'If the US Sneezes,India Need not Catch a Cold'

Abstract

This article studies strategies of representation of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, in India’s English print media and the construction of this crisis as a ‘natural disaster’ through an ‘outbreak narrative’. This article will demonstrate the similarities in the use of the outbreak narrative between US public health discourse and representations of the global financial crisis. This similarity appears because both conditions face similar problems of representation and visualization.^{However, there
are crucial differences between both representation strategies due to the different
ideological contexts within which both discourses arose. Further, it studies the political
economy of newspaper reportage about the impact of the crisis in India, through an
examination of the ideological context of its construction and the frames through which it
was appropriated by different political forces like the UPA government, representatives of
capital and representatives of the left. This article argues that there was homogeneity in
the appropriation of the outbreak narrative by representatives of the state, capital and
left, who each positioned themselves as critiques of American neoliberalism, and saviours
of the economy from the impacts of the global financial crisis.}

Keywords

Global financial crisis Indian media representations economic disaster political economy neoliberalism

Introduction: The Global Financial Crisis as ‘Disaster’

A serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society involving widespread human, material, economic or environmental losses and impacts, which exceeds the ability of the affected community or society to cope using its own resources. (UNISDR 2009)

There can be two kinds of disasters: natural and man-made. Natural disasters are caused by changes in natural phenomenon and the extent of their damage is determined by the vulnerability of the population it affects. Man-made disasters, also known as anthropogenic disasters, can be caused as a result of human intent, error or as a result of failed systems. An economic crisis/collapse is a type of man-made disaster, and an economic crisis caused by the collapse of financial markets is termed a financial crisis. Economic crises have been common in the latter half of the twentieth century, and many nations, for example, Latin America, East Asia and Russia, have faced multiple crises in this period. However, the global financial crisis in the period 2007–2008 exceeds the others in magnitude, both in terms of loss of output and unemployment. The Wall Street Journal has claimed that the global crisis was the largest crisis since the great depression of the 1930s (Hilsenrath et al. 2008). A conservative estimate, made by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), pegged global banks’ losses due to the financial crises at $4.1 trillion and the resulting number of unemployed at 5.5 million in the US itself (Pew Charitable Trusts 2010). While the crisis itself was reported to have originated in America, it quickly spread to many large developed nations and exposed their economic instabilities, thus leading most famously to the Euro crisis and the Greek government debt crisis of 2010.

However, the global financial crisis differs from other disasters because it does not cause any direct loss of lives or property. In fact, the greatest impact of the financial crisis is felt in the loss of value of assets, the creation of huge debts on individuals, institutions, governments and an impending threat of worldwide economic collapse. It is notoriously difficult to measure the extent of the crisis, as it represents not only a loss of output but a loss of potential value. Further, it is equally difficult to trace the source of the crisis, as there has been an increasing interdependence of financial systems all over the world, owing to the vast improvements in communication technology. A market crash in one part of the world could lead to crashes in other parts in a matter of a few key strokes. The impossibility of estimating damages caused by the crisis or predicting its dynamics makes the representation of the crisis particularly difficult.

The article attempts to study how the global financial crisis was represented in the Indian print media and how the impact of the crisis on India was framed by diverse organized interest groups in the media. This article does not attempt to study the effects of the crisis on the Indian economy, neither does it try to analyze whether newspaper reports about the crisis were ‘true’. There exists an abundance of literature analyzing the effects of the crisis on India; some notable examples are Mathur (2012), Nayyar (2010) and Reddy (2009).

Economic crisis in general and the global financial crisis in particular are notoriously difficult to represent. This is largely because there is a lack of arresting images to represent the disaster. Imagery plays an important part in representing any disaster and communicating to the audience, the scale of the damage and the risk it poses. Looping images in the media, of the fall of the twin towers or footage of the damage caused to the Taj hotel during the terrorist attack of November 2008 became symbolic of the larger disaster they represented. In the case of the global financial crisis, it was difficult to fix the source of the disaster, the network through which it spread and to estimate the losses of incomes and values to individuals due to the crisis.

There have been a number of studies which have tried to address this puzzle through a discursive study of representative strategies of economics in general and economic/financial crises in particular. A large part of this literature has studied how economics uses metaphors to represent economic bodies/forces. Examples include the economy as an organism, the economy as a body, metaphors of war, etc. (White 1997). Others have argued that economics appropriates other discourses to represent itself. White (2004), for instance, has shown how metaphors of meteorological phenomena (gales, turbulence) are used to represent crisis. Fung (2010) has shown how metaphors of natural disasters, like ‘financial tsunami’ or ‘wall street storm’, have been used by the Chinese media to describe the chaos caused by the crisis. This article, following in this same tradition, argues that since it is both difficult to represent economic crises and conflate them with other disasters, there is a tendency amongst the media to use metaphors or narratives of natural disasters to describe them. The equation of the crisis with natural disasters is a media strategy to heighten the threat of the crisis and make it more newsworthy. Natural disasters are perceived as ‘acts of god’ (Nair 1997), and their conflation with economic crises creates a sense of impending threat upon the reader. I will argue, in the third section, that this sense of impending threat of the crisis was a necessary rhetorical tactic, for organized interest groups (state, capital and the left) to construct themselves as legitimate guardians of the economy.

