Thomas Friedman speaks..

The Wall Street Journal had a front-page story last Wednesday that caught my eye. It was about how the antiglobalization movement seemed to be losing steam, with
police not expecting the sort of violent protesters of the late 1990’s to show up at the G-8 summit in Sea Island, Ga., this week. If you want to understand why the
antiglobalization movement – which was always a mishmash of groups and ideologies – has lost its edge, you should study the recent Indian elections. And if the antiglobalizers want to understand how they could again become relevant, they should study those elections as well.

To everyone’s surprise, India’s elections ended with the rightist Hindu nationalist B.J.P. alliance being thrown out and replaced by the left-leaning Congress Party alliance. Of course, no sooner did the B.J.P. – which ran on a
platform of taking credit for India’s high-tech revolution – go down than the usual suspects from the antiglobalization movement declared this was a grass-roots
rejection of India’s globalization strategy. They got it exactly wrong. What Indian voters were saying was not: “Stop the globalization train, we want to get off.” It was, “Slow down the globalization train, and build me a better
step-stool, because I want to get on.”

“Every time an Indian villager watches the community TV and sees an ad for soap or shampoo, what they notice are not the soap and shampoo but the lifestyle of the people using them, the kind of motorbikes they ride, their dress and their homes,” says Nayan Chanda, the Indian-born editor of the invaluable YaleGlobal online magazine. “They see a world they want access to. This election was about envy, anger and aspirations. It was a classic case of revolutions happening when things are getting better but not fast enough for many people.”

Indeed, Indian villagers and farmers are just like all other consumers today – better informed. And they seemed to know, at a gut level, exactly why the B.J.P.’s stress on information technology was not delivering for them. It was because local governments in India have become so eaten away by corruption and mismanagement they cannot deliver for the poor the schools and infrastructure they need to get a fair share of the pie. The Indian masses didn’t vote for an antiglobalization strategy, they voted for (among other things) an effective globalization strategy. Sonia Gandhi, the Congress Party leader, seemed to understand this when she chose as prime minister Manmohan Singh, the former Congress finance minister, who first put the Indian economy onto a globalization track in the 1990’s. His task now is to make globalization work for more Indians by making government work for more Indians.

“Both the Congress and its left allies would be risking India’s future if they draw the wrong conclusion from this election,” said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, an Indian professor of government, writing in The Hindu. “The revolt against holders of power is not a revolt of the poor against the rich: ordinary people are far less prone to resent other people’s success, than intellectuals suppose. It is rather
an expression of the fact that the reform of the state has not gone far enough.” Gurcharan Das, the former head of Procter & Gamble in India, wrote in The Times of India that this election was about better local governance: “What matters to the rickshawala [scooter driver] is that the cops not take away a sixth of his daily earnings. The farmer wants a clear title to his land without having to bribe the patwari [village accountant]. The sick villager wants the doctor to be there when she visits the primary health center. The housewife doesn’t want the water tap to
go dry while she is washing.”

My own recent travels to India have left me convinced that the most important forces combating poverty there today are those activists who are fighting for better local governance. The world doesn’t need the antiglobalization movement to go away now – it just needs for the movement to grow up. It had a lot of energy and a lot of mobilizing capacity. What it lacked was a real agenda for helping the
poor. Here’s what its agenda should be: Helping the poor by improving governance – accountability, transparency, education and the rule of law – at the local level, by using the Internet and other tools to spotlight corruption, mismanagement and tax avoidance. It may not be as sexy as protesting against world leaders on CNN, but it is a lot more important. Ask any Indian villager.