India's Status:Enemies Unafraid/Friends Don't Care

[Guest guest]

The problem we face in Kashmir is India's, not America's

By Jay Dubashi

Source: Free Press Journal

 

If there is any country that has suffered the most in the

September 11th incident - apart from the United States - it is

India. We have suffered in prestige, if not in other ways.India

does not seem to count any more.It is Pakistan, not India, that is

making world headlines, and it is again Pakistan that has

become a frontline state, though if should have been India.

 

Open any foreign newspaper or magazine; you don't find any

mention of India anywhere, even when so many worthies have

been going in and out of America ever since that terrible

September. Our foreign minister was there recently but you

would not have noticed it from any US newspaper. Neither the

New York Times nor Washington Post took any notice of him.

Other papers hardly ever mention India, so it is not surprising

that they totally ignored the foreign minister.

 

Actually, the day our Singh arrived in Washington, New York

Times carried a long interview on its Opp-Ed page - with

Pakistan's ambassadorin Washington! Even that country's

ambassador is considered more important than our Singhs and

Vajpayees. In fact, Singh had to return empty-handed after he

discovered that America's love affair with Pakistan was as torrid

as ever and even senators who were asking for Musharraf's

head on a platter until recently have now changed their minds

and have become Pakistan afficianados.

 

Look at the way Britain's Tony Blair has behaved.He came all the

way to Pakistan to plead with her supremo to spare the lives of

British missionaries who are being tried in Afghanistan. Of

course, he gave it a political colour, investing his mission with

international overtones. Initially, he had no intention of visiting

India, until he was told that it would look very bad indeed if,

having come all the way to this part of the world, he would go

back without paying a visit to Delhi.And although he spent almost

half a day here, he spent exactly 28 minutes with Atal Bihari

Vajpayee. In Pakistan, he spent hours with Pervez Musharraf,

almost on bent knees, asking for mercy to his missionaries in

Afghanistan.

 

Why is India being treated like this? It is all our own doing. When

you become a doormat, you are treated like a doormat. We are

falling over backwards to please Americans, doing the kind of

chamchagiri Indian princes had raised to a fine art when dealing

with the British. After fifty years of independence, this

chamchagiri is still very much a part of our psyche.When I say

'our', I don't mean you and me, for we never did any chamchagiri

when the British were here, nor do we do it now.But there are

some Indians, particularly those who have lived in the old

princely states, who are still chamchas at heart, and cannot but

bend and crawl when they see a white pro-consul or even a

white babu.

 

We were the first ones to offer our assistance to the Americans

as also our air bases, and may be other things, when America

was attacked in New York. The Americans didn't ask for our help.

They didn't even inform us about what had happened in New

York. But chamchagiri is in our blood and within hours of the

incident, we had pledged our facilities to them including possibly

military help.

 

No wonder, we are being ignored and treated with

disdain.Somehow we believed that now that the US itself had felt

the heat of terror first hand, they would appreciate our help and

President Bush would come all the way from Washington to

express his gratitude. India has suffered more from terrorists

than almost any other country in the world, and that too

continuously for the last fifty years, but the Americans are not

interested in this kind of history. What matters to them is who

can help them in their present crisis. And they know fully well that

apart from moral support, there is little that India can offer,

because in almost all matters, India herself now needs US help

and has become a US underling.

 

Pakistan, on the other hand, has played its cards very well. When

you see Pakistani spokesmen on the TV, especially on CNN, you

get the impression that these men are very smart and know what

they are doing. When the Americans circulated the so-called

proofs of bin Laden's hand in the New York attack, and Pakistan

was one of the countries that received the evidence, their foreign

office refused to say that the evidence was strong enough to

indict bin Laden atleast initially, though later on they did say that

the evidence was adequate. Throughout his interview with a BBC

reporter Pervez Musharraf was careful not to praise America too

much, and was so guarded that the reporter was too stunned to

speak.Musharraf gave the impression that he was in full control

of his house and the Americans would have to do business with

him, not somebody else. Incidentally, Pakistan has been

successful in extracting a lot of money from President Bush and

also probably other concessions, while we have come out of this

minus our reputation.