Objectives and Conceptual Framework

This article surveys strategies of representation of the global financial crisis in the Indian print media. I will focus specifically on Indian national print dailies. The focus on the Indian media is largely because of this author’s greater familiarity with this media. The focus on print media is because it is easier to access than television or the digital mass media (forums, blogs, social networks). I will focus on English national dailies like the Hindu and its supplement Businessline, The Times of India and its supplement The Economic Times and weekly magazines like Frontline, Outlook India, Business Today and Tehelka which have run special issues on the global financial crisis. I have collected newspaper reports and articles about the global financial crisis from 2007 to 2010, thereby encapsulating reportage in the period before and after the outbreak of the crisis.

A popular method to study media discourse in cognitive linguistics is to use techniques of content analysis (Lischinsky 2011; Liu 2009; White 2004). However, I have not attempted to carry out content analyses in this article because Indian media databases are not amenable to such searches. This article focuses more on the politics of the discourse rather than the variables which determine it.

Discussion

Outbreak Narrative and the Global Financial Crisis

In this section, I will study the construction of the global financial crisis as a natural disaster through an outbreak narrative and identify the main elements of this narrative. I will also highlight some key differences between the use of the outbreak narrative to represent the threat of global financial crisis and communicable diseases. To this end, I will use Kirsten Ostherr’s (2005) and Priscilla Wald’s (2008) categorization of the outbreak narrative. Wald traces the outbreak narrative through accounts of communicable disease outbreaks in scientific publications and the mainstream media in the US. Ostherr tracks visual representations of the contamination of bodies across a range of US media, including public health films and Hollywood blockbusters. Both trace a history of the use of the outbreak narrative and how it was transformed in different socio-political–technological contexts.

I argue that the outbreak narrative was used in the Indian media to represent the global financial crisis. This is not because there are similarities between contagious diseases and financial crises but because both conditions face similar problems of representation. The public health discourse traced by Wald and Ostherr struggles to visually represent contagious viruses and the network through which this contagion occurs. Wald characterizes the outbreak narrative thus:

The outbreak narrative—in its scientific, journalistic and fictional incarnations—follows a formulaic plot that begins with the identification of an emerging infection, includes discussion of the global networks throughout which it travels, and chronicles the epidemiological work that ends with its containment. (2008, p. 2)

The outbreak narrative evolves in certain ways to overcome the problem of visualization. The discourse of the global financial crisis also struggled with a similar inability to represent either the source of the crisis or the network through which it spread. Moreover, both discourses articulate an anxiety towards the increasing porousness of boundaries in the wake of globalizing forces and the threat of invasion.²

In this section I study how the outbreak narrative has been adopted by newspaper reports about the global financial crisis and how it differs from the narrative constructed in the case of public health discourse. In the next section, I will study why the outbreak narrative was a popular representative strategy in the Indian case and argue that this is on account of ideological appropriation of the narrative, by diverse organized interest groups.

In order to argue that newspaper reports about the global financial crisis were represented through an outbreak narrative, I will identify the elements of this narrative (as documented by Wald) in news reports. It is important to study this outbreak narrative, because it influences financiers and the lay public about the nature and consequences of the crisis, how they imagine the threat and why they react with such panic and fear to some crises and not others. Moreover, such a narrative promotes or mitigates the stigmatizing of individuals, groups, populations, locales, behaviours and lifestyles.

The story of the global financial crisis can be traced back to 2007, when the first reports of the real estate/subprime markets and credit markets crashes started surfacing. However, the plot constructing the disaster can be traced to 14 September 2008 (also referred to as Black Sunday), when a whole group of large American institutions went bankrupt overnight. The bankruptcy of some of the world’s largest banks like Lehman Brothers (3rd largest) and Merrill Lynch (4th largest) became iconic of the larger global crisis. The Hindu reports,

On ‘black’ Sunday (September 14), the contours of the U.S. financial sector and to a large extent those of the global financial system changed forever. That was the week-end Lehman Brothers collapsed and Merrill Lynch was taken over. (The Hindu 22 September 2008)

I now turn to the elements constituting the outbreak narrative.

Element 1: The Super-spreader

An outbreak narrative begins with the identification of the super-spreader. The super-spreader is a carrier of the virus/crisis and becomes iconic of the threat posed by the contagion. The outbreak narrative constructs the super-spreader as one of the primary sources of contagion by depicting how it can travel past boundaries with ease. For example, in public health discourse, super-spreaders were usually people who could pass through national borders with ease like the

twenty six year old Singaporean flight attendant [who was] infamous for ‘importing’ the disease (SARS) from China. It killed her parents and pastor, sickened other members of her family and community, and turned her into a national scape-goat when Singapore’s minister of health announced at a press conference in early April that she ‘infected the whole lot of us’. (Wald 2008, pp. 3–4).

The super-spreader is a crucial element of the plot because the super-spreader serves as a network or hub connecting everyone to everyone else. ‘They are figures of fascination as well as of fear because of the connections they elucidate’ (Wald 2008, p. 9). They represent the increasing possibility for anyone to be infected.

Newspaper reports about the global financial crisis identified a fair amount of super-spreaders. Some notable examples are:

Real Estate/Subprime Market

Subprime markets were traced as the source of the crisis. A perceptive article traces the contagion from the subprime market to other markets. It reports, ‘The sub-prime crisis that first surfaced in July last has rapidly spread its tentacles across the financial sector. Credit markets of the developed world are virtually frozen and stock prices across the globe have plunged’ (The Hindu 24 March 2008).

