1: same sentence. Both are frequently shorthand for the future of
Speaker 1: the world. But is China really the best comparison or
Speaker 1: is it merely the easiest? Does the narrative about India
Speaker 1: China rivalry obscure more than it enlightens. Welcome to Benchmark,
Speaker 1: a show about the global economy. I'm Annual Moss, columnists
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg Opinion in New York, and I'm Scott Landman
Speaker 1: and economics editor with Bloomberg News in Washington. A more
Speaker 1: interesting way of looking at India today might be to
Speaker 1: compare it to America in the late nineteenth and early
Speaker 1: twenty centuries. That was the era of the so called
Speaker 1: robber barons of tycoons like Rockefeller and Morgan. And today
Speaker 1: in India we have tycoons that have a kind of
Speaker 1: a similar profile in their society. Dan tell us a
Speaker 1: little bit about our guests. Our guest is James Crabtree,
Speaker 1: an associate professor at the Lee Kuan New School of
Speaker 1: Public Policy in Singapore. He's a former Financial Times journalist
Speaker 1: who's just published The Billionaire Raj, a journey through India's
Speaker 1: new guilded age. James, congratulations on the book, Thanks for
Speaker 1: joining us, Thanks for having me. How different our India
Speaker 1: and China? And what, if anything does the shorthand link
Speaker 1: between the two, miss I think that you're starting premise
Speaker 1: in your introduction is the right one, which is, these
Speaker 1: are two very different economies. China's is state dominated. India's,
Speaker 1: although it has a healthy state sector, is predominantly private sector.
Speaker 1: Um China has a strong government that is capable of
Speaker 1: doing things India, with the best wood in the world,
Speaker 1: does not. And most crucially, China began its liberalization process
Speaker 1: a good ten years before India, maybe twenty years depending
Speaker 1: on how you count it, and so China is a
Speaker 1: much much larger economy. This plays out in the way
Speaker 1: that people misread these two Asian giants, or one Asian
Speaker 1: giant and one Asian giant in waiting. If you look
Speaker 1: at an issue like the size and the middle class,
Speaker 1: people look at them as if they're the same. But
Speaker 1: the Chinese middle class is vast. The number of online
Speaker 1: shoppers in China now is greater than the number of
Speaker 1: online shoppers in the entire of the rest of the
Speaker 1: world combined. The Indian middle class is stupid tiny. I mean,
Speaker 1: maybe eighty million people out of population at one point
Speaker 1: three billion would classify as the sort of middle class
Speaker 1: customer that that you know, your listeners would imagine someone
Speaker 1: who has a petrol driven vehicle and some savings in
Speaker 1: the bank and a higher education. So they're very, very
Speaker 1: different economies, and so it's often not that helpful to
Speaker 1: take a kind of crude comparison between the two of them. James,
Speaker 1: let's talk about how that plays into your book, you know,
Speaker 1: thinking about the government's role in the economies of China
Speaker 1: and India. China had the state sponsored economy for some
Speaker 1: decades after the Communist Revolution. Subsequently, in the late nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies started to step away, which allowed the flourishing of
Speaker 1: the kind the economy that you see today. Can you
Speaker 1: tell us about India and how the government plays a
Speaker 1: role in India's economy and how that has either helped
Speaker 1: or held back and how that set the stage for
Speaker 1: the rise of the billionaire class that you talk about
Speaker 1: in your book. So India and China have been through
Speaker 1: a similar stage in their economic development, or China has
Speaker 1: been through. In India is going through this early stage
Speaker 1: of industrialization, which comes with a number of other things,
Speaker 1: massive urbanization, the development of the middle class um and
Speaker 1: big infrastructure development and its infrastructure, which I think is
Speaker 1: the most instructive comparison, because China has been through the
Speaker 1: largest infrastructure investment in human history, and it was predominantly
Speaker 1: driven and even directed by the states. So the government
Speaker 1: decided what should be built, and the people who are
Speaker 1: building it were largely state back companies, not necessarily wholly
Speaker 1: stay owned, but they were controlled by the state. India
Speaker 1: in the two thousands went through a similar infrastructure boom,
Speaker 1: and typically we view India as having fairly hopeless infrastructure.
