Author: M V Kamath
Publication: News Today
Date: January 16, 2006
URL: http://newstodaynet.com/guest/1601gu1.htm
How perceptions of India change in the western,
especially American, world! In the mid-1950s, an American journalist Harold
Isaacs wrote a very perceptive book analysing what Americans thought of India.
Titled Scratches on our Minds, the book did
a statistical analysis of what Americans thought of India and China. China,
then, was still coming out of its Civil War mould. And India had not yet completed
a decade of independence. But in comparison China surprisingly came out better.
India was the land of poverty, cows straying
on city roads, sanyasis sleeping on beds of thorn, and not a single American
had a kind word to say of India. It seldom made news in the American media
and if it did at all, it was in favourable terms.
In 50 years the American mindset has obviously
changed. In the 1950s the American establishment was perceptibly hostile towards
India and its ideology of non-alignment. Washington could care less for what
Delhi thought. It was Pakistan that mattered. How things have changed!
The visit of then President Clinton initiated
the process. And now President Bush is scheduled to visit India some time
in March. Bush's visit, when it happens, is not likely to be as flamboyant
as the one made in 2000 by the charismatic Bill Clinton who by his informality
- and noticeable disdain towards Pakistan - charmed the media, the public
and even Parliamentarians, during his sojourn in this country. But, notes
a commentator, 'make no mistake, it will be a considerably more substantial
visit that holds the potential of irreversibly transforming India-US relations'.
It would appear that the Bush Administration
is resolute about taking the nuclear deal signed between India and the US
- over which there is such a controversy - to its logical conclusion with
political observers believing that the President has 'the political will and
determination to carry Congress with him'. There are increasing signs of the
flowering of Indo-US friendship. It may not be a big step but only the other
day President Bush signed into law a Bill naming a post office in California
after Dillip Singh Saund, the first American of Indian origin to be elected
to the US Congress way back in 1956. But what is interesting is that the New
York Times has taken a special interest in India. Starting on the paper's
front page on four consecutive days (4, 5, 6 and 7 December), there appeared
a series of articles written by the paper's correspondent on the six-lane
US-style superhighway linking the four major metros of the country.
Accompanying the correspondent on his 3,625
mile journey was a photographer and together they threw light on the good
things the super highway had brought in its wake. To say the least, this is
a wholly new development. It also reflects America's increasing - and positive
- interest in India and its progress in the last decade. India is drawing
a bumper crop of headlines, most of them supportive.
The first article in the four-part series
noted that 'goddess versus man, superstition versus progress, the people versus
the State - mile by mile India is struggling to modernise its national highway
system, in the process, itself'.
The article said the government's determination
to widen and pave some 40,000 miles of narrow, decrepit national highway 'amounts
to the most ambitious infrastructure project since independence in 1947 and
the British building of the sub-continent's railway network the century before'.
The article said that while the reform process
has been fitful, leaving the country trailing its neighbour and rival China,
'India has turned the corner. India, it said, has 'a new identity, thanks
to outsourcing, as back office to the world'. The third article noted that
the domestic hunger for goods has become an important engine for Indian economy
that still lags in exports. After decades of socialist deprivation, when consumer
goods were so limited that refrigerators were given pride of place in living
rooms, Indians, said the article, 'have even more wares to spend money on
like cellphones, air-conditioners and washing machines, Botox, sushi and Louis
Vuitton bags and, perhaps the biggest status symbol of all, cars'. Indians,
said the article, are discovering in cars everything Americans did: 'control
and freedom, privacy and privilege, speed and status'. But the article also
sadly noted that all this bespeaks a larger and troubling shift, quoting a
former Minister Major General B C Khanduri as saying that the value system
of Indians was getting over, with Indians 'gradually increasing everyone for
himself'.
The fourth article pointed out that in 1991
India had 23 cities with one million or more people while a decade later the
number of such cities had increased to 35, changing the very nature of India,
not only in financial terms but also in psychic terms. It said: 'Less visible
than the heated consumerism or western sexual habits changing India, this
slow churning may be more profound and, for a country weaned on the virtues
of village life, more wrenching'. It is a profound observation. What, additionally,
has rising income done to Indians? This the correspondent dealt in his second
and thought-provoking article. It was all very well for India to build its
Golden Triangle but its national highways, it said, had become a conduit for
the AIDS virus, passed by prostitutes and truckers who pay them and bring
home to unsuspecting wives the newest scourge.
India's entry into the global economy had
its bitter side. The national highway project allowed roads to carry more
freight than ever before, but said the article wisely, 'some things are better
left uncarried'. And it added: 'India's entry into the global economy over
the past 15 years may also be furthering the spread of AIDS. With rising income,
men have more money for sex; poor women see selling sex as their only access
to the new prosperity. Western influences are liberalising Indian sexual mores.
In response, cultural protectionists are refusing to allow even the national
conversation about AIDS to reflect the changing reality...'
What is significant is the new interest in
India, as well as the concern expressed. This is itself is a new development.
India is no longer seen as a land of stray cows wandering aimlessly on urban
streets and beggar- children harassing passing strangers. Perceptions about
India are undergoing rapid changes in the western world. What is intriguing
is that little thought to this is being given by the Indian media and even
less by social activists. Towards what goal is India moving? Is the impact
of globalisation and modernity on Indian society a healthy development? Isn't
that something worth thinking over? That is something for over political parties
to ponder over.
