NEW DELHI — Serious social tension roils here and there across the globe. Gaps between poor and rich rarely seem to shrink and in most places continue to enlarge. The fairest assessment of economic and informational globalization (the greatest pretender as an income gap-narrower since orthodox Marxism) would suggest it may be adding more fuel to the fire than anything else.
In India, especially, a blind man can see what is happening. The poor are to be found almost everywhere you go, even and especially in this mammoth nation's capital city. Fortunately, Manmohan Singh has anything but deficient eyesight. Educated at Punjab and Oxford universities in economics, he senses a gathering storm — a kind of global political warming in the sociological rather than the meteorological sense.
Singh, India's deeply intellectual prime minister, offered an extraordinary speech recently before an enormously well-fed audience of Indian industrialists that, in another era, might have been dismissed as maudlin Marxism. But Singh is no more a Marxist than Alan Greenspan, the former U.S. Federal Reserve system chairman whose public expression of concern around the same time about China's overheated economy sent shivers down the spine of world markets.