Speaker 1: But actually if you go to the major Indian cities
Speaker 1: now and you go to their airports, they're not the
Speaker 1: airports that you think. They are. World class airports in
Speaker 1: almost every case. Now every big Indian city has a
Speaker 1: has a world class airport, and the most they opened
Speaker 1: in the last five to ten years and almost all
Speaker 1: of these were put in by big private sector conglomerates
Speaker 1: run by tycoons. The same is true of the steel
Speaker 1: mills and the iron ore mills, and the ports on
Speaker 1: the coast, and the and the toll roads between the cities.
Speaker 1: And that is where the comparison with America and the
Speaker 1: Gilded Age sort of bears out, because these have both
Speaker 1: been countries where the risk taking and industrial development has
Speaker 1: predominantly been taken on by the private sector. Now in
Speaker 1: the Indian case, it is funded by public sector banks.
Speaker 1: And you know, the government plays an important role because
Speaker 1: you can't get land to build a road or or
Speaker 1: a steel mill without the government say so. But it's
Speaker 1: really been the private sector that has taken the lead.
Speaker 1: And I think it's probably fair to say that the
Speaker 1: investment that went into India in the two thousands was
Speaker 1: probably the largest private sector investment in history since America
Speaker 1: built its railways. So you know, you're you're talking about
Speaker 1: a very substantial role for the private sector. In the US,
Speaker 1: there's a strong perception that China's government and its companies
Speaker 1: are one that the state that is a communist party,
Speaker 1: has co opted business in pursuit of national goals. Listening
Speaker 1: to you speak, I wonder whether the reverse is true
Speaker 1: in India. Companies have co opted the state. It's a
Speaker 1: very nice way of putting it. I think that definitely
Speaker 1: was true in the middle of the two thousands. So
Speaker 1: take take a step back. India became independent from Britain
Speaker 1: in seven and then for forty years shut itself off
Speaker 1: from the rest of the world and developed a socialist
Speaker 1: planned economy. Your listeners may be familiar with the phrase
Speaker 1: the Hindu rate of growth, the sense that India was
Speaker 1: a basket case that couldn't really grow more than four
Speaker 1: or five It opened up and began to liberalize, but
Speaker 1: it was really in the two thousands when things really
Speaker 1: kicked off, and that was when India began to grow
Speaker 1: it around eight percent a year, and you also got
Speaker 1: a wave of corruption handles, many of them to do
Speaker 1: with infrastructure investment or extractive industries or rent seeking. And
Speaker 1: it was at that moment that the point you make
Speaker 1: appeared to be true, where it really looked as if
Speaker 1: the large tycoons had just got the government in their pocket.
Speaker 1: They were bribing left, right and center, and that was
Speaker 1: when you had a big public reaction against grand corruption
Speaker 1: India in its pre liberalization time, We've always had corruption,
Speaker 1: but it was pretty small bore stuff. You know, you
Speaker 1: had to play a bribe to a policeman, you had
Speaker 1: to pay a bribe to get your driving license, your
Speaker 1: marriage certificate. It was only after liberalization. And this also
Speaker 1: happened in different ways in China and Russia too. But
Speaker 1: as the economy grew, the value of corruption grew with it,
Speaker 1: and so suddenly you had this grand not rather than
Speaker 1: retail corruption, you had a wholesale corruption. That has tapered
Speaker 1: off a little bit. So into India's people elected Randramodi,
Speaker 1: the current Prime Minister, won an overwhelming landslide. That was
Speaker 1: partly because he stood as a pro growth, pro business candidate,
Speaker 1: but he was also staunchly anti corruption. And so this
Speaker 1: sense that the tycoons have the Indian government in their
Speaker 1: pocket has tapered off a little bit. But I think
Speaker 1: it's certainly true to say that if you look at
Speaker 1: it the other way around, which is China. China's government
Speaker 1: is very strategic in the way that it directs investment,
Speaker 1: and presently, for instance, is trying to roll out it's
Speaker 1: China Plan to develop world class advanced manufacturing in areas
Speaker 1: like robotics and aeronautic manufacturing. India is much less good
Speaker 1: at that at sort of the state directing industry strategically
Speaker 1: and enabling it so that you get the kind of
Speaker 1: injuries industries you need to develop. Why don't you tell
Speaker 1: us a little bit about one of the main figures
Speaker 1: in your book, Mukesh Ambani, one of the wealthiest men
Speaker 1: in India. Who is he? Is there anybody in the
Speaker 1: United States that might be an equivalent to like Jeff
Speaker 1: Bezos or you know, how how did he amass not
Speaker 1: just his wealth but the power. You have some pretty
Speaker 1: interesting ecdotes in your book where people don't even want
Speaker 1: to talk about him. He just has so much hidden
Speaker 1: power behind the scenes. There's an Indian newspaper editor called
Speaker 1: Shaker Gupta. He's one of the pre eminent columnists in India.
