Opinion What Obama can learn from his visit
As someone who grew up in India at a time when there was hysterical paranoia about all things American,I have found the breathless excitement over President Obamas visit most interesting.
As someone who grew up in India at a time when there was hysterical paranoia about all things American,I have found the breathless excitement over President Obamas visit most interesting. It is a measure of how much India has changed that not even our communist parties are exhibiting any signs of hysteria this time. When George Bush came visiting,they did their best to ensure that the American President noticed that even if the Soviet Union was no longer around,there were people in India who remained committed to its memory and to Stalinism. Then they tried to bring Dr Manmohan Singhs first government down on the absurd grounds that by signing his nuclear agreement with President Bush he had turned India into a slave of America. They quickly found how out of touch they were with the public mood when last years general election reduced their strength in Parliament by nearly half.
Considering the aggressive anti-Americanism on which Indians of my generation were bred,it is extraordinary how much India has changed. When I got my first job in Indian journalism with The Statesman newspaper in the summer of 1975,it was impossible to meet either politicians or journalists in Delhi who were not anti-American to some degree. On account of some very bad timing,my job began two months before Mrs Gandhi declared a state of Emergency and imposed press censorship. For me,personally this meant that I realised instantly that the only kind of journalism I was interested in was the political kind.
As someone who was not drawn to Marxist ideas,economic or political,and was not impressed by either China or the Soviet Union,I remember being constantly amazed by the number of intellectuals who saw capitalism as evil and America as proof of this.
It now turns out,thanks to revelations made by former KGB spymaster,Vasili Mitrokhin in his Mitrokhin Archives that some of these so-called intellectuals were paid to spout Soviet propaganda. But,mostly,we believed our own propaganda that Indira Gandhi sold us with her passionate conviction that the CIA was determined to break India up. She was obsessed with this idea and held the foreign hand responsible for nearly everything that went wrong. She got away with some very bad economic and political policies by blaming everything on the foreign hand,which is how she liked describing the CIA.
The irony is that we need to worry much more about American policies in South Asia now than we ever did then. Unless President Obama can find some way of making Pakistans Generals stop supporting groups like the Lashkar-e-Toiba,there is every likelihood that some jihadi group some time soon will craft a nuclear 26/11. David Headley has revealed that there were plans to attack a nuclear facility in Mumbai so please do not think I am being alarmist. Our problem is that President Obama needs to continue financing Pakistan because he needs Pakistani troops to deal with his terrorist problems. So American money finances terrorism against India in the hope that this will persuade Pakistans Generals to eliminate the terrorist groups that work against the United States. Pakistan has so far shown that it is a dishonest ally but the alternative is to let Pakistan fail as a state and be taken over,almost certainly,by the jihadis.
This is Indias ultimate nightmare but we do not believe that giving Pakistan billions of dollars every year since 9/11 has so far brought us any closer to winning the global war on Islamist terrorism. In India,we had hoped that when Barack Obama became President,he could come up with some new ideas. So far the only new idea he has come up with is trying to win Muslim countries over by being extra nice to them. He bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia and then there was that speech in Cairo last year that sought to win hearts and minds.
Has this niceness worked? Not in South Asia. In Afghanistan,the war against the jihadis has gone so badly that Hamid Karzai is now trying to make a deal with the Taliban even if it means that Afghan women will be treated like dirt once more. In Pakistan,Army Headquarters remains in charge of foreign policy and has shown no sign of controlling the violent fanatics it spawned. Not just those that threaten India but those that are killing American soldiers in Afghanistan. If there was ever a time in India that we needed to worry about the foreign hand,that time is now. We can only hope that by coming to India,President Obama gets a clearer idea of what a dangerous place South Asia has become on account of American policies that have gone so very,very wrong.
Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter @ tavleen_singh
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