Healthy Skepticism Library item: 8833

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Publication type: news

Gupta S.
Why le Carre’s ThreeBees will not sting India : Trust our immune system
Indian Express (Mumbai) 2001 Feb 10
http://www.expressindia.com/ie/daily/20010227/shekhar.htm

Full text:

The end of the Cold War threatened to put three industries out of business – arms exports, espionage and spy fiction. The first two have already suffered grievously. The spy fiction writers, however, are surviving, inventing newer conflicts and enemies, the good and the bad guys.

John le Carre is probably the most cerebral spy fiction writer ever. He is certainly the most sophisticated, dazzling his reader not with details of gizmos and high-tech weaponry, like Ian Flemming or Tom Clancy, but through dense, detailed, complex and very political storytelling. So only he could have dreamt up an entirely new ‘‘bad guy’’, the western multinational corporation, the dreaded MNC, in his latest book The Constant Gardener (Scribner, $28). Also, only someone of his skill could make a pharmaceutical MNC sound more malevolent, more cynically murderous than that favoured post-Cold War villain of thriller writers, the narcotics warlord.

In le Carre’s hands, the Swiss pharma giant Karl Vita Hansen (KVH), holder of patents on many molecules, including the new tuberculosis wonder cure, dypraxia, and its British partner in crime, Bell, Barker and Benjamin (or the House of ThreeBees), that rules the African market, come across as the greatest threat to the poor of the world since the bubonic plague. They conspire to push dypraxia, a still toxic, inadequately tested drug, down African throats hoping to clean out the glitches in real-life trials so as to perfect it in time to mint billions when the impending Aids-related TB epidemic hits the West.

Thousands of Africans, Kenyans and Sudanese, die, but no one can protest. Moi’s government, police, locals elites and the media are all bought over by ThreeBees. The British diplomats and the foreign office bend over backwards to support the cause of their big business. What else could they do, when the head of the African desk in Whitehall has been promised a fat post-retirement job at KVH, most other senior bureaucrats get free booze, junkets, boatrides with expensive girls and the senior cabinet members campaign contribution from ThreeBees? The only one who threatens to spoil the business, Tessa, the very pretty, very intelligent, very flirtatious and very jholawala wife of the mid-ranking British diplomat Justin Quayle, is found raped with throat slit in a jeep in deep Africa. Her alleged black lover and fellow MNC-baiting jholawala, Dr Arnold Bbubun, disappears mysteriously.

A similar fate then threatens to befall anybody who picks up the dead woman’s cause, including her husband whom Whitehall disowns and the MNC hunts viciously and violently over three continents. He is stalked, thrashed, has the hard discs on all his friends’ computers attacked by mysterious viruses. More important, authorities in Western countries, from Great Britain to Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Canada, collude with their MNC merchants of the killer drug to victimise him and some other scientists with conscience and activists. No wonder, Sir Kenneth Curtiss, the foul-mouthed but spectacularly successful CEO of ThreeBees, tells MI6’s Nairobi station chief Tim Donohue, whose conscience is beginning to prick a bit ‘‘You’re history Donohue. You think countries run the f…g world! Go back to f…g Sunday school. It’s ‘God save our multinational’ they are singing these days… So f..k the lot of you.’’

THE book is already on top of the bestseller lists. Surely, it will find readers here and our socialists, pop and real, jholawalas will gratefully welcome an ally like le Carre in this new Cold War. What a fictional ThreeBees did to Africa, a real-life Pfizer or Novartis could do in India, it will be argued. See what Enron is doing already, the other MNCs are buying up Indian companies, and now they are gaining control of our airlines, building our roads, running our insurance, banking and telecom. So time to hit the trenches, because, after all, as Curtiss says, countries do not run the world, corporations do.

Actually, why has it not happened to India already? In the decade of reform, the MNCs have lost more money in India than they have made. The giants in infrastructure, telecom, insurance and power have been wrestling with one babu or the other, mostly unable to even achieve financial closure after years of work and lobbying.

The consumer goods MNCs, from Reebok to Pepsi to McDonalds, are picking up losses. The pharma giants are a different story altogether. While some MNCs have grown, mostly with Indian shareholding and management, the others have fretted impotently as smart Indian companies have cracked their codes and formulae, including Viagra, to manufacture their own cheaper equivalents. This is why India still has among the cheapest pharmaceuticals in the world. Even le Carre acknowledges this. Even Peter Lorbeer, le Carre’s buccaneer corruptor of pharma researchers tells Justin: ‘‘The pills in this jar cost 20 US dollars apiece in Nairobi, six in New York, 18 dollars in Manila. Any day now India is going to manufacture the generic version and the same pill will cost 60 cents.’’

There are different reasons why India is not Africa for MNCs. In pharma, as in many other areas, India’s strength is its large scientific base, its English speaking, English medium educated elites and its tradition of aggressive trade and commerce. Unlike Africans, Indians are now present in powerful, decision-making positions in most MNCs, in almost all businesses. But even greater protection is a modern system of laws and regulation, backed by a modern, if cussed, bureaucracy, an independent judiciary and the media. These combine to give India an institutional strength, a kind of immune system that defies the basic Third World paradigm.

We have seen this system kick back, break out in rashes and sneeze several times over the past few years. And each time we have won. So has, mostly, the principle of free market. We have not had to drive out the MNCs, nor have they seen the need to bolt to a more pliable Africa. Telecom is an interesting example. After many hiccups and much heartburn we have been able to create a consumer-friendly regulatory mechanism where we have better services, more phones, cheaper calls and many choices. In the process the MNCs have prospered, reasonably, and even the domestic PSU monopoly has changed for the better. The Insurance Regulatory Authority should be able to similarly maintain sanity when that sector opens up.

Isn’t the idea, that regulation will make free market grow, an non sequitur? No, because modern regulation of this kind not only creates a level playing field, it also reduces heavily the babu and the politician’s discretionary powers. Discretion is the mother of corruption, it is also the hallmark of the dictator. Healthy, autonomous regulation, the TRAI, the IRA and SEBI, should take this discretion and thereby patronage away. Backed by an independent judiciary and media, it forms a formidable immune system which no ThreeBees in singleminded pursuit of god Profit can breach. It can create a modern market mechanism whereby class action suits rather than PILs will ensure corporate accountability. We may be so awfully messed up but we are not Africa. We must go out and embrace the MNCs, but only meanwhile we must build a protective wall, not of tariffs, but of institutions and laws that establish discretion-free consumer friendly regulation.