Not quite a diplomat, fortunately

Sir Humphrey Appleby:
Bernard, Ministers should never know more than they need to know. Then they can't
tell anyone. Like secret agents, they could be captured and tortured.

Bernard Woolley: You mean by
terrorists?

Sir Humphrey Appleby: By the
BBC, Bernard.

(From the Yes Minister series)

Lord Patten is more renowned for the assignment he took up in
the late nineties, as the last colonial governor of Hong Kong. After a stint as
a EU minister, Patten settled down in the academic environs of Oxford
(currently, he is one of the contenders for the BBC top post). Yet, in spite of
all his engagements, Patten finds time for things he seems to like the most,
namely writing. He has released books like: Not Quite the Diplomat; Cousins and
Strangers: America, Britain, and Europe in a New Century; Tory Case and
co-authored and contributed to other books like 50 Remarkable Years -the New
Elizabethan Age; 150 Years of Cricket in Hong Kong.

Patten recently came down to India for the Oxford India Business
Forum and regaled the audience with his wit and humor. He refers to himself as a
historian and thus has a lot to share on India and its 'spectacular' journey
so far. This is just what he did with Shashwat Chaturvedi from CyberMedia
News.

By the way, he also has an interesting connection with India, as
his youngest daughter (Alice Patten) was the leading lady of the Bollywood hit,
Range De Basanti. Excerpts.

There is a feeling among many that India has just become a low
value destination for measly jobs. That it is a case of new imperialism, this
time it is money instead of ammunition.

That is surely not a correct observation. Over the years, the Indian economy
has grown in ways that had not been imagined. Today, the nation is renowned for
its IT strength. In many ways, India has become a global back office. That does
not mean dealing with low value added occupations only, a lot of high value jobs
are being shifted to India and being done out of India. That is something to be
pleased about not to be criticized. The challenge for India, as I see it, is to
develop manufacturing, food processing and agriculture, in the same ways it has
done IT, telecommunications and so on. And there is no reason, intellectually,
why India should not be just as successful in those areas, as it has been in the
services industry.

Isn't shifting of jobs a big concern for people in the western
countries like the UK and the US? There have been so many reports of backlash
and hostility on the issue. Your views?

It is much less a problem with the services sector, as with manufacturing-take
for instance textile. A real appalling example of protectionism in the developed
countries can be found in those sectors. I believe the way we behaved when the
multi-fiber agreement was stopped, was very bad. The subsidies that we gave to
more expensive agricultural communities like cotton are extremely bad too. I
believe if we are to promote more open trade globally then we have to be much
tougher on dismantling protectionism among the developed countries.

You have voiced you support to India vis-à-vis China, due to
the democratic institutions in place in India. How do you think the future will
pan out?

The world should want both India and China to be successes. The point I make
is that you cannot see economic and social development without making political
adjustment, and if you open up the economy it is increasingly difficult for you
to keep an iron grip on politics. As India has a political system that
increasingly incorporates what is happening economically, it is better placed.
China, sooner or later, will have to change its political system in order to
bring it in line with the economic development. The question is whether it can
do that without sacrificing stability.

You stated that the 'world is not flat', what made you say
that?

There is an implication and many people who must have read that book must
have taken this message, that technology has made us all equals. But it hasn't.
There are terrible mountains that poor people and poor countries have to climb
and I don't think it is enough to say that the information technology
revolution, even though it has made problems more solvable, has actually solved
them. I mentioned about traveling to the incredibly impressive Infosys campus in
Bangalore-on the way you notice evidence to the fact that the world is not
actually flat, you see very poor people and you travel on very poor
infrastructure. I think we have a very long way to go before we can truly claim
that the world is really flat. And it never will be entirely, though I wish we
were doing more to decrease global inequity in wealth and opportunities.