Author: Ashok Malik
Publication: Yahoo News
Date: June 8, 2009
URL: http://in.news.yahoo.com/32/20090608/1049/top-no-longer-out-of-focus.html
In recent weeks, the random violence against
Indians in Australia has been remarkable not just for what is happening Down
Under but also for how it is being played out up here. The attacks on Indians
are, of course, deeply disquieting.
Whatever the initial claims of the Melbourne
police - its description of the occurrences as 'opportunistic activity' was,
well, inopportune - the fact is that at least some Indians have been targeted
because of skin colour. The Australian government has moved into damage control
mode.
It has been pressured by New Delhi. Canberra
also senses that if the phenomenon persists or expands, it could acquire a
life of its own.
Perceptions of Australian racism, more than
any active racism per se, could become an even bigger story, and a public
relations disaster across south and southeast Asia. For a country so dependent
on foreign markets - commodity buyers, tourists, overseas students - this
is non-negotiable.
Education is Australia's third largest export
industry and it cannot afford an impression that it is an unsafe destination.
Indeed, the surge in Indian enrolment in Australian universities began in
2002-03, primarily because they were seen as safer and more accessible in
contrast to post-9/11 American campuses.
It is interesting how both Indian ministers
and their Australian counterparts were forced into breathless reaction by
the Indian media's coverage of the 'racism story'. This represents a phenomenon
at once noteworthy and somewhat worrying.
It establishes that news channels are democratising
not just India's domestic political debate, but also its global attitudes.
Is incensed middle-class opinion, provoked by overdone television news packages,
emerging as a new source of foreign policy? It is a piquant question.
More than whether this is good or bad, one
must recognise that it is there. There is a broader point here.
Whether in social, economic or cultural spheres,
India's engagement with the rest of the world has ballooned in the past 15-odd
years. Take education.
Fifty years ago, a small elite sent its children
to Oxbridge. Twenty-five years ago, a slightly bigger upper middle class sent
its children to the US. These groups were English-speaking and often had prior
experience - or at least knowledge - of the countries they were going to.
In contrast, many of the students who have
suffered in Australia are from smaller towns and humbler backgrounds, with
parents who have struggled and saved to pay for their education. A substantial
number have left their state, let alone their country, for the first time.
Till even the early 1990s, India meeting the
world largely meant bureaucrats in bandgalas shaking hands with bureaucrats
in suits. Today, it has many dimensions - business-to-business, tourist-to-host,
student-to-university.
In a wider reckoning, India finds itself a
bigger economic and political power than at any time in its independent history.
Yet, the intellectual tools and mechanisms that shape its worldview, its foreign
policy and its sense of strategy remain rooted in another era.
Cogitation on external relations is still
the domain of a small Delhi club of retired diplomats and generals, with a
few analysts and journalists thrown in. There is obviously a gap between the
demographic groups - whether they be Jalandhar families that send their sons
to Melbourne University, or Pune-based techies who write software programmes
for clients in Minnesota - that are driving India's engagement with the world,
and the ivory-tower elite that has arrogated foreign policy thinking to itself.
This gulf is untenable. In 10 years or so,
it will severely contract and a new equilibrium will inevitably set in.
Till that happens, however, there will be
a degree of turmoil and confusion and the Australia episode is a sampler.
As a society's relationship with the world moves beyond the realm of government,
it is calibrated by new intellectual mechanisms - think-tanks, civil society
institutions, academia and so on.
They complement, even supplant, government
groupthink. The problem is that India lacks this infrastructure.
It has scarcely any independent think-tanks.
Its higher education is so closed and forbidding that foreigners can enter
only at their peril.
Instead, it has retired pundits who speak
a language unintelligible to the proverbial family in Jalandhar. This vacuum
is filled by television.
Other countries have think-tanks, India makes
do with prime-time chat shows. The problem with the medium is that it has
only one, reductionist template - good versus bad, right versus left, BJP
versus Congress.
When it extends this framework to explaining
the rest of the planet, the effects are hair-raising.On one television show,
an anchor said Australia had been preceded by attacks on Indians in Germany,
the United States and Idi Amin's Uganda and wondered why the world hated Indians.
This is a happy universe of nuance-free non
sequiturs. Even so, India's television-propelled middle class opinion is a
clear and present reality.
It will shape discourse that will hassle and
harangue governments, demand instant action and colourful rhetoric. In some
senses, the drama outside the Delhi airport during the IC-814 hijack was a
teaser trailer.
This is the new India. Now even Kevin Rudd
knows that.