Speaker 1: On Twitter earlier this week he sent me a little
Speaker 1: message saying, you know, you're quite brave to have written
Speaker 1: this book. And partially what he means is that people
Speaker 1: in India a bit careful writing about the big business people.
Speaker 1: Not because like Russia, you're going to end up dead
Speaker 1: in a ditch. But these people, they have a lot
Speaker 1: of power they remember, and so people are somewhat cautious
Speaker 1: about about writing about them. I mean, I had left
Speaker 1: the country son, since I'm somewhat protected, and Ambani is
Speaker 1: the most sort of famous I suppose of these examples.
Speaker 1: So let's start from the beginning. The American edition of
Speaker 1: my book on its front cover has a picture of
Speaker 1: his house, which is called Antilia. It is a a
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy meter residential skyscraper that towers over downtown Mumbai.
Speaker 1: It's a family home for Sambani, his wife and his
Speaker 1: three chill Droun and you know, it's large enough to
Speaker 1: be a gigantic hotel. It has all sorts of luxurious
Speaker 1: a coutoment from an indoor put football pitch and swimming
Speaker 1: pools and all the things you'd expect, hanging gardens, roof terraces,
Speaker 1: and people call it the billion dollar Home. Nobody really
Speaker 1: knows how much it actually cost to build. But there's
Speaker 1: this sense that this is really the icon of what
Speaker 1: I have called India's New Gilded Age, because it's one
Speaker 1: of the most visible buildings in Mumbai, which is the
Speaker 1: financial capital and the richest city in India. But it's
Speaker 1: still a city where something about half the residents live
Speaker 1: in slums and in a country where GDP per capital
Speaker 1: is about sevent d dollars. Muka Schambanni who is he?
Speaker 1: It's quite difficult to compare him to an American capitalist
Speaker 1: because he runs, as many Asian tycoons do, a very
Speaker 1: distributed conglomerate. So he inherited it from his father, and
Speaker 1: his father started out in plastics and moved into petro
Speaker 1: chemicals and oil refining. Muk Shambani has recently he spent
Speaker 1: an enormous amount of money thirty billion dollars launching a
Speaker 1: fourth generation mobile telephone business. But he has his fingers
Speaker 1: in all sorts of pies. He has media, hotels, bits
Speaker 1: and bobs of financial services, all sorts of things, and
Speaker 1: it's a very distributed business. Oil and gas it's a
Speaker 1: big business. So they do energy exploration. And he's not
Speaker 1: just the richest man in India and his personal fortune
Speaker 1: is forty billion dollars, so he's the richest man in
Speaker 1: Asia according to the most recent Forbes list. The reason
Speaker 1: why he's so feared partly is the legacy of his father,
Speaker 1: who was India's pre eminent tycoon before him. And had
Speaker 1: a reputation for you know, knowing how to work the
Speaker 1: system to to make money. Is a ferociously competitive and
Speaker 1: his son has inherited some of that as well. Chambani
Speaker 1: is known as a ferocious competitor who will spend whatever
Speaker 1: money and you know, indulge in whatever tactic is necessary
Speaker 1: to get what he wants. And his investment in what's
Speaker 1: called reliance Geo. This new Greenfield mobile telephone network is
Speaker 1: an example of a quite tycoon like venture in the
Speaker 1: sense that no sensible board of a Western style company
Speaker 1: would have green lit spending thirty billion dollars to build
Speaker 1: a new fourth generation mobile outfit in India, which is
Speaker 1: an incredibly competitive mobile that mobile market in which almost
Speaker 1: none of the companies make any profits because it's so competitive,
Speaker 1: And yet he sank more money into one company than
Speaker 1: all of the rest of the Indian telecom companies had
Speaker 1: spent collectively since liberalization. I mean, it was just a
Speaker 1: it's an insanely ambitious venture. And in the book, so
Speaker 1: I suppose I have to say I sort of admire that.
Speaker 1: I mean, what's the point of being a tycoon if
Speaker 1: you can't take these ridiculous big bets that's sort of
Speaker 1: the point of building a railway between New York and
Speaker 1: Los Angeles, or you know, these huge, bold, visionary things.
