Free Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power by Robert D. Kaplan Page A

him.
    Modi’s office is located on an upper floor of a massive ministry building, made of cheap stone forty years ago and with a scabby facade. It is surrounded by other equally massive and ugly ministry buildings in Gandhinagar, the planned city of government workers north of Ahmedabad that is a monument to some of the flawed architectural schemes of formerly socialist India. Gujarat constitutes only 5 percent of the Indian population, but that is still fifty million people, more than the population of South Korea, so it requires a sizable government bureaucracy.
    There was considerable hubbub outside his office, as Western businessmen and investors in expensive suits clustered together after meetings with the chief minister. At 5 p.m. sharp, I was ushered into Modi’s office. He sat behind a desk that looked over a long committee table with the chairs empty. He wore traditional pajama pants and a long, elegant brown
korta
, with pens stuck in the pocket, the traditional dress of India that the Muslim Mughals had brought here. Wire-rimmed glasses rested on his face. He had a clipped and distinguished salt-and-pepper beard, and a handsome, welcoming visage. In front of him lay a small stack of documents, which he thrust at me before I even asked my first question. He clearly had little time for small talk. “I heard you were interested in development here, so here are your answers.” What he gave me was not the usual promotional brochures, but long lists of sourced statistics put together by an aide. Gujarat had had 10.2 percent annual GDP growth since 2002. It had eight new universities. More than half the new jobs created in India were in Gujarat. It ranked first in poverty alleviation, first in electrical generation. As I had experienced, Gujarat was a far cry from neighboring Sindh in Pakistan where there were only a few hours of power every day. Then there were the new dam projects and micro-irrigation systems—again, a far cry from Sindh, with its acute shortages of water and dams not improved upon since the era of the British.
    Chile and China flashed through my mind. Augusto Pinochet torturedand murdered a few thousand people in his first months as leader in 1973 and 1974, and then went on to create an economic dynamo that benefited the whole country. Deng Xiaoping massacred many hundreds of students at Tiananmen Square in 1989, and then went on to improve the quality of life of more people in a shorter time than perhaps ever before in recorded economic history. In both cases, deliberately planned atrocities had created an atmosphere of shock and fear, which the leader manipulated in order to push through a host of reforms without opposition. It worked, even as it was repugnant. It was a fact almost difficult to admit, that since 2002 there had not been a single act of inter-communal violence in Gujarat.
    Was Modi trying to create another Singapore or Dubai in Gujarat, a place that would be, in a positive sense, distinctive from the mother brand of India? I asked him.
    “No,” came the reply. “Singapore and Dubai are city-states. There can be many Singapores and Dubais here. We will have a Singapore in Kutch,” he said, waving his arm dismissively, “and GIFT [the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, a new high-tech city planned nearby] can be like Dubai. Gujarat as a whole will be like South Korea. Global commerce is in our blood,” he went on, lifting his eyebrows for emphasis. There was a practiced theatricality about the way he talked. You could see how he could move a crowd or take over a boardroom. Whenever he opened his mouth he suddenly had real, mesmerizing presence.
    His ambition was staggering, whatever his roots as a faceless
pracharak
. South Korea was the world’s thirteenth largest economy. Yet I could understanding the comparison: South Korea is a vast peninsula open to major sea-lanes like Gujarat. It had congealed as an industrialized, middle-class dynamo not under democratic rule, but