By Kollengode S Venkataraman, Written in April 2006
Indo-US relations have cozied up for the long haul irrespective of who governs in the US or in India. For the first time, two successive US presidents, one Democrat (Clinton) and the other Republican (Bush), visited India. In his address to Asia Society in Washington, DC in late February before his South Asia trip, and later in addressing a pre-screened audience from Purana Qila (Old Fort) in New Delhi in March, President Bush was waxing about India — about its diversity, a Sikh prime minister and a Muslim president, multiethnic and multireligious social fabric; India’s burgeoning middle class (300 million and counting); India’s democratic ethos (even with all its cronyism from top to bottom; rich history, arts;
India’s independent accomplishments in the medicine, agriculture, technology, not to speak of the contribution of the 2-million-strong people Indian descent in the US in healthcare, science c technology, research, teaching, and entrepreneurship.
The condescension of the orthodox and conservative US political establishment typified by the Kissinger-Nixon interactions towards India is a faded memory now.
The conservative political establishment in the US knows that the Sole-Super-Power status of the US is not only unstable, but also untenable. In Greek and Indian mythologies, we read about powerful overweening kings becoming overconfident – remember “The sun never sets in the British empire”? – only to be destroyed by their own hubris. So, the unbridled Superpower status of the US will be short-lived.
EU and Japan have aging populations, and are only too aware of the consequence of their colonizing past before WW II.
The other power center emerging is the totalitarian China. China, with its 1.2 billion people population has already become a political, economic and cultural fulcrum in Asia Pacific and Southeast Asia. China also has to avenge the humiliation it suffered in the 19th and 20th centuries at the hands of Japanese and European colonizers.
It is this context that is forcing US traditional conservatives to forge closer relationship with the democratic India with the hope to checkmate China, which pits one Asian country against another.
Already, China’s inroads into the US are formidable, going beyond Wal-Mart and consumer electronics. It is sustaining (partially, in any case the low interest rates and the real estate boom here by pumping billions of dollars into US treasuries. So, as China seeks world domination, US tries to rope in India within its sphere of influence to check
With its 8% annual growth for years into the future, the equally populous India is the natural choice for the US to counterweigh China, even though India lags behind China on many measures. But this alliance has its own risks for US and India. The new alliance is bound to make Pakistan, which sees India as its archrival and enemy, very uncomfortable. This is because US has been Pakistan’s ally through several dictatorships. The estranged Pakistan is bound get closer to China, Pakistan’s all-weather friend. This has the potential to disturb regional stability.
However, the beneficiaries of India’s economic boom are by and large India’s middle class. The shining part of India (~30% of the population, or 300 million) shines so brightly that it blinds the other part of India that is left behind (around 750 million), which has no chance of catching up with the shining India. The situation is analogous in China.
In the new paradigm of the globalized economy, the threat to global peace and stability may not be aggression from neighbors and enemies from far off lands, but from inside, triggered by the huge inequities in access to resources towards quality education, health care, communication and transportation between the affluent and those left behind. In India and China, the appalling disparity in every quantifiable measure between the affluent and the poor hits every first-time visitor.
The disparity in the quality of primary and secondary schooling in India between the rich and the poor is scandalous. The Indian middle class buys relatively inexpensive high-quality primary and secondary education from private schools for their children, giving its kids enormous advantage when they compete for admission into highly subsidized university education. The kids from these two social classes in India grow up in two entirely different Indias, with the two Indias not having much in common socially, economically, culturally, even emotionally.
Another is in healthcare. (See Sherry Narang’s article elsewhere). While most of the modern medical care is available in urban India, they are way beyond the reach of low-income Indians.
Even in the US nearly 15% of the population — or 45 million people – mostly young and poor, don’t have health insurance. The personal savings of citizens in the US are among the lowest in the world. The cost of college education is way beyond the paying capacities of average students from Low-income families. One by one, large American corporations are withdrawing their pension plans for new employees. So, if the trend continues, in 30 years, Social Security checks would be the main source of income for many future retirees in their autumn years. To this, if you also add the macro consequences of the US trade and budget deficits piling year after year, even without a degree in economics, one can see the general direction we are heading.
The educated Indian Middle class cannot even relate to the low- income people in their midst. So, in the one-man-one-vote Indian democracy, grass-root political leadership comes not from the educated middle class, but from the disenfranchised classes. This dichotomy has serious consequences for India’s social stability.
So, ultimately India’s strength will be decided not by how well its anglicized sector services the needs of the industrialized West, and not by the purchasing power of its affluent middle class. It will be determined by how it reconciles the ethically indefensible huge inequities among its citizens. The Indian middle class in its pursuit for personal success does not seem to recognize these issues.
And MNCs (multinational corporations), in their desire to expand their markets, only look at the 300-million Indian middle class, “larger than the entire population of the U.S”
As President Bush put it in his Asia Society address. The yearnings of the 700+ million disenfranchised Indians are not their concern. This trend is repeated globally with varying degrees.
While nations form alliances for countering real and perceived external threats in traditional ways, their real threats would be internal strife caused by the widening inequity between the well-connected and the disenfranchised. All the global alliances and the most sophisticated weapon systems would be of no use against this threat. END