The US Financial Sector and Large Investment Banks

The article goes on to chronicle the dissemination of the crisis from the subprime market to the rest of the financial sector. It recounts,

That some of the world’s biggest names in banking and finance could, individually and collectively, be ‘behind a crisis of such a magnitude, with far reaching consequences for the U.S. as well as the global economy, may seem far-fetched even now. Yet that is precisely what has happened’ (The Hindu 24 March 2008).

Another report identifies ‘Lehman Brothers Holding—with $60 billion in bad debts’ and ‘Merrill Lynch … which also stuck with toxic sub-prime (real estate) with $40 billion write-downs’ (The Hindu 22 September 2008) as the super-spreaders.

Hedge Funds

The article also identifies hedge funds as having ‘a role in the ongoing crisis’. These were elite investment funds ‘open only to a small group of well-heeled investors from whom they charge a performance fee. It is believed that some of these hedge funds have been the main buyers of the sub-prime mortgage securities’ (The Hindu 24 March 2008).

American Consumers

While the crisis was traced to the subprime market and the financial sector, one article traced the crisis to the unsustainable nature of American consumption. The author writes,

Our current crisis is not simply a blowback effect of financial globalization. Financial globalization misfired because it took a bet on a type of economy that was becoming unsustainable. During the past quarter-century, but especially over the five years leading up to 2008, the world seemed to revolve around the American consumer. (James 2009)

The different super-spreaders identified were iconic of US-led neoliberal capitalism.³ Investment banks, hedge funds and subprime markets are all products of the liberal US financial market, while the credit market and American consumerism form the backbone of neoliberalism. It is not a coincidence that newspaper reports about the global financial crisis associates the crisis with neoliberalism, and I will argue in this article that the discourse uses the outbreak narrative to construct an ideological critique of neoliberalism.

Element 2: Intent of the Super-spreader

The effect of the super-spreader on the public imagination is further cemented by ascribing intentionality to the super-spreader. A commentator ponders ‘why such big names (large banks) encounter sudden deaths’. The reason its author suggests ‘lies within the organizations. A common factor in all these “deaths” is the financial shenanigans of the top management.’ The most common intent pinned by these reports on the super-spreader, was ‘some highly questionable practices adopted by American banks and institutions’ (The Hindu 22 September 2008). Newspaper reports about the global financial crisis constructs the super-spreader as having been infected on account of the extravagant risks he/she took. As one article aptly titled ‘Global Financial Crisis: A Slippery Slope’ (Duggal 2008) comments,

…during these good times financial institutions (FIs), particularly investment banks, grew very large. They took big risks and made huge profits. In recent years, FIs contributed nearly 40%, as against the normal 10%, of total US corporate profits. They paid huge salaries to recruit the best and the brightest (sic) from top business schools, who, in turn, helped create and sell complex financial products, credit derivatives and other securities whose risks were not understood by either investors or the top managements of investment banks.

These extravagant risks were being taken, largely to make profits, by investment bankers who duped investors into buying financial instruments, which in the end turned out to be ‘toxic’. Eminent industrialist Lord Swaraj Paul in August 2008 was quoted as saying, ‘It is a man-made crisis and the investment bankers are responsible for it,’ and moreover ‘bankers have gone overboard by giving loans to people, which were more than their repaying capacity and have resulted in the current crisis’ (The Hindu 12 August 2008). Another article elaborates that

The root cause for all these—the sub-prime crisis—has its origins in some highly questionable practices adopted by American banks and institutions. Borrowers with poor credit records were lured into taking home loans. These loans were then packaged, securitized and converted into complex instruments that encompassed various types of risks, and then sold to investors across the globe. (The Hindu 24 March 2008)

Newspaper reports about the crisis constructs the banks as the ‘culprits’ who duped ‘innocent’ people who couldn’t pay back their loans, thus leading to crashing of these banks. Thus, though these banks and investors themselves lost huge amounts of money, they are seen to ‘deserve’ it because they caused the crisis. As one prophetic article titled ‘This is not just a Market Wobble, 18 Aug 2007’ reflects:

So what happens now? It’s tempting to say those who have sowed the wind through greed and arrogance should reap the whirlwind. There is some irony in listening to the calls for welfare for hedge funds from the people who normally argue governments should get out of the way and allow market forces to decide which companies survive or fall.

The investment banker was perceived as the source of the crisis, and images of ‘reckless’ investment bankers (who get huge salaries) proliferated in newspapers. The intent of the investment bankers was constructed in moral terms, where the bankers were driven to take greater risks to make more money. ‘The investment bankers, now in dire straits, drew handsome salaries and fat bonuses when the going was good. Many of them are now being shown the door’ (The Hindu 24 March 2008). This article included a picture of a man, identified as a banker, dressed in a black suit and holding a black briefcase, walking out of a bank, with the caption ‘stemming the rot’. Another article showed a picture (Elliot 2007) of a man in front of a stock exchange, staring at the changing prices of shares. Investment bankers were constructed as being willing to put the whole world at risk for the sake of immediate returns. The investment bankers, portrayed as the source of the infection, represented an increasing anxiety that disaster and crisis could affect an economy despite originating outside its boundaries.