Speaker 1: The problem in India traditionally has been that you can
Speaker 1: take a lot of risk as a tycoon, but you
Speaker 1: don't take any of the downside of that risk because
Speaker 1: as you have great control over the banks, you don't
Speaker 1: have to pay back your debts. It's it's almost unheard
Speaker 1: of for Indians to go bust. So the tycoons have
Speaker 1: a lot of power. So tell us a little bit
Speaker 1: about your background. You were the ft bureau chief in Mumbai.
Speaker 1: Did that mean you were the head of all FT
Speaker 1: reporters in India. No, the South Asian Bureau chief sits
Speaker 1: in Delhi. So typically that's how it works. The Ft
Speaker 1: obviously is a much smaller operation than the giants of Broomberg.
Speaker 1: So we had a couple of people in Mumbai and
Speaker 1: a couple of people in Delhi, and so I was
Speaker 1: in charge of writing about banks and finance, heavy industry, tech, telecoms, cricket, Bollywood,
Speaker 1: whole range of fun stuff. But it was we'll get
Speaker 1: to cricket in a second. If it was, it was
Speaker 1: from the beginning of the right from the start that
Speaker 1: I got there. I arrived in twenty eleven. That was
Speaker 1: the period of these corruption scandals, and so I sort
Speaker 1: of arrived on the on the turn, as it were,
Speaker 1: the moment when the real boom years were just beginning
Speaker 1: to peter out. And what then happened, which was, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the tide went out and you began to
Speaker 1: see who was still less standing, as it were, and
Speaker 1: so a number of these conglomerates, it turned out to
Speaker 1: have taken on far too much risk and got themselves
Speaker 1: into big trouble. And this has been a theme of
Speaker 1: the Indian economy ever since. Then. You have what's called
Speaker 1: the twin balance sheet problem, where there's far too much
Speaker 1: debt in the corporate center and much too much bad
Speaker 1: loans in the banking system. And so India has been
Speaker 1: struggling to come to terms with the sort of the
Speaker 1: after effects of the boom in the mid two thousands.
Speaker 1: And did you ask to go to India or were
Speaker 1: you assigned? Now I've desperately wanted to go. I've been
Speaker 1: to India before. You know, India's a fascinating country. It's
Speaker 1: a wonderful place to be a journalist. It's very open.
Speaker 1: If you compare South Asia, which is chaotic, to East Asia,
Speaker 1: which is very well organized. But but South Asia is
Speaker 1: very open society. Indians love to talk. If you go
Speaker 1: in there, particularly if you work for a top tier
Speaker 1: media organization like Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal or
Speaker 1: the Ft, get great access. People will talk to you.
Speaker 1: The Indian elite it's quite Western in its orientation. They
Speaker 1: send their kids to American universities, their own houses in London,
Speaker 1: they care, they get their capital from Western capital markets.
Speaker 1: None of this is really true in China. That's not
Speaker 1: to say that the Chinese are for the kids going
Speaker 1: to university in the US. That's true. But and that's
Speaker 1: not to say that China's elite is insular. It isn't.
Speaker 1: But the Indian elite is particularly concerned with what is
Speaker 1: said about it and is very well networked into the
Speaker 1: global financial sectors London and New York. And that means
Speaker 1: you get a peculiar insight into what's going on. And
Speaker 1: I also think that typically when outsiders like us right
Speaker 1: about India, we tend to do it from Delhi. The
Speaker 1: typical book written by a foreigner about about India tends
Speaker 1: to look at Indian politics. And so although I've often
Speaker 1: joked that it's not as if the world was crying
Speaker 1: out for another book written about India by a white
Speaker 1: British journalist, I think mine is at least a little
Speaker 1: bit different because it was written from Mumbai, and it's
Speaker 1: written through the lens of business, and that's what I
Speaker 1: was interested in. I never was that interested as a
Speaker 1: journalist in writing about MidCap companies in London. But what
Speaker 1: captured my imagination was the sheer risk taking that has
Speaker 1: to go on in India at this stage in its development.
Speaker 1: And I think if you were a journalist in America
Speaker 1: and eight and you're watching Cornelius Vanderbilt or Jay Gould
Speaker 1: or the true robber Barons, then these are exciting people.
