Indian IT''s moment of truth
Harish Nambiar
24 December 2004
The IT sector must negotiate with the politics, policies and polemics of democratic India.
There is an apocryphal story about how the Oxbridge Club had a competition for the best headline that would include elements of sex, royalty, mystery and 'whodunit.' The winner was Who raped the queen? Funnily, even that piece of crafty intellectual fiction has found echoes in India's recent tryst with IT royalty, schoolyard sex, and the Delhi police's universally declaimed heading the list of whodunit; Avnish Bajaj.
The arrest of Bajaj, the CEO of baazee.com, the Indian arm of eBay, is the inevitable result of 'shining' India's tryst with Bharat, the vast unwashed majority that populate this country. After the liberalisation of the '90s, and its avowedly rich economic harvest, it was time for a correction. The correction that needs to accommodate, co-opt, and eventually share a vision of India that includes the majority who are still far from sharing the pie that the world of the English educated are orgasmic about; the six per cent GDP growth that makes India the world's biggest economies.
This the majority that has been bearing the brunt, and carrying the burden of having to live under laws that were formulated by the Raj, that is still a largely unchanged body of hopelessly outdated jurisprudence. Avnish Bajaj's arrest is the regulation case of a 18th century mentality that informs the application of a 21st century law.
When India enacted its Information Technology Act in 2000, there was much reason to be pleased. We were one of the frontrunners with it along with habitual leaders of liberalism in the world, like the Scandinavian countries. But Bajaj's arrest underscores that eventually Nasscom and the rest of the IT-enabled hoarding world lit up in its own glow need inevitably negotiate the wider truth of the India versus Bharat debate.