Element 3: Identification of a Conducive Environment

After identifying a super-spreader and granting him/her intent, the outbreak narrative continues to describe the environment which acts as the epicentre of the contagion and the incubator of the super-spreader. There is a certain consensus amongst the media, that the contagion was created within the bowels of American capitalism, symbolized by New York in general and Wall Street in particular. Newspaper reports of the global financial crisis are accompanied by recurrent imagery of Wall Street with photos of high-rise buildings sporting glass fronts (The Hindu 22 September 2008) or one of a news ticker in front of Times Square, subtitled ‘the crunch’ (Narasimhan 2007).

The profligacy of Wall Street, however, could not have been possible without the conditions provided by the state. The reports of the crisis were used as an opportunity to critique the American government and its inability to regulate Wall Street. The US government was inserted into the narrative through images of the White House along with the caption ‘stemming the rot’ (same as another article) (The Hindu 22 September 2008). The connection between the US government and Wall Street was drawn in an article in Tehelka suitably titled ‘Will Wall Street’s flu make India Sneeze’ (9–16 February 2008), where the author writes,

As uncertainty grips the world, and the US economy flounders between the Scylla of the sub-prime crisis and the Charybdis of a credit crunch, economists and political leaders around the globe have been providing a plenitude of opinions, united only on one thing: everyone agrees a big storm is coming.

Another article quotes the Russian Prime Minister as saying ‘it was not only the failure of leading financial corporations to assess financial risks’, but also ‘the aggressive financial policies of the world’s biggest economy’ (referring to the US) that triggered what may be the worst global crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s and ‘made a majority of people in the world poorer’ (The Hindu 8 June 2008). An American newspaper describes the inability of the US government to contain the economy by comparing it to an infected human body. The author writes, ‘The U.S. financial system thus resembles a patient in intensive care. This “body” is trying to fight off a disease that is spreading, and as it does so, the body convulses, settles for a time and then convulses again.’ The US government is portrayed as ‘ineffective’ as they have failed to stem the illness which ‘seems to be overwhelming the self-healing tendencies of markets. The doctors in charge are resorting to ever-more invasive treatment, and are now experimenting with remedies that have never before been applied’ (Hilsenrath et al. 2008).

This is one ground on which the outbreak narrative used in newspaper reports about the global financial crisis differs significantly from the use of the outbreak narrative in US public health discourse. While US public health discourse constructs underdeveloped countries as the environment in which the infection is gestated (Wald 2008, p. 6), in the newspaper reports about the global financial crisis, the US and the developed world are seen as the environment which incubates contagion. This difference is due to the different ideological contexts within which both discourses arose, and I shall discuss this in more detail in the section which details the political economy of the newspaper reports on the crisis.

Element 4: Identification of the Dissemination of the Contagion

After describing the super-spreader and the environment within which it was created, the outbreak narrative describes the route of the contagion and the network through which it passes. This element plays a crucial role in creating a feeling of threat from the possibility of contagion in the reader. One cautionary article titled ‘This is not just a Market Wobble, 18 Aug 2007’ comments that

Contagion is taking hold of the global financial system—and the British Government has helped make that happen. On Thursday, there was a whiff of panic in the air. In London, the FTSE index lost 250 points and closed below 6,000 for the first time since last autumn.

A Frontline article explains that the ‘the main “transmission mechanisms” of the crisis from the place of its origin to the rest of the world, particularly Asia, consisted of the drop in equity markets dependent on international portfolio flows’ (Kurien, 17–30 July 2010).

Stock markets were represented as the network through which the contagion was moving rapidly and an anxiety was generated about possible contagion in the Indian stock market, indicated by its fall. A popular image used in these reports was of graphs of falling stock indexes. It is not a coincidence that these graphs resemble the heart rate of a person in their dying throes. There were worries in India of ‘the possibility of a domino effect knocking down even players who are far away from the action’ (The Hindu 22 September 2008). The increased anxiety felt by Indian investors of possible contagion is indicated in articles with headlines such as ‘Global Financial Crisis Sends Sensex Tumbling, 16 September 2008’ and ‘Sensex Closes Flat amid Global Financial Worries, 17 September 2008’.

Element 5: Containment

The outbreak narrative usually climaxes with a call for regulation and the containment of the crisis. Wald argues that ‘Epidemics dramatize the need for regulation…the memory of epidemics, however, is typically harnessed in the service of reinforcements…they foster the parallel growth of the state’ (2008, p. 17). A Frontline article puts this need for regulation in perspective, with the author commenting,

Of course, the main reason for the rapid spread of the crisis was the absence of a global financial architecture, which led to the integration of the financial markets globally when the going was good but without effective regulation or restraint, which were left to the national economies. (Kurien, 17–30 July 2010)

The reporting of the crisis was followed by urgent calls to increase regulation. A Times of India article echoes this sentiment, with the author saying, ‘Only concerted action by governments and monetary authorities, particularly those of the US, can prevent a global disaster.’ He goes on to add that ‘The US government must commit large amounts of taxpayer funds and show firm determination to solve the problem’ (Duggal 2008).