Speaker 1: If you were either Tarbell, yeah, exactly, if you're a
Speaker 1: muck breaker, these are exciting people. And they're exciting partly
Speaker 1: because of the boldness of their their capitalism, but also
Speaker 1: because of the way they're bending the rules. And so
Speaker 1: there's this this sort of very enchanting combination of risk
Speaker 1: taking of a sort that are more established Western PLC
Speaker 1: simply is not allowed to do. Maybe if you cover
Speaker 1: somebody like Elon Musk you could say that you have
Speaker 1: buccaneering tycoons of of a sort of similar quality who
Speaker 1: are who are doing things that are simply the sort
Speaker 1: of thing you wouldn't normally get on on Wall Street,
Speaker 1: or it's not stretched across the entire our economy the
Speaker 1: way someone like Muskies. Right, Well, I suppose that's true,
Speaker 1: But anyway, that was that was what that was what
Speaker 1: captured my imagination about India. This combination of risk taking
Speaker 1: and rule bending, I thought was just a fantastic story.
Speaker 1: Is the State of the Billionaire raj as we like
Speaker 1: to It's a great title for the book. By the way,
Speaker 1: Uh do you see that going on for a long time?
Speaker 1: And we talked a bit about at first we've alluded
Speaker 1: to the guilded age, you know, that era in the
Speaker 1: United States, and you just have this massive inequality in India.
Speaker 1: Obviously these you know, a billionaire like on body who's
Speaker 1: building his own billion dollar home. You know, often the
Speaker 1: politics from from the outside, it seems to be kind
Speaker 1: of paralyzed and not really going anywhere. Is this state
Speaker 1: of affairs of India's economy? Inequality? Is that likely to
Speaker 1: persist for a long time? Or you know, do you
Speaker 1: see this kind of working its way through the system
Speaker 1: that you know there might be a way to equalize
Speaker 1: that in the economy somehow. That's a great question. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think for India it has to be that this
Speaker 1: should be a passing phase and not a permanent condition,
Speaker 1: because if it's a permanent condition, that's problematic for a
Speaker 1: for a whole range of reasons. Countries that start off
Speaker 1: very very unequal tend to stay that way, like Brazil
Speaker 1: or South Africa, and that stores up problems for later.
Speaker 1: It's much more difficult to reverse these trends, and very
Speaker 1: unequal countries come with particular challenges. However, there's nothing particularly
Speaker 1: unusual about what's going on in India at the moment.
Speaker 1: We've talked about the American guilded age, and I think
Speaker 1: if you were sitting where we are now in New
Speaker 1: York as a media organization in eight and you looked
Speaker 1: at the United States, you could very well say, you know,
Speaker 1: this is an absolutely hopeless country. It's politicians are completely venal,
Speaker 1: it's tycoons are corrupt, its politics is disorganized. The no
Speaker 1: and that this is going to become a great superpower
Speaker 1: looks rather fanciful. And yet over the next twenty or
Speaker 1: thirty years you had a range of things that happened.
Speaker 1: The middle class began to assert more control over politics.
Speaker 1: You had the development of different types of institutions, You
Speaker 1: had anti corruption campaigns. There a whole range of things
Speaker 1: which meant that you know, twenty or thirty years later,
Speaker 1: things look rather different. The thing that has to happen, however,
Speaker 1: I in the billionaire rage, I say, has these three
Speaker 1: characteristics the rise of the super rich and the inequality
Speaker 1: that came with it, endemic chrony capitalism, and then a
Speaker 1: boom and bust investment model. And I think it's difficult
Speaker 1: to see India moving quickly from its current position. It's
Speaker 1: not really a poor country anymore. It's a sort of
Speaker 1: lower middle income country through the ranks of middle income
Speaker 1: status to become, you know, a rich country by some
Speaker 1: time in the second half of this century, unless it
Speaker 1: fixes these three problems. And we we've seen countries do this.
