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Journalism of Courage
My favourite professor in the security and international relations business has for long banned the use of two expressions in his classes: superpower8217; and the Third World8217;.
One reason he has done it, he says, is because being the head of the department, he can get away with it. Second, they blur our judgment, blind our vision and create a simplistic worldview that blights creative thinking.
Which, precisely, is the problem with the Indian policymakers; and the reason why they feel so smug with India8217;s self-styled leadership of the Third World while at the same time wishing to join the big power league.
Nehruvian Socialism and mixed economy may have become unfashionable in an era when even dyed-in-the-wool socialists recite the reform raga. But Third Worldism has proved to be a much more durable dogma and with disastrous results for India. With the solitary, and honourable, exception of P. V. Narasimha Rao, no Indian Prime Minister has had the courage to question it. Deve Gowda, of course, could be another exception, though of a different kind: his intellectual horizon didn8217;t go beyond Karnataka.
That is why Gujral8217;s reason for choosing a Marco Polo-like route to New York via Tanzania was not exactly to help his entourage accumulate more frequent-flier miles. He wanted to make a political statement by making his first stop as Prime Minister outside South Asia in Africa. The 36-hour halt resulted in a massively complicated itinerary and extra hours of flying.Since he is visiting South Africa now, why couldn8217;t he have combined this with his New York trip instead? The answer simply is that South Africa is relatively prosperous and successful. Gujral needed to make a failed and poverty-stricken African nation his first stop.
Ideas like Third Worldism and non-alignment in the post-Cold War world are not only outdated but dangerous for a country with any pretensions to the great power status. Not only do these mantras blur our judgment, blind our vision and blight creative thinking, they also condemn us to irrelevance in a world where much of what used to be Third World notably China, the far-east and the middle-east has already left us far behind. Desperate to find an audience and to keep the old fantasy alive we bend over backwards to reach out to the part of the world so hopeless that even we have left it behind. You can8217;t lead this rabble and yet expect the world to treat you as an equal.
Our Gandhian fixations leave us shy of claiming the status of a nuclear power. A per capita income of 400 or thereabouts, nearly half of Maldives8217;, a country with a capital so small even I can jog across it in exactly ten minutes, isn8217;t what qualifies a nation to the big league. But we think it is our birth right as we are large, democratic and morally superior. We are incapable of realising that the leadership of the Third World, or the rabble that is now left in its name, does not bring any respect in a tough world. We won8217;t even learn from the way the Third World sees us. Or from the pattern of voting at the UN on several issues crucial to India, including the CTBT.
Our tragedy is that long after it was won and settled we still search for a place on the world stage in terms of Cold War formulations. Third World, G-77, NAM, South-South Cooperation were all curiosities conjured up by the eastern bloc Cold Warriors. If you were rich or successful, you had to be imperialist. And to fight this imperialism, the deputy superpower built the-se exclusive, non-aligned8217; clubs consisting of some of the world8217;s worst despots, tyrants, thieves and thugs. They led client states and banana republics, usually to their ruin and we, in India, were so impressed that we went on a spree naming roads in our Capital after them. How many of our Third World friends8217; voted for us in our humiliating defeat by Japan for a non-permanent Security Council seat last year?
Now the Prime Minister asserts that India won8217;t beg for a permanent seat at the UN Security Council and goes around doing precisely that. So ludicrous and wasteful is this aswamedha in kaliyug, so premature and presumptuous that even senior MEA officials find it hard to describe the conquest8217; of yet another non-aligned8217; capital without a smirk.
We believe that we have the right to lecture the whole world and worse, that the world must listen when we talk. We believe also that our poverty is no curse, it is actually an advantage, and flaunt it in the manner of a leper thrusting his disfigured limbs into the window of your Opel Astra. The world must appreciate that we have sustained our democracy despite our poverty and must not ask unfair questions like whether we have actually given democracy a bad name by giving abject poverty such a long run. We are so superior, so self-righteous and so stuffed we even believe we can acquire our quot;rightfulquot; superpower status through an OBC seat in a restructured Security Council.
The reality is that a nation cannot hope to become a big power unless it can begin to think, evolve and act like one 8212; entirely in self interest. Our foreign policy has sometimes been pro-non alignment, anti-imperialist, pro-Palestinian, anti-zionist, pro-African, anti-apartheid, pro-Third World, anti-West and so on but never unabashedly pro-Indian. No wonder we don8217;t even know where we belong in today8217;s world. If we find it difficult to learn from fellow Asians, notably the Chinese, we can at least follow our favourite anti-imperialist warrior Nelson Mandela. The moment he took over as president, his South Africa became a westernised, prosperous country following the western agenda that worked in its best interest and ruthlessly opposing old Third World fraternity 8212; notably India on the nuclear issue 8212; on questions of crucial national interest.
South Africa now is a world power and looks the world confidently in the eye. We are so inferiorly complexed we want to strap a chastity belt around our Prime Minister8217;s waist when he meets Bill Clinton or Nawaz Sharif. No wonder the more we tout our world power status, the more desperately we scrounge for support among the 8212; fortunately 8212; shrinking Third World. When the world, the rich as well as the basket cases, snigger at us, so blinded are we by dogma that we can8217;t even see why.