 

Our friends do not care for us; our enemies are not afraid of us.

Even Musharraf can tell us to lay off and all we can do in return is

write a long letter to Bush to tell him that our patience has its

limits. Why write to Bush? Is he our protector? Here again, the

old habits of princely states die hard. For them, the British king

was their protector and they lived in his patronage. Has India

reverted to princely statehood with the United States replacing

Britain?

 

This patronage business began the day the Vajpayee

government abandoned its party's Swadeshi policies and tried to

please the westerners by going global. Since then, foreign

investors have become our patrons, though they do not really

care for us, or our economy. A good example is Enron, which

behaved right from the start as if it was obliging us by investing

in India, and always emphasised the fact that it had powerful

friends back in Washington. Actually, Enron does not have much

of a reputation in the US and is more of a trader in electricity than

an investor. It makes more money by buying and selling

electricity in the market, that is, mainly as a speculator. And

speculators are not looked upon kindly even in capitalist

countries.

 

But New Delhi is so scared of companies like Enron,it dare not

call its bluff. It seems to have no policy at all on how to deal with

rogue companies like Enron, for fear such a policy might

antagonise the powers that be, back in Washington. This is not

how sovereign countries behave. Even Britain, which is known

worldwide as America's poodle, does not behave in such a

servile fashion.

 

The net result is that though the economy is in a mess, the

government has no cue how to deal with it. The company is

probably already in recession, with GDP growth back to low

single digits, probably no more than two or three per cent.

Industry is in such a bad state that industrial growth this year

may be negative. If so, nothing can save us. With agriculture

growth also in low single digits despite reasonably satisfactory

rains, this is going to be one of the worst years in memory, a

disastrous start to the New Millennium. We would not be in such

straits but for the government's total dependence on foreign

investors. For reasons that have never been satisfactorily

explained, the government seems to believe that foreign

investment is the key to progress in development, though

everything points the other way.Foreign investment helps if first

you help yourself. This is what China has done. China's growth

owes much more to its own efforts than foreign investors.

 

China has gross domestic savings of 42 per cent of GDP,

among the highest in the world, if not the highest. When you

have that kind of savings, growth rates are bound to be high.

Actually, investment in China is less than 40 per cent, which

means China does not really require all that foreign investment.

The country is driven by its own savings, which are nearly twice

ours. No wonder, GDP growth rates in China are also twice ours.

The key therefore is not foreign investment, as the apologists of

foreign investors believe, but China's excellent financial

management which yields such high savings rates.

 

We are now so mesmerised by foreign investors that the finance

ministry is at a loss to know how to proceed in the current crisis.

It has taken no steps so far to get the economy moving, because

it has no idea how to go about it. The United States, on the other

hand, has been drastically reducing its interest rates and has

done so seven times in the current year, almost once every

month.

 

Midterm interest rates have come down to 3 per cent a year, the

lowest in 30 years. But even then, the economy is not moving, for

interests alone do not do the trick. Investor confidence has been

shaken to a point of no return, and unless and until the Bush

government makes good on its promise to capture Osama bin

Laden and bring him to justice, consumer confidence will

continue to remain badly shaken.

 

Consumer confidence has been badly shaken in India too, but

even more than that, it is the political confidence that lies in

tatters. Indians are a proud people and do not expect their

government to grovel before foreigners. If we cannot tackle the

problem that Pakistan has been creating in Kashmir, then it is

our problem, not America's problem. All this talk about global

terrorism is bunkum. If India cannot deal with problems of

terrorism at its door, it is futile to expect America to do so for our

sake. It only means that we are not the nation we are supposed

to be, and therefore not deserving of any respect. Can such

countries ever attract any foreign investment?