Sam Varghese
Saturday, 10 January 2009 06:26
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
The late Indira Gandhi, perhaps the best known of India's prime ministers after her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, once made a statement to the effect that corruption is a way of life in India.
She knew the country well, how to exploit the feelings of the masses and how to win elections by rigging them.
But then anyone with a modicum of intelligence who has lived in India and understands the country knows this as well. Naked patriotism, the refuge of those with an inferiority complex, often gets in the way of people admitting the truth about their countries, especially when they are abroad.
To me, as a person of Indian origin, the news about
the massive fraud at Satyam , the Indian outsourcing company which has fairly large contracts in Australia, not to mention the US and the UK among others, comes as no surprise.
Indeed, I would not be surprised if this was just the beginning of a mass
mea culpa from Indian companies about similar doings. It happened in the US, it can just as easily happen in India.
Some background about the Indian outsourcing phenomenon helps to understand how such greed has permeated an eastern country which often poses as something different from the West and parades itself as adhering to a different set of values.
Over the last 15 years, Western companies eager to make profits and conscious of the low cost of labour in India have gone thither in droves, in a desperate effort to keep profits high. They have been welcomed with open arms in India by the middle-classes who need the kinds of jobs they offer.
Governments have been eager to spread out the red carpet for these fortune-seekers, forgetting that in the past it was the colonials who raped India and then left it when they could no longer justify their adventures on the economic balance sheet.
