For one thing, the attitude of the workforce is not what it was. It's always been a curious paradox that Keralites put in long hours in places like the Gulf, where they have earned a reputation for being hardworking and utterly reliable, though at home they are seen as indolent and strike-prone. Surely the same people couldn't be so different in two different places? And yet they were — for one simple reason: the politicized environment at home. It's a reputation that has come to haunt Kerala. Several people told me the story of how BMW had been persuaded to install a car-manufacturing plant in the state, thanks to generous concessions by the government. But the very day the BMW executives arrived in Kerala to sign the deal, they were greeted by a bandh (strike): the state had shut down over some marginal political issue, cars were being blocked on the streets, shops were closed by a hartal. It had nothing to do with BMW or with foreign investment, but the executives — or so I was told — beat a hasty retreat. The plant has now been set up in neighboring Tamil Nadu.
Kerala's political and business leaders are aware of this story. But few are aware of the counternarrative. Last year I met Antony Prince, a Malayali long settled in the Bahamas, who is president of a major ship design company there, GTR Campbell (GTRC). GTRC had built many ships around the world, and its contracts had helped revive China's Xingang shipyard. Why not try to do the same in his native land, Prince wondered. Ignoring all the friendly (negative) advice he was given, he decided to get one of his huge “Trader” double-hull bulk carriers built at Kerala's Kochi shipyard. This was a major undertaking: GTRC's Trader-class ships are thirty thousand tons deadweight, have cargo holds of forty thousand cubic meters in capacity, and are meant to sail over a range of 15,500 nautical miles, so the task would have challenged a more experienced shipyard. But as the work unfolded, Prince realized he need not have worried. Not only was there not a single strike or work stoppage, but the shipyard workers took pride in having been given such a major assignment. They finished the job to GTRC's complete satisfaction — ahead of deadline. Five more ships will now be built in Kochi; it's the ship-yard's largest-ever order.
But the potential is even greater. Working with GTRC had transformed Xingang into a world-class shipbuilder; there is no reason why the same cannot happen in Kochi. Mr. Prince was enthusiastic about the prospects. “The officers and workers in the Kochi yard have proved that they can do it, launching the first vessel on schedule, with first-rate quality and meeting international shipbuilding standards,” he said. “I hope the message will spread.”
It should. The interesting point is that shipbuilding is a highly labor-intensive industry; some 30 percent of the input is human labor, which is what makes it ideal for a country like India. The workers at Kochi shipyard — unionized to a man — demonstrated that labor remains India's greatest asset, even in Kerala. It is not, as skittish investors had long feared, a liability.
A visit to Trivandrum's Technopark confirmed my impression that the skeptics are behind the curve. CEO after CEO told me in glowing terms of their satisfaction with the work environment in Kerala, the quality of the local engineering graduates, and the beauty of the lush and tranquil surroundings. Indeed, Kerala's past failures at attracting and retaining heavy industry are now working in the state's favor. One Technopark firm, U.S. Technologies, told me of having bid for a contract with a Houston-based company which had drawn up a short list of Indian service providers and placed the Trivandrum-based company last. The American executives making the final decision flew down to India to inspect the six short-listed Indian firms. After three harrowing days plowing through the traffic congestion and pollution of Bombay, Bangalore, and Delhi, they arrived in Trivandrum, checked into the Leela at Kovalam Beach, sipped a drink by the seaside at sunset — and voted unanimously to give the contract to U.S. Technologies. “If we have to visit India from time to time to see how our contract is doing,” the chief said, “we'd rather visit Kerala than any other place in India.”
As they say in the United States: Sounds like a plan! It is time that Indian investors took notice as well. God's own country no longer deserves the business reputation of being the devil's playground.
65. Shaking Hands
HANDSHAKES ARE NOT OFTEN TERMED “HISTORIC,” but the one between Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad in 2004 readily earned the adjective. After three years of bristling hostility verging on war, and less than five years after a bloody clash of arms across the snowy wastes that divide them in Kashmir, not to mention the fifty-six years of mutual tension that had marked their relationship, the two countries seemed genuinely on the verge of a real and lasting peace.
In the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, a striking example of the confluence of Islam and Hinduism on the subcontinent, the talk for days after the handshake was of the possibilities it had opened up. One idea that had seized the Hyderabad public's imagination (and many inches in its newspapers) was of the city “twinning” with its namesake, the city of Hyderabad in Pakistan. Till the British partitioned India in 1947, the two had been known as “Hyderabad, Deccan” and “Hyderabad, Sind” to distinguish them from each other in conversation. The drawing of hard lines on a map had made this unnecessary; it was enough to know which side of the border you were on to know which Hyderabad you were referring to. The other was simply out of reach.
The Indian Hyderabad is a good place to look at the subcontinent's past — and its future. Exquisite Muslim architecture abounds, especially palaces and mosques, including the famous Mecca Masjid where the faithful congregate in the thousands every Friday. But at the foot of the city's most famous monument, the four-turreted Charminar, sits a Hindu temple to the goddess Mahalakshmi, the priests chanting their mantras for centuries under the celebrated Muslim minarets. And beyond the old city of Hyderabad gleams the high-tech crucible of “Cyberabad,” a pet project of the state's laptoptoting former chief minister, Chandrababu Naidu, where Indian software engineers of all faiths click their country's way into the twenty-first century.
Here the past poses no impediment to the future. But that has not been quite as true for the subcontinent as a whole, which has for more than five decades seemed a prisoner of the past, handcuffed to a pessimist's reading of history.
Muslims and Hindus (as well as followers of many other creeds) have shared the same civilizational space on the subcontinent for over a thousand years. Islam came to India as early as the eighth century A.D., to Sind in the north with the Arab armies of Mohammed bin Qasim, and to Kerala in the south with traders and travelers across the Arabia sea. For the most part the two big faiths coexisted for centuries; though persecution and violence were not unknown, few saw religion as the primary determinant of their loyalties. In the great revolt of 1857 against the British, Hindus and Muslims rose as one against the foreign occupier, rallying under the banner of the last Mughal king. But the Hindu-Muslim unity seen in that revolt led the alarmed British to adopt a policy of “divide and rule,” which sowed mutual suspicions and hatreds. The policy found its culmination ninety years later in Partition.
The tragic flash point of Kashmir, which has twice brought the two countries to war and several times to the brink of it, is described by some in Pakistan as the “unfinished business of Partition.” When a student at Cambridge, Chaudhury Rehmat Ali invented the name Pakistan (land of the pure) for the country he hoped would be created for his coreligionists, the k in his neologism stood for Kashmir. But Kashmir's Hindu maharajah, facing invaders at his door, acceded to India, and the resultant conflict left both countries with a portion of the state, and a dotted line (the Line of Control) across the map. Pakistan argues that the Muslim-majority state should have always been part of the Muslim country; India points to Kashmir's Muslim majority as proof of the pluralism of its secular democracy.