Davos, Switzerland is the media networker’s delight. This alpine town, among the snow-capped mountains, is where scores of private jets have been descending the past week carrying the world’s who’s who.The conclave, hosted by the World Economic Forum, is a private annual event now into its 50th year; but over time it has become the ideological voice of inclusive capitalism, and hence a missionary journey for everyone who matters.
This year the agenda was climate change and reducing poverty and increasing inclusiveness – in that order. Donald Trump and Greta Thunberg were the most mentioned people in social media; but they were daggers drawn. Tuesday, the first full day of the conclave, was dominated by Trump versus Teenager. The US president said too much was being made of the catastrophic wildfires, and the overheating of the globe. Criticizing Thunberg and her ilk, Trump called them ‘prophets of doom’ who had missed the impact of his policies that had ushered in an era of prosperity for US citizens.
“They are the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune tellers,” the president said. “They predicted an overpopulation crisis in the 1960s, a mass starvation in the 70s, and an end of oil in the 1990s.” Thunberg, who had listened to him among the audience, came out an hour later all guns blazing, backed by her army of 2 million Twitter followers. Rebuking Trump and other world leaders, Thunberg said they had ignored pleas for the world to act on climate change.
“You say children shouldn’t worry,” Thunberg scoffed. “You say, Just leave this to us. We will fix this. We promise we won’t let you down.” Clearly there was no consensus. While Germany’s Angela Merkel supported Thunberg calling for a common platform to fight global warming and to give serious weightage to young peoples’ concerns, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, mocked the teenage activist. “Are you qualified to talk about economic issues linked to climate change. Go and study the subject in college,” he advised the 17-year-old activist. Thunberg got back at Mnuchin, calling for a climate strike on Friday morning near the Davos conclave site.
UNPAID LABOUR
Davos also debates and digests the annual story on the growing wealth gap. It is a report put out by the not-for-profit Oxfam, whose colourful comparisons are designed to make the well-heeled go away with some guilt in their chests. This year too the report had all the startling data: The world’s 2,153 billionaires have accumulated more wealth between them than the rest of the world’s 4.6 billion people. However, the focus was on gender inequality and how economies are designed to function on the strength of unpaid work contributed by women. “There’s something deeply sick about the economy,” says Gawain Kripke, policy director at Oxfam America. “The fact that women around the world are doing so much work that is uncompensated, unrecognised and unsupported is part of the problem.”
In India, women spend almost six hours on unpaid labour while men spend less than an hour. Even in Norway, a country often hailed as an example of gender equality, women spend about an hour more on unpaid work than men.
INDIA ON LOW KEY
India at Davos was a damp squib this year. The peals of praise for India’s growth story was missing. Instead there was tongue lashing from several quarters for the government’s shift away from ‘secularism’. George Soros, the international investor and philanthropist, caught the eye for his $1 billion donation he promised to fund universities “to promote liberal values and his vision of an open society”. He renewed his attack on Donald Trump too, calling the US president “the ultimate narcissist”.
Soros also attacked ‘nationalism’ as a danger to a unified global economy, and cited India as his example. “The most frightening setback,” he said came in India “where a democratically elected Narendra Modi is creating a Hindu nationalist state, imposing punitive measures on Kashmir, a semi-autonomous Muslim region, and threatening to deprive millions of Muslims of their citizenship.”
Another vocal ‘think-tank’, Ian Bremmer, political scientist and founder of Eurasia Group, told BloombergQuint in Davos: “In his (Prime Minister Modi) first term, the priorities were very clearly about economic reform ... And also bringing up the poor people at the low level. Now we see that … they aren’t as high priority as Hindu nationalism that’s really helping drive the country — driving Modi’s base, but also driving India farther apart, creating polarisation.” In their annual report of top risks for 2020, the Eurasia Group had listed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s policies as the fifth biggest risk to the global economy.
In January 2015, with electoral victory in hand and with the euphoria of India’s fastest-developing-economy tag, then finance minister Arun Jaitley at Davos was pursued by investors and politicians who wanted a connect with India. It was not quite the same this year.