The Bush administration responded by ‘proposing a sweeping overhaul of the way the government regulates the nation’s financial service industry from banks and securities firms to mortgage brokers and insurance companies’ (The Hindu 30 March 2008). This was followed by

a massive $300 billion liquidity infusion into the world financial system … announced by the central banks of the U.S., the EU, Japan and Canada with the objective of calming the markets and providing liquidity to financial institutions. This liquidity injection seems to have worked so far as the markets recovered just as quickly as they fell. (The Hindu 22 September 2008)

However, in stark contrast to US public health discourse, newspaper reports of the global financial crisis doubted whether this new commitment to regulation will solve the crisis. A Hindu article ironically titled ‘A Stitch in Time Saves Nine, 22 September 2008’ argues ‘time only will tell whether the Bush administration’s radical bailout plan and the prompt intervention by major central banks the world over, including the Reserve Bank of India, last week, would actually help find a permanent solution to the unprecedented crisis facing the global markets’.

The primary critique against the US government’s attempts, at the curtailment of the contagion, was that it did not address the main source of the crisis, which was the greed and avarice of American financial institutions, who were bailed out using tax payers’ money. One article submits that

[the] U.S. is a divided house today on the issue that whether to spend tax payers’ money to pay for the mistakes of some Wall Street financial barons. At the same time, no one is sure this $700 billion will help bail out fully the beleaguered (sic) financial institutions of the U.S. and restore confidence of the world markets. (The Hindu 29 September 2008)

Moreover, the bailout was constructed as a weakness of the US neoliberal economic policies, which recommended that the market would take care of its own mistake. An article perceptively points out that ‘committing public money to shore up investor confidence may be the ultimate repudiation of the belief that the markets will punish errant institutions and, because they are self-correcting, there is no need for the government to intervene’ (The Hindu 21 July 2008). The use of the outbreak narrative in the newspaper reports of the global financial crisis was employed to make an ideological critique of neoliberal capitalism and America’s strong endorsement of it. A Hindu article astutely notes, even before the onset of the global crises, that ‘What is certain is that the end of the long boom will have a profound ideological impact’. The author adds that ‘If the credit squeeze does indeed trigger a wider economic meltdown, that will certainly mean the end of the neoliberal consensus that has dominated politics for almost a generation’ (Milne 2007).

The outbreak narrative put the start of the crisis in the heart of US financial capitalism and traced the spread of the contagion across other developed countries. This discourse articulated a growing anxiety about the unregulated nature of neoliberal capitalism, and the threat that this poses to an increasingly interconnected world. This discourse was ideologically positioned to criticize American capitalism. Moreover, we find that interest groups from different ideological backgrounds appropriated this discourse to frame their own political positions. In the next section, we will study the political economy of the newspaper reports of the global financial crisis and trace the different ideologies within which these reports were framed.

The Political Economy of Reporting Crisis

The outbreak narrative was a popular representative strategy for the 2008 global financial crisis in Indian newspapers. In this section I will try to contextualize this discourse within a political economy framework. I will analyze the different institutional/ideological positions from which various individuals have represented the crisis and the frames within which they embedded the reports about the global financial crisis. The media is used by a variety of institutions/vested interest groups to inform the ‘public’ about their policies and stands on public issues. Interest groups appropriate ‘media events’ to frame their own ideological position for public consumption.

I have surveyed the two highest circulating English dailies in India, namely, The Times of India and The Hindu. The Times of India, in terms of readership, is considered the second most widely read paper (in any language) in the world (Khandekar 2010). Further, I have surveyed some popular English weeklies like Tehelka, Frontline, etc. A large part of the readership of English print media is comprised of educated upper income classes based in cities and large towns. The readership for these newspapers are classes which influence policies, and consist of a heterogeneous group of bureaucrats, politicians, business men, managers, academicians and formal sector employees (both private and public).

Interest Groups and their Rhetoric of Crisis

I will identify the three most dominant interest groups with regard to the discourse of global financial crisis and will trace the ideological frames through which each of these groups appropriated the media’s construction of the global financial crisis.

The UPA and Congress

The importance of the global financial crisis to the UPA can be gleaned from the sheer number of reports and interviews given about this topic. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister P. Chidambaram were the most quoted representatives of the UPA government, and it is not a coincidence that both were trained economists. I will argue in the conclusion that the global financial crisis was constructed as an economic phenomenon, which had little effect on other spheres of society.

‘Noting that the world is in the midst of a “deep crisis” and going through “choppy waters”, Manmohan Singh said, “in a globalized (sic) world we cannot pretend that we will not be affected by the crisis that has not been created here but somewhere else”’ (The Times of India 21 November 2008). However, seeking to allay concerns about slowdown in the country in view of global meltdown, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says that ‘no effort would be spared to “neutralize” to the “maximum” its adverse impact on India and asserted that the economy would grow at eight per cent’. The state identified this crisis to have been foreign to the country and hence necessary to ‘neutralize’. Representatives of the state commonly argued (Dasgupta 2008; Khare 2008; The Hindu 28 January 2008) that the Indian economy was insulated from the excesses of the global financial crisis. This was most evocatively articulated by the Finance Minister P. Chidambaram who stated that ‘If the U.S. sneezes, India need not catch a cold!’⁴ There are three interdependent reasons offered for this position by representatives of the state:

State-led Regulation

The primary reason provided in support of the idea that the Indian economy was insulated from the crisis was that the economy and the financial sector were well regulated by the state. Finance Minister P. Chidambaram ‘used the World Economic Forum to get across the message that India is fairly insulated from the global financial crisis, which he said was the result of “failure of regulators and lack of regulations”’ (The Hindu 28 January 2008). The outbreak narrative frames the global crisis as a failure of the American state to regulate reckless financial institutions and immoral investment bankers. However, the Indian economy was argued to be insulated because the state played an important role in protecting the economy from dangerous external forces. This is because, as a perceptive article states,

