Why India can never be a banana republic | Economic Times

India is not a banana republic. It may have exported 1.95 lakh metric tonnes of the unpeeled stuff worth Rs 660 crore in 2019-20 — with Andhra Pradesh leading the bunch — and is its largest producer in the world. But it is still not a banana republic.By banana republic, I mean the way in which we usually mean the term — a small, poor country, often reliant on limited resources, governed by an authoritarian regime and characterised by corruption and economic exploitation by foreign corporations in league with a local ruling elite. India is not small. It is not reliant on limited resources. MNCs haven’t been able to make it a client state. So, it is not a banana republic.It was in O Henry’s 1904 collection of connected short stories, Cabbages and Kings, set in the fictional Central American country of Anchuria — which he based on Honduras where he stayed for six months after embezzling a bank he worked for in Texas — that we first encountered the term. In the late 1890s, the American United Fruit Co. bought huge tracts of land in Honduras to set up banana plantations. At the cost of any other enterprise, the economy was forced to produce only bananas by the United Fruit Co. to be exported to the US for great margins.Such a country, completely controlled and operated by a commercial company only to export a single product — in the case of Anchuria/Honduras the banana — is deemed a banana republic. If the East India Company had singularly primed post-Mughal India for the export of only, say, cotton, India would have been a cotton republic. But India, having more goods to offer than bananas, is neither figuratively or literally a banana republic.There are other reasons why it doesn’t qualify. One, India is stable — both in terms of government and society — unlike a functional banana republic, with a flurry flying over the coupcoup’s nest. In fact, Indian society is a bit too stable for many people’s taste, considering Indians, in general, abhor change (in the language of grown-ups: reforms). Two, for all its romantic yearnings to be a tough ‘Talk less, work more’ entity, it’s still embarrassed of coming across as a heavy-breathing Darth Vader state.It isn’t monosodium glutamate single-party China. Or an understated version of Pakistan’s deep state. Or ‘Off with her head!’ Saudi Arabia. Or North Korea, where a supreme leader set-up makes the Indian National Congress in its heyday look like an egalitarian hippie commune with voting rights for the pet cat. Compared to authoritarian states, banana republics or kelacracies, India wants to come across as benign. So, despite dipping into some Dirty Tricks Department nuggets — charging folks with sedition or seditious-like offences, engaging in everyday communitarianism, making dissent a social taboo — India is not a banana republic by a long shot.Bananas contain fibre, potassium, folate (a nutrient in vitamin B complex) and antioxidants. In this nutrient-rich sense, India is more like the American clothing and accessories company, Banana Republic. Like the original company founded in 1978 — and originally named ‘Banana Republic Travel & Safari Clothing Company’ that started off by selling items with a safari theme — India, too, till the early 1990s, was a Kiplingesque enterprise, more Gunga Dinned against than Gunga Dinning.But since the last 30 years, when on July 24, 1991 Manmohan Singh presented that budget, India has been aiming to be the since-1983-Gap-owned Banana Republic — the high-end retail store.The fact that India is not an O Henryian banana republic is most overwhelmingly confirmed by the fact that we are free to express ourselves without undue worry, and can disagree with opinions without being hauled up (as the Chinese do in Hong Kong).But most importantly, we’re not a banana republic because we protest vociferously when any other country says that we may, from time to time, show some slippery signs of turning into a banana republic. Now, would Honduras, under the charismatic President Juan Orlando Hernández, ever care to do that?