Though recovering
from an acusticus neurinoma operation and still severely handicapped, I took
the risk of flying to Hong Kong (the lure of that city was just too strong) to
participate in the World Hindu Economic Forum on 30 June and 1 July. And I
haven’t regretted it for a moment.
Conferences
of academics, especially in the field of religion and Asian Studies, tend to be
disappointing. Everybody reads his very own paper while nothing actually
happens. Well, I can live with that as it is the occupational hazard of
scholarship. But academics should be pursuing truth, and in my field, truth is
often absent from the meetings. And in some of the questions I specifically
pursue, I see rather too many colleagues making fools of themselves. Here, it
was different.
First of
all, by composition this was not the kind of conference I am used to. Though a
few professors of Economics participated, most people present, even among the
speakers, were businessmen. They were businesslike and meant business. This
starts with the keeping of time. Whereas I have witnessed panels where one of
the scheduled speakers ended up not speaking due to shortage of time, i.e.
because the chair had allowed the earlier speakers to go on and on, here
everybody effortlessly kept to his allotted time-span. The businessmen also got
their website ready, and donated money to get their organization running. That’s different from the complicated situation prevailing in academia.
It also had to do with the sense of initiative of the local Hindu (mainly
Sindhi) community and of the conference’s no-nonsense originator, the Vishva
Hindu Parishad’s General Secretary Swami Vigyananda. Of course the Sangh
Parivar (“family” of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) can get things done, but
this man was getting something very good done.
Hindu
businessmen are not like Indian academics. They have succeeded, not by greasing
the right palms or conforming politically, but by their own initiative,
inventiveness and work. That success was what for once I got to see here. To be
sure, I had seen Hindu businessmen – at conferences meant to be academic, where
they had donated money to make the conference possible and in return got some
speaking time (and used it to make fools of themselves by giving their opinions
on things they didn’t understand). But here they spoke on their own
achievements, and that was more impressive. Many existing and new projects were
presented. Space, the environment, banking, and of course ICT, Indian
businesses are active everywhere. A very optimistic speech was also given by Anil
Kumar Bachoo, deputy PM of Mauritius, who invited Indians to settle in his
country and accelerate its progress.
Profs.
Subramaniam Swamy, Gautam Sen, R. Vaidyanathan and Subhash Thakrar had their
speeches printed in the conference book. The economists developed a
postcolonial framework for India’s regaining its rightful place in the world
economy. As a Westerner, I should note that the speakers were not impressed
with the advantages America still has, and they laughed at Europe with its
crisis. One reason for their optimism was demographic, another was ethical.
Among the major economies, India has the youngest population, but it also has
an ancient system of morals and of cosmology that works better than Western
individualism.
You want
some criticism? Well, here goes. This conference was full of patriotism, which
is allowed, but sometimes they overdid it. “I am the richest man in the world –
because I am a Hindu”, said a Mister Alpesh Patel from Oxford. At a time when
so many poor Hindus succumb to the lure of conversion to Christianity, the
statement seemed unduly triumphalistic. Some of the non-speaking attendees gave
their opinion at the table and I found their antipathies to the West less than
realistic. Thus, I heard a few people fumbling about Western conspiracies
against India, when I know for a fact that Westerners generally don’t care
about India; and those few who do, see India as a bulwark against China and the
Islamic world, worthy of our sympathy and support.
And of
course, the proceedings of the conference only were what we got to see.
Speakers who announce that they will donate so much money to a good cause are a
familiar sight. But I know Hindu organizers who remain skeptical till the money
is in, because people seek prestige and photo opportunities and therefore make
such announcements without meaning them (or meaning them sincerely but later
getting influenced by their families to be more careful with the family assets),
so the actual giving never comes through. However, this being a business
conference, these fears may be unfounded, and the money may have really materialized.
At any rate, they came across as very successful and very Hindu.
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