Broadly, state intervention to support failing institutions is not new here. In fact public ownership has been a great help in the recent past…. In other words, there is no dogmatic opposition to official intervention in India. Those in India looking to the West for best practices and new tools will be disappointed. And while integration with the rest of the world is a fact, it seems just as well that there are still policy blocks to the unbridled entry of foreign banks. (The Hindu 24 March 2008)

The reason for ‘our not getting overexposed to the underbelly of globalisation and liberalisation (sic)’, according to Union Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar, is that the Congress has embedded ‘Safeguards to moderate the impact of adverse global impulses’. He traces these safeguards to a long lineage of Congress leaders for whom ‘political sovereignty has always been a precursor to economic sovereignty’ (Red Blood Corpuscles, 10–17 November 2008).

This framing of the regulated Indian economy, as being insulated from the global financial crisis, is an important validation of the strong state directed development policies that India embraced upon independence. The state directed vision of capitalism followed by India has been consistently critiqued by the US and other adherents of neoliberalism on the grounds that market forces are not given the required freedom. India’s independent history is replete with examples of neoliberals trying to influence state’s interventionist policies. Two famous examples are: the liberalization of the agricultural sector (also referred to as the green revolution) when the US pulled out PL 480 aid, in the face of an agricultural crisis in 1965, and the IMF enforcing liberal reforms in India in 1991, in exchange for giving large loans to alleviate the country’s fiscal and debt crises. The state framed its position with respect to the global financial crisis, such that while American neoliberalism led to the crisis, Indian state regulated capitalism ensured that the economy was insulated.

Independence of India’s Growth Regime

Aside from being insulated from the crisis, the government argued that India’s growth and development was not dependent on America and the Western world. Singh argues, ‘The world looks at the country in the “hope that India would be an engine of growth for the world economy”’, this is because ‘“India, with its still relatively inward-looking economy, is decidedly better placed” than many countries in the world to cope with the worldwide slump’ (The Economic Times 28 March 2009). One article referred to this as a clear reversal of global roles, reporting that ‘European countries repeatedly asked Asia to lead the way out of the crisis. N. Ravi, secretary (east) in the MEA, told reporters that all EU leaders asked Asian countries to refrain from withdrawing into “economic nationalism”’ (Bagchi & Dasgupta 2008). Along with arguing that India was insulated from the crisis and was an independent generator of growth, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ‘warned the international community not to ignore the developing countries in tackling the debilitating international financial crisis’ (Parashar 2008). The state framed India’s insulation to argue for India’s stronger role in the international community and to effect a consequent downgrading of America’s position. Noting that a ‘club of few rich countries’ was driving the international financial system, Singh said ‘for the first time, it has been recognized that this club membership must be expanded and countries like India must be part of this club for consultations and decision-making process’ (The Times of India 21 November 2008).

Contagion only Affected Foreign Institutional Investment (FII)⁵

The prime minister did concede ‘that the global crisis could lead to a decline in capital inflows because foreign investors may “need liquidity, [and] take money out.” (Insertion original) In such a situation, the stock markets would be affected and the Indian corporate houses would have difficulty raising resources abroad’ (The Times of India 21 November 2008). The state accepted the construction of contagion through stock markets and FII; however, these were considered to be temporary and wouldn’t affect the whole market. Chidambaram supported this position and is quoted in an article as saying,

We live in an interdependent world and the fate of all countries is related to the international financial system. Our value markets are opened to the world and, if they are affected, this will affect our capacity to finance our development…. FIIs are selling, but I do not think all FIIs are selling nor do I think they are selling all the time. They are selling because they have got payment obligations in other markets, he said. (Dasgupta 2008)

India’s economy developed under the UPA regimes of 2003–2008 and 2008–2012, under a growth regime driven by exports and investments. Foreign investments and foreign demand for Indian goods and services were important drivers of India’s growth. The global crisis directly affected the Indian economy through a massive pullout of FIIs and a sharp fall in international demand for India’s IT sector services. The three issues, through which the state framed its position, were signals for investors to maintain confidence in the Indian economy and not pull out their funds and thereby stall the high growth phase. Further, it was used as a signal for investors pulling out of the West to convey the idea that the Indian sector was resilient in the face of the global crisis and capable of growing, even while the rest of the world was stagnating. This discourse is indicative of a growing support of capital, from the state, albeit with a strong role played by state regulation. One of the frames missing from the state’s position on the global financial crisis was the effect of the crisis on common people and people unconnected with FIIs and stock exchange.

Representatives of Capital

Capital has been represented by a diverse array of corporations and institutions, most notably by financial institutions like Carlyle India Advisors Pvt. Ltd and HSBC India bank, corporations like Reliance, industrialists like Lord Swaraj Paul or rightist elements in civil society like Forum for Free Enterprise, industrial lobbies like NASSCOM and business schools like IIMC. There isn’t a homogenous position taken by representatives of capital as interests of financiers, banks, stock market investors and corporations are diverse. However, I will argue in this sub-section, that while different sections of capital made different arguments about the reasons for the crisis and its impact on India, their frames of appropriation of newspaper reports of the global financial crisis were similar.

