The English patient

Recent years,however, have seen the emergence of a dangerous world view where the West, particularly the US, is now looking at Asia as two, or probably even three, distinct continents. The first, the far and south-east, is the real Asia, with strong, growing economies, robust governments, driven by pragmatic self-interest and blessed with remarkable ethnic, religious and linguistic homogeneity. China belongs here though this view is now being challenged by some Western strategists. To its west is South Asia: overcrowded, poor, unstable, insecure, nuclear armed, democratic but dangerous. Further west, you are looking at the newest Asia, comprising the Arab, Persian, Turkic and Central Asian cultures. You could call it the Islamic Asia. How do you describe South Asia then?

Let me suggest a new definition: English-speaking Asia. Our governments, businesses, elites, scientists, courts and banks all use the English language. We have tended to follow old British patterns of laws, governance, even the regimental organisationof our armies. We are some of the very few Western-style democracies in Asia. But how does this definition help South Asia? Or India? And why should we bother, anyway?

It is time we began worrying about this balkanisation of Asia in the emerging Western world view. There is a Smart Asia in the east and a Screwed-up Asia to the west, and no prizes for guessing where we belong. As this new continental drift takes the richer Asia away, we need to take note of a distinct process of its de-Asianisation. The entry of the US, Peru and Mexico to the APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) grouping is an example. At the same time, developed nations like Australia and New Zealand are being widely coopted into this Smart Asia. Just last week when the Indonesians demanded greater Asian participation in the UN forces in East Timor, Kofi Annan was quick to assert that Australia was actually an Asian country.

The consequences of such a divide will be quite disastrous for us. Already, the Western world has more or lessforgotten all about Africa, except the prosperous, industrialised salt-and-pepper enclave at its southern tip. We now risk getting isolated, ignored and even ostracised as the troublesome, overpopulated, chaotic region that weighs down the rest of Asia. Already, even more than the Western world, the east Asians look at us exactly this way.

They sometimes do not hide embarrassment over the fact that they belong to the same continent. This, when we have now been gloating for more than a year over how prudently and smartly we managed our economies while the overspeeding south-easterners went into deep recession. The bitter truth is, we still look at our 6 per cent growth rates while South Korea has left a bad year of negative 6 per cent behind to log 9.5 per cent this year. From Japan to Thailand we are now looking at remarkable turnaround stories. No surprise then that a grateful Kim Dae Jung, the South Korean president, recently sent a gift-wrapped box of prime quality ginseng to the IMF representative atSeoul.

The truth is, given this look-east obsession in the West, it would have been impossible for us to attract any attention at all but for the fear of this region’s nuclear instability. To that extent, both India and Pakistan have a joint stake in this nuclear blackmail of the world as the only justification for international relevance.

It is for this reason that India needs to reassess its Asian and global, equations again immediately. We cannot merely ride Sinopophobia to international stature and relevance as we tried to do after Pokharan-II. Just as the West needs to understand that there is an Asia west of China that matters, we need to reach out to an Asia east of China. There is a lot to learn from the economic miracles in the cultures closer home. Just because they do not speak English, we tend to think of them as more foreign than the Americans. This is a grave error.

These are interesting times as the West is currently caught up in a reassessment of China even as it celebrates the economicrevival in the east. This process will gather momentum as the China-Taiwan relations deteriorate. The strategic community has been debating furiously a provocative new thesis from Gerald Segal, the renowned East Asia expert and Sinosceptic, who argues that China gets exaggerated attention and respect just because it has mastered the art of diplomatic theatre (`Does China Matter?’ Foreign Affairs, Sept/Oct 1999). More significantly, he underlines the fact that "India’s cultural ties with the Atlantic world have always been greater than China’s and India’s wildly heterogeneous society has always been more accessible to the West."

Let’s now return to the point we made earlier on describing our region as the English-speaking Asia? Culturally and practically, that should make it easier for us to relate to the West and vice versa. But have we even leveraged that strength well enough? We, on the other hand, blew a lot of money at a tamasha in London last week promoting the truly fantastic notion of Hindi as aninternational link language. If Asian nations like Japan and South Korea could have industrialised while sticking to their native languages, why can’t we Indians? So goes the argument. But it is outdated by a decade.

How remarkable that we should wish to promote our native tongue as an international language just when the pragmatic east is moving rapidly in the opposite direction! At a gathering of Asian editors at Seoul last week, Dr Eisuke Sakakibara, former Japanese vice-minister of finance for international affairs and one of the high priests of globalisation, talked about the arrival of cybercapitalism, when all business around the world will be done on web. Financial markets, bonds, commodities, retailing will all be on the Net and the computers, basically, know only one language: English. He talked of how public opinion is being built in Japan to teach more people English.

Ditto for Korea. Ditto for China. And here we, in typical Indian fashion, are moving the other way, abandoning the one strengthwe have vis-a-vis our more successful eastern neighbours. If we wish to be a global cyber power, if we want a larger share of the world markets, if we want greater political relevance and if we want to survive the competition with the smarter Asia, we could start out with a crash programme to promote English, not Hindi.