Speaker 1: I mean that the successful developing economies of East Asia
Speaker 1: have all managed to do this, but they did it
Speaker 1: in a particular way. They were more egalitarian than India
Speaker 1: is now. Crucially, they also had a different economic model
Speaker 1: because they were better at export focused manufacturing and India
Speaker 1: is not very good at that. So that's another part
Speaker 1: of the puzzle. But I think if India is going
Speaker 1: to develop successfully, it needs to act pretty quickly to
Speaker 1: try and find a way of bringing this extreme inequality
Speaker 1: under control. Cricket, let's talk about that. How has the
Speaker 1: game developed in India and what role does it play
Speaker 1: in trying to understand the modern Indian economy. I'll just
Speaker 1: back up a bit for some listeners. The game's ancestral
Speaker 1: home is England. In the late nineties seventies, thanks largely
Speaker 1: to changes initiated by an Australian businessman called Carrie Packer,
Speaker 1: Australia became the financial driver of the game. Has that
Speaker 1: now shifted to India? And what does that tell us?
Speaker 1: So cricket is a fascinating example and I think fits
Speaker 1: absolutely squarely within the book. So there's a chapter in
Speaker 1: the book on cricket. I used to cover cricket not
Speaker 1: as a sport but as the business of sports, and
Speaker 1: cricket is very, very lucrative in India. And yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean not absolutely no question that the idea that anyone
Speaker 1: other than India controls the finances of world cricket is
Speaker 1: now fanciful and has been for probably ten or fifteen years,
Speaker 1: but the gap just gets bigger and bigger. But cricket
Speaker 1: is interesting for a different reason, which is there are
Speaker 1: very few examples of industries in which India is the
Speaker 1: world leader. There will be over time, as with China,
Speaker 1: as India grows to become the It's already the third
Speaker 1: largest economy by by PPP. But you know, as it
Speaker 1: becomes bigger and bigger and bigger, there will be many
Speaker 1: areas that India comes to dominate, but at the moment
Speaker 1: there are very few, and cricket is definitely one. And
Speaker 1: you see, that's sort of the good and the bad
Speaker 1: of the Indian economy being reflected in the way that
Speaker 1: cricket is now run. So the good, all of that
Speaker 1: money has actually improved cricket a great deal. Cricket used
Speaker 1: to be a rather, you know, sort of tired, uninteresting game.
Speaker 1: People like you and me might have liked it, but
Speaker 1: it was compared to football or basketball, it's certainly lacked
Speaker 1: a bit of razzle dazzle. And India basically by pushing
Speaker 1: a short term, more vibrant, more television friendly form of
Speaker 1: the game. Pumping it up with money has turned cricket
Speaker 1: on its head, but actually made it much more palatable.
Speaker 1: That's certainly true domestically in India, where you know, you
Speaker 1: have built lots of great stadiums and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: But the dark side has come that actually the same
Speaker 1: story that you had in mining or telecoms was true
Speaker 1: in cricket as well. You have questionable government standards, corruption scandals,
Speaker 1: chrony capitalism in which you had effectively the same kind
Speaker 1: of collusion between the politicians who ran the game and
Speaker 1: the business people who sponsored the game. And so cricket
Speaker 1: has become an example of the new India writ large,
Speaker 1: it's more vibrant, but it's also more corrupt. Let's talk
Speaker 1: about those politics for a moment. Prime Minister Moody was
Speaker 1: elected in He was widely viewed as a business can
Speaker 1: to person who is going to bring a very different
Speaker 1: kind of administration to India, and yet governing is always
Speaker 1: tougher than it looks. How is his government doing and
Speaker 1: how has the relationship with the billionaire class in India
Speaker 1: evolved under Moody. On the surface, I think Moody has
Speaker 1: done reasonably well India's headline growth rate is strong. It's
Speaker 1: the world's fastest growing major economy and has been for
Speaker 1: many of the last four years. It sort of goes
Speaker 1: back and forth with China depending on how much juice
Speaker 1: the Chinese are putting into their economy. The mega corruption
Speaker 1: scandals have stopped, and they've introduced some broadly sensible reforms,
Speaker 1: particularly goods and services tax of value added tax. The
Speaker 1: fiscal situation is broadly under control. So that's all pretty positive.
Speaker 1: But I think that the criticism of Modi would be
Speaker 1: that while he's been a good administrator of the Indian economy,
Speaker 1: he hasn't been a very radical reformer of the Indian economy.
Speaker 1: And you can look at that across a whole range
Speaker 1: of areas. So we've mentioned already the twin balance sheet problem,
Speaker 1: one of the huge the fact that India has had
Speaker 1: almost a lost decade of industrial investment because it's companies
Speaker 1: have too much debt and its banks have lots of
Speaker 1: bad loans. He hasn't fixed that big underlying structural problems,
Speaker 1: changes to how you get a hold of land, how
Speaker 1: the tax system works, a bunch of these structural economic reforms.