Representatives of capital made diverse arguments about the causes of the crisis and its impact on the Indian economy:

Insulation of the Economy from the Crisis

Representatives of capital had a position similar to the state, that the effects of the crisis would be dampened in the Indian economy. However, representatives of capital did not conflate this insulation with effective state regulation; instead they credited it to the strength of Indian industries and markets. An investment advisor elaborates,

I THINK THE fear of US recession is real…. The Indian economy, though, is fairly insulated. And its dependence on foreign events is small, except for oil prices. Of course, the outsourcing and IT companies may take a hit and face pressure, but the retail, entertainment, banking and infrastructure sectors will continue to perform. (emphasis original) (Churiwala 2008).

Another investment advisor adds that

Although we have become more integrated with the US and the global economy, a US slowdown will not hit us in a big way as we have diversified our exports to other countries. Also, we have a huge domestic market, which will provide a buffer against a slowdown in the US. (Joshi 2008)

Market Forces will Take Care of the Crisis

This position was most articulately stated by David Mulford, US ambassador to India, in an article titled ‘Market is Solving US Problem on its Own’ (Jebaraj 2008). He argues that the market punishes those who excessively abuse the market; he writes, ‘This is painful stuff. They’re letting people go, they’re suffering in their stock price, the wealth creation prospects of the people who work there have been completely demolished for the time being, and my feeling is that what is necessary to fix the problem is happening.’ However, tightening regulation would punish people who were not to blame. This view is echoed by Rajiv Gupta, managing director of Carlyle India, who says about markets ‘from an Indian perspective, it is a self-correcting mechanism’. Further, he feels that there are already grounds for looking with optimism to the future as ‘Fundamentals start looking better and earnings also look better, I don’t think there is any ground for panic,’ said Mr Gupta, adding that there is no need to be too pessimistic in the Indian context (The Hindu 20 August 2007, p. 15).

Indian Businesses and Managers Will Remain Resilient

Another popular argument was that Indian businesses and managers have survived in tough times and will remain resilient in the face of the global financial crisis too. Arguing that Indian businesses fared better in 2008 than in 1997 (East Asian Crisis), Swaminathan Aiyar (2009) writes:

Indian corporates were much less over-borrowed in 2008 than in 1997, and Indian banks were far better capitalized, so they withstood the financial crisis. Companies that had borrowed big for new projects in 1997 collapsed, and many begged for debt forgiveness. In 2008, Tata Steel, Tata Motors and Hindustan Aluminium had raised gargantuan dollar loans for foreign acquisitions, yet managed to weather the storm.

A Business Today article, called ‘Managing the Slowdown, 5 October 2008’, studies different strategies devised by businesses to function profitably during the slowdown. The article introduces itself as,

this isn’t a story about how much industry has slowed down by. Rather, it’s about how the bellwethers of some of the sectors closely linked to the economy are devising strategies to drive growth—in investments and in volumes—in tougher climes. They’re doing so in various ways. And innovatively.

The different arguments made by representatives of capital, however, had one thing in common. They all articulated that the Indian economy was a good environment to invest in. They were also providing signals to investors to continue to invest in the economy. However, the representatives of capital differed in their position from the state. There were no reports from these interest groups which framed the regulatory capacities of the state as the reason for the insulation of the Indian economy from the global financial crisis, instead the insulation of the economy were due to the strengths of Indian industries and the resilience of its employees.

Representatives of the Left

The left was represented by leftist academicians, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), who unlike representatives of the state and capital dwelled on the socio-economic effects of the crisis. This connection is made by leftist strategist Prabhat Patnaik, who said, ‘the government must immediately initiate anti-recessionary measures to ensure that the global financial crisis did not hurt the ordinary people’ (The Hindu 4 October 2008). Noted economist T.N. Srinivasan (2010) made a more vitriolic retort to the union budget of 2008 and its failure to stem the social consequences of the global financial crisis, stating

The Prime Minister and his finance ministers repeatedly mention ‘inclusiveness’ of policies and their outcomes. Undoubtedly, this is as appealing a political slogan as ‘Garibi Hatao’. But to have real content, it has to mean the use of proven socially effective and least costly policy tools to eradicate mass poverty within a reasonable time, an overarching objective on which there has been a political consensus since long before Independence.

The left further linked the crisis to the middle classes. This is illustrated by eminent Marxist scholar Jayati Ghosh (2008) who stated:

The implications of the financial market meltdown will increasingly make themselves felt in the real economy through declining demand and associated job losses. And for the middle classes in India, the crunch is likely to come not only through potential adverse effects on real income but also through further financial pain—this time in the form of a credit card crunch.

Aside from connecting the crisis to different socio-economic sections, the left also pointed out the rhetorical inconsistencies of the Congress government, who were now critiquing a system (neoliberalism) which they themselves introduced in the Indian economy (liberal reforms 1991). Jayati Ghosh (2008) perceptively notes, while India has not been directly affected by the crisis, it is hypocritical to claim that better state regulation has led to it. She writes,

While India is not likely to face a financial meltdown of the kind that was nearly experienced in the US, the global financial crisis will certainly have an impact. When the financial crisis erupted in a comprehensive manner on Wall Street, there was some premature triumphalism among Indian policymakers and media persons. It was argued that India would be relatively immune to this crisis, because of the ‘strong fundamentals’ of the economy and the supposedly well-regulated banking system.

