I am visiting India a short four years after the ruling Congress Party--the party of Gandhi and Independence, of Nehru and the Salt March--abandoned India's long-standing policy of sheltering national culture and business and rolled out the red carpet for multinationals. As a longtime skeptic of the environmental and social benefits of global economic integration, I always admired plucky India's status as the world's largest holdout. It provided the critical gap in the western neo-liberal's otherwise seamless worldview: the "world's largest democracy" (good thing) actually turning its back on the global free market (bad thing). Well, they can breathe easier now.

Nothing symbolizes the capitulation of this country so much as the arrival of soft drinks and fast food in a country where famine is periodic, hunger common, and thousands of men and women break up rocks with hammers and chisels on contruction sites for two dollars a day. In 1977, the Coca-Cola Company quit India rather than submit to demands of the government and the nation's largest domestic drink manufacturer, Parle, to turn over some assets, and the mysterious "formula," to local manufacturers. Last year, one champion of that effort, Parle's CEO Ramesh Chauhan, turned around and sold his company to his former nemesis, Coca-Cola. Travellers will be distressed to know that the familiar bottles of Limca, Campa Cola and Thums Up now are labelled "a subsidiary of the Coca-Cola Company."

Foreign investment is pouring into India, although at a far slower rate than the size and complexion of the country would suggest. Marketers wax lyrical about an emerging middle class said to number 150 million, identified by McKinsey, the global consulting company, with the disturbing observation that "a sustained taste for foreign consumer durables begins at an income of only $2,000 a year." Yet there is a catch.

The enthusiasm for foreign stuff is shallow. It is restricted, naturally, to the urban business and political elite because in India, as in all developing countries, the consumer culture is built on the backs of the rural poor. Land and water for industry and aquaculture are usually appropriated from small farms to benefit the cities and the export market and much of the pollution from industry and power generation ends up, of course, in the water, food and lungs of the poor (remember Bhopal?). And the capacity of Indians for daring and militant political action appears limitless. As they begin to tame vast India, the captains of global industry are discovering a powerful lesson: when doing business in a country which enshrines the 20th century's most powerful example of civil disobedience, Gandhi's Salt March, on the 500-rupee note, expect some significant and unanticipated setbacks.

International agriculture giant Cargill felt the backlash in 1992 when its offices were ransacked by farmers irate over the specter of international agribusiness controlling their seed stock. Dupont's efforts to establish a $250-million nylon plant in Goa were scuttled after local activists launched a campaign that featured a sustained social boycott (virtually all public establishments in the area around the plant pledged to refuse service to Dupont employees). At the funeral of an activist shot by the police during a demonstration a few days earlier, a crowd of about 4,000 invaded the site and ransacked the few buildings. In June, Dupont decided to quit Goa in favor of Tamil Nadu, in southeast India.

Such goings-on are standard practice here, offering the faint hope that as the world is increasingly shaped in the corporate image, there will remain in ancient India the spirit of conscious evolution and self-preservation espoused so earnestly by the father of the country, Mohandas Gandhi. A few days before returning, I jumped at the chance to pay a visit to the hospital bed of a 74-year-old Gandhian activist named Sunderlal Bahuguna, emaciated after 33 days of fasting in opposition to the construction of the massive Tehri Dam. His eyes still bright and fierce, he informed me passionately that all the weapons of the Indian government, unleashed in defense of this terrible project, were no match for the strength of one man armed with fearlessness and self-knowledge. I don't doubt him. On June 26th, the Prime Minister agreed to a full review of the Tehri Dam, and Bahuguna ended his fast.

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