Inside Asian Gaming

14 is strong, as Deutsche Bank suggests. It’shardertoarguethatHaryanaisatypical of all other Indian states, though its fortunes have been influenced by its location. It is next door to the National Capital Territory of Delhi, and as such benefits from the capital’s role as a transport and commercial gateway. Urbanised Haryana is (for India) relatively small in area and population but it is highly urbanised, with 81 settlements classified as cities. According to figures from the Ministry of Tourism, Haryana also accounted for the largest individual share of India’s foreign visitors in 2006, with 17.3% of the total 4.4 million arrivals. This might make it economically viable to open casinos limited to foreigners or to Indians resident overseas. Faridabad, one of the cities proposed for a casino development, is only 25 miles south of Delhi on the well- worn tourist routes to Agra, the site of the Taj Mahal in Uttar Pradesh, and to the World Heritage city of Jaipur in Rajasthan. Another Haryana casino resort has been proposed for Gurgaon, a satellite city of two million to the west of Delhi. It would be misleading though to suggest that within Goa and Haryana there is unanimity of opinion on gaming. In Haryana in particular, the gaming debate has been very divisive. After the casino proposal was passed by the state legislature in late 2002 the then state governor took more than three months to decide whether to ratify the proposal. Opposition politicians claimed the state leadership tried to smuggle the measure past state lawmakers so it could be sent to Delhi. Killed off They needn’t have worried. In July 2005 the then federal president Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam—formerly a leading scientist in India’s nuclear missile programme and a noted exponent of the country taking a more assertive stance in international relations—torpedoed the casino bill by declining to ratify it. Although the reasons given included the familiar ones about the moral turpitude of the community, tellingly, the most prominent argument was linked to economic nationalism. The Union Ministry for Home Affairs wrote a letter to the Haryana government explaining the decision in the following terms. “Foreign investment and foreign technology collaboration, in any form, are completelyprohibited in the lotterybusiness, gambling and betting sector. “Further, the lottery business, gambling and betting are not open to foreign investment, which applies to FDI, [foreign direct investment] FII [foreign institutional investment] portfolio investment, NRI/OCB [non-resident Indians/ overseas corporate bodies] portfolio investment and investment by foreign venture capital investors.” There may be more than a whiff of self- interest here. Almost half of India’s 28 states now have land-based lotteries administered at state level, and like Hong Kong, the country also has a long-standing horse racing industry that it wants to protect. Protectionism It’s also possible that resistance to casinos is related to a more long-standing culture of choosiness regarding foreign direct investment. Despite the fact India has moved in recent years to a more market- based and less protectionist economy (it has been a member of the World Trade Organization since January 1995) the emotional legacy of economic nationalism is still alive and well. For around 20 years from the mid-1970s until economic liberalisation in 1991, international consumer brands including Coca-Cola and other foreign soft drinks were actually banned from the country.This writer remembers visiting India while a back packing student in the late 1980s and sampling the syrupy pleasures of Campa Cola—a local alternative. In 1976, during a period of emergency government when prime minister Indira Gandhi ruled by decree,the Indian constitutionwas amended to add the word ‘socialist’ to the republic’s title. Perhaps tellingly, the word ‘socialist’ still comes before the words ‘secular’ and ‘democratic’ in the country’s official nomenclature. It’s easy to forget this legacy amid television pictures of the current prime minister, Manmohan Singh, cosying up to the leader of the free trade world George W. Bush and the American administration on Abdul Kalam