The Western mind feels totally threatened by China, they think of China as the terror that will eat them up. Their current understanding is that the 51-starred flag may not rule the world anymore, the future drivers of the planet are the billion-peopled countries of China and India.
A French friend was telling me in Paris last week that China town used to be in the 13th district earlier, but now you can see a Chinese bank in the heart of Paris. A taxi driver in Amsterdam was scared that China, being extremely disciplined with one ruling party, their billions can be driven to do anything at the whim of their government. China is highly associated with elements like having money power through government reserves to being a highly polluting environment, from manufacturing counterfeit products to having low-cost, high industrial productivity to being the biggest consuming society in the world. A business associate of mine from Italy, on his return from China, said he had heard of Chairman Mao?s strict regime but suddenly he discovered skyscrapers in Shanghai like any other Western city. China, with its languages and cultural differences, is a total mystery to the West.
But the West have some hope that India will be China?s challenger. They are comfortable with India because of its democracy and hospitality, and prefer India at the forefront as the better alternative. India inspires them. The question is whether India can take leadership of the world with its open democracy, communication skills, and being a multicultural society.
Those who have experienced India say we do not like to take challenges. But it wasn?t always so. Let me recall how, after the passing of the Government of India Act, 1833, Macaulay was appointed as the first law member of the governor-general?s council to change things. He came to India in 1834 and found that it will be very difficult to have control over this highly civilised independent country if they didn?t demoralise the masses. In his 1835 Minute on Indian Education, he said, ?It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.?
So Macauly was instrumental in creating the foundations of bilingual, colonial India. He convinced the governor-general to adopt English as the medium of instruction in higher education, from the sixth year of schooling onwards, rather than Sanskrit or Arabic in the institutions that the East India Company then supported. He destroyed around 7,32,000 gurukuls (schools), tortured the teachers and burnt them alive. His final years in India were devoted to the creation of a Penal Code, as the leading member of the law commission. We can say he was really a visionary who broke the morale of Indians so that the British could control India with less people.
Can we in India now change ourselves after 165 years so that we can take on the world? Challenge means not losing a ready opportunity. I think we have everything to give a new direction to the world. What are the challenges? Take Indian companies for example. Why do we confine ourselves to boundaries that do not exist? If a retail store selling products for the home is called Home Town why are other competing retails called Home Life, Home Stop or @home among others. Look at shops abroad called Habitat, Ikea, Conran, they are all different while being in the same ready-to-fit furniture market. Their approach, brand, products and the retail experience all have different characters.
Global growth starts with the capacity to manage business in any country in the world with local expertise. Indian business houses can achieve global sustainability if they can have high localisation through adopting local customs and hiring local people. Whatever the political resistance was in Europe for Arcelor Mittal, even today it is stirring up passions among ordinary citizens, like taxi drivers who say you have to be Indian to work there. Thirty years ago Europeans hated Americans, considering them as vampires in their country. In one way they admired USA, as they gave full support for the Allies to win the Second World War. At the same time, American business colonising Europe, from tooth paste to sanitary napkins, was not bearable as Europeans always liked to be the colonisers, and not be colonised. Since then, American companies have worked hard towards locality customisation of their businesses and brands. Brilliant examples are companies like IBM and P&G among others that are considered as global companies today with high local expertise and customisation, rather than being American.
Outsourcing, cost arbitrage, offshore development may be devaluing India?s value image and can be scary for Western masses, but not at the corporate level. We definitely cannot do away with these drivers that have created essential businesses and contributed to our economy. But they should be used in a tactical way rather than being promoted as ?low-cost India? as the core. A simple example is the way Swatch managed its image despite being a low-cost watch. Swatch, the globally renowned high aspirational watch brand costs only $30. Yet its reputation is not that it is a low-cost watch; rather Swatch is known to be a latent fashion statement. We have to be very careful that the growing extreme right parties of the politicised Western countries do not use ?low-cost outsourcing India? as a strong weapon to create antagonism against India. If high resentment grows among the Western masses, that their jobs are being hijacked by India, it can jeopardise our global image. We should not forget that Hitler?s Nazi politics started from this background of instigating people against Jewish people who had money power and they were then exterminated.
So India in general does not scare the developed countries like China does. It is in the hands of India and its business community to drive business globally while being sensitive to being local in every country they operate in. Don?t ask the world to behave like Indians. Let?s take the opportunity to drive different people in the world through their own culture by being flexible yet highly disciplined and with the mentality of taking on challenges, to reinforce that India inspires.
?Shombit Sengupta is an international creative business strategy consultant to top management. Reach him at http://www.shiningconsulting.com