Speaker 1: He hasn't really managed to push through, and so I
Speaker 1: think in a sense there were people who had much
Speaker 1: higher hopes for what he would be able to achieve.
Speaker 1: What has struck you about Americans views towards Asia generally
Speaker 1: and India in particular. Well, I have a self interest
Speaker 1: in saying this, but I think everybody needs to spend
Speaker 1: a lot more time thinking about India than they do.
Speaker 1: Now I have a book to promote. So you might say, well,
Speaker 1: he would say that anyway, But I think it's clear
Speaker 1: that in the U S and to some degree ever else,
Speaker 1: we we view Asia through the prism of China, and
Speaker 1: I think actually there is a case to say that
Speaker 1: India is more important China. China is clearly the path
Speaker 1: is almost set now it is degenerating into a kind
Speaker 1: of neo Leninist autocracy. India is much more in play
Speaker 1: for the kind of country that it will become. And
Speaker 1: we we in the West, we who believe in free
Speaker 1: markets and the power of business, have a great self
Speaker 1: interest in India becoming a middle income parliamentary democracy with
Speaker 1: a broadly secular culture and liberal rights. That is probably
Speaker 1: the path that India will take. But you know who
Speaker 1: can tell it's It's the great swing state of the
Speaker 1: twenty one century at a time in which the die
Speaker 1: looks increasingly cast between the West and China. And therefore
Speaker 1: I think I think people probably pay a little bit
Speaker 1: too little attention to India and could probably pay pay
Speaker 1: a little more. The term Indo Pacific has proliferated here
Speaker 1: in the US the past couple of years. What does
Speaker 1: that mean to you? Well, the Indo Pacific, which is
Speaker 1: often called the free and open Indoor Pacific, is a
Speaker 1: is a new attempt to justify the current status quo,
Speaker 1: the American led global order. This is sometimes called the
Speaker 1: rules based global order. The Indo Pacific as a particular
Speaker 1: term became more prominent when President Trump went to Asia
Speaker 1: at the end of last year. And it's instead of
Speaker 1: talking about the Asia Pacific, which is the way that
Speaker 1: the people normally talk about that region, it's been enlarged
Speaker 1: to call it the Indo Pacific, with the specific aim
Speaker 1: of basically bringing India together with the US, Japan, and
Speaker 1: Australia to some degree as the sort of friends. Broadly
Speaker 1: speaking of the US, is this thing called the Quad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the Quad, which is part of the notion of
Speaker 1: the free and open Indo Pacific. But it's basically an
Speaker 1: attempt to try and balance Asia against the rise of
Speaker 1: China and to try and draw India more firmly into this.
Speaker 1: They don't want to say anti Chinese, but I mean,
Speaker 1: you could call it what it is. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: certainly the reason why people are coming up with this
Speaker 1: is that all of these countries are worried about the
Speaker 1: rise of China and what that will then mean to
Speaker 1: the system of rules in Asia. However, this is happening
Speaker 1: at a time in which America, in theory, is the
Speaker 1: architect of the free and open indoor Pacific. But then
Speaker 1: of course President Trump is going around destroying large arts
Speaker 1: of that order that in a sense of America is
Speaker 1: claiming to protect. And so it's very complicated situations for
Speaker 1: countries like India to some degree in Japan, South Korea
Speaker 1: that they all quite like the status quo, but the
Speaker 1: country that is meant to be leading the status quo
Speaker 1: is also undermining it. And so it's a very complicated
Speaker 1: situation in Asia at the moment in which people are
Speaker 1: pretty confused about American leadership. Well, we almost got through
Speaker 1: an entire episode without mentioning President Donald Trump. So I
Speaker 1: think we're just going to have to end it right there.
Speaker 1: My apologies, all right, James Crabtree, Arthur of the Billionaire RAJ,
Speaker 1: thank you very much for joining us on Benchmark. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Benchmark will be back next week. Until then, you can
Speaker 1: find us on the Bloomberg terminal, Bloomberg dot com or
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Speaker 1: listeners can find us. You can follow O me at
Speaker 1: Moss Underscore Echo, I'm at scott Landman, and our guest
Speaker 1: is at at James Crabtree. Benchmark is produced by Tofa Foreheads.
Speaker 1: The head of Bloomberg Podcasts is Francesca Lead. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: To see you next time.