As a consequence the state did not learn from the errors of the American government. Prabhat Patnaik anxiously comments on this deficiency; he says, ‘It is sad that the government has not learned appropriate lessons from the global crisis and is still talking of going ahead with the financial sector reforms’ (The Hindu 4 October 2008). This analysis is rounded up by Ghosh (2008) who argues that the crisis should be considered as grounds for rethinking India’s liberalizing model, instead of talking about its resilience, as she points out,

The extent of imported difficulties would have been far less if the Government had not increased the vulnerability of the country to external shocks by drastically opening up the real and financial sectors. It is disconcerting; therefore, that when faced with this crisis the Government is not rethinking its own liberalization strategy, despite the backlash against neoliberalism worldwide.

She goes on to conclude that

By deciding to relax conditions that apply to FII investments in the vain hope of attracting them back and by focusing on pumping liquidity into the system rather than using public expenditure and investment to stall a recession, it is indicating that it hopes that more of what created the problem would help solve it. This is just to postpone decisions that may prove critical—till it is too late.

The leftist critique of the state, however, does not come from a political vacuum. The left believed that the only reason India has been somewhat insulated from the crisis, is not because of the Congress’s regulatory role, but because of the role of the left in UPA 2003–2008.

Prabhat Patnaik argues that the effects of the crisis were muted in India because ‘No Indian financial institution is exposed as much to the risks since financial liberalisation did not proceed far enough in India. This is, of course, because the Left stood consistently against these reforms.’ He further emphasizes the role of the left and says, ‘The Left had strongly opposed any steps towards economic reform in India. They prevented and stalled banking reforms and also prevented full capital account convertibility, but they must be given credit where its due’ (P. Singh 2008).

The left were not the only ones to link the global financial crisis to its social consequences and its effect on the marginalized population. Development institutions (World Bank, UN) connected the crisis to larger socio-economic consequences. The UN Habitat reported on the impact of the global crisis on poverty:

The global economic meltdown is set to push as many as 100 million into a poverty trap, mostly in developing countries, UN Habitat has predicted…. The latest estimates suggest that no country will be immune to the impact of the unfolding economic crisis. However, countries that will bear the brunt of this worldwide slide into poverty have not been specified. (M. Singh 2009)

Aside from linking the crisis to different socio-economic classes, the left’s analysis is important to my analysis because, it also analyzes the politics of the state’s rhetoric about the crisis. The government had tried to differentiate its state-led liberalization policies from the American free market oriented neoliberalism; however, as the left pointed out, both are based on similar flaws, the dependence on the vagaries of the market, and the threat of contagion.

Conclusion

The 2008 global financial crisis is an example of a man-made disaster. However, unlike other man-made disasters (the Bhopal gas tragedy, 7/11 Mumbai terrorist attacks), it is difficult to fix the source of the disaster. Difficulties of representation (as argued in the second section) warranted the use of the outbreak narrative, to conflate the global financial crisis with a natural disaster. Moreover, the outbreak narrative created a sense of impending threat amongst readers and made reports of the crisis more news worthy.

The popularity of the outbreak narrative was probably because the crisis revealed a growing anxiety about financial liberalization⁶ in the Third World. Financial liberalization was the central guiding principle of neoliberalism, as introduced by Thatcher and Reagan governments of UK and US in 1980 (Harvey 2007, p. 11). The crisis revealed a growing fear amongst the Indian polity, about the loss of economic sovereignty and contagion, brought about by liberal reforms introduced since 1991. This explains the homogenous appropriation of the outbreak narrative by representatives of the state, capital and left, who each positioned themselves as critiques of American neoliberalism, and saviours of the economy from the impacts of the global financial crisis.

However, there were significant differences, in the framing of the crisis by representatives of each of these organized interest groups (state, capital and left). The state did not want its own brand of liberal capitalism introduced in 1991 to be equated to American neoliberalism, and the crisis to be used as a critique of liberal reforms introduced by the Congress. The framing of the Congress as a regulator and guardian of the economy was necessary to maintain its voting blocs, while the framing of the economy as insulated from the crisis was to provide signals to investors to not pull out finances from the economy. Representatives of capital provided paradoxical frames for the crisis, which included framing the economy as insulated from the crisis and framing domestic enterprises as resilient to the crisis. This position was largely because of the paradoxical relationship of capital with regard to financial liberalization. Profitable opportunities for domestic capital had significantly increased since the introductions of liberal reforms in 1991; however, this also included the threat of foreign capital to out-compete domestic capital, and the danger of a sudden loss of investor confidence in the economy, leading to a drain of funds from the economy. The left has been a staunch critique of American neoliberalism since its inception, and it framed the crisis to criticize the liberal policies of the state. The left also used this as an opportunity to criticize the state rhetoric about the crisis, as being paradoxical to its own ideologies. This attack on the state was largely contextual, as the left had started falling out with UPA government in 2008, and was planning to stand independently for the upcoming Lok Sabha election in 2009.

A discursive analysis of newspaper reports about the global financial crisis provides an important tool to understand the changing political economy of the country. It provides a method to comprehend the political strategies of organized interest groups, and an understanding of the role of the national media in shaping the views of public regarding liberal reforms.

Footnotes

Notes

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