Why Do Indians Seek Acceptance From the West?
A few days ago I read an article that said that US President Barack Obama considers India and the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as “part of his family”. He reportedly made these statements to Sant Chatwal (who according to Indian newspaper reports was an “eminent Indian-American leader”). Almost every media outlet in India reported this story. Let me clarify a few things. First of all Sant Chatwal is not an eminent Indian-American leader. Very few Indians who live in America know of him. He is actually a businessman who has contributed in the past to the Democratic Party in the United States. The list of allegations against him by various US government agencies and Indian banks is too long to list here (in 2001 the US Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan discharged Chatwal as bankrupt after a six-year case involving debts of more than $100 million, including more than $30 million in taxes owed to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), New York City, several states and $22 million owed to three banks owned by the government of India). Why is the media in India reporting news without doing a simple background check?
But what concerned me the most is why are Obama’s feelings about India and our Prime Minister important to the Indian public? Would the media cover this news the same way if the leader of Bangladesh said the same things about India? A friend of mine recently showed me a video on You Tube in which President Obama sends his Diwali greetings to the Indian people. According to my friend this shows that Obama cares and things about the Indian people. I do not quite agree. US Foreign Grants and Credits in 2007 for India were $46 million (India is a country of 1.1 billion people most of whom live under very poor conditions). For Israel the aid amount was $2.3 billion (Israel is a developed country and has just 7.5 million people). Numbers like these are all I need to know about what countries like the United States really think about India. Diwali greetings and You Tube videos are just window dressing.
The Indian President who is currently visiting the United Kingdom said in an interview that UK and India are natural allies. Really? What does India and United Kingdom have in common other than the fact that United Kingdom and its trading companies (particularly the East India Company) ruled India for about 300 years? In the 300 years India went from a prosperous society to one that is now known all over the world for its abject poverty (there is a popular phrase that says that the only reason Briton left India was that there was nothing left to steal).
The problems left behind when Britain left are still some of the key problems that India is grappling with even now and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future (this includes boundary issues with China, Pakistan, Burma and Bangladesh and partitioning India into India and Pakistan on religious basis). Just like United States and India, United Kingdom and India have many common foreign policy objectives (containing and battling Islamic terrorism is one of them). But this does not mean that we are natural allies. France and Briton are allies. A French or British citizen can travel, work, live or retire in either country without the government getting involved. An Indian citizen however rich or educated he or she might be cannot step on British soil without getting a visa (which in most cases will be rejected if you tell them that you are going there to work or retire). So how can Briton or any other Western country be our natural ally when they do not want us there?
India’s natural allies are Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan. We have a lot of things in common with these countries (shared culture, religion, languages and history). There will be short term problems but these countries are more likely to be our friends in the long term than the United Kingdom or the United States of America. The sooner we realize this the better off we will all be. I sometimes wonder what would American Presidents do if there were no problems between India and Pakistan or Pakistan and Afghanistan or Israel and Palestine? The American presidents job would be boring and nobody would be there to hear his speeches.
Many Indians still carry the hangover from the past when we were a British colony. For them it is not enough to achieve great goals but it is equally important to make sure that our former masters and their allies also acknowledge these achievements (my friend once told me that Indians are like coconuts, brown on the outside but white on the inside). India is a country that has a history and tradition that has very few parallels in the world. Fortunately we live at a time when the Indian economy is one of the engines of the world. This has been achieved mainly due to the hard work put in by Indians in India and all over the world. Nobody handed anything to us but we earned every penny of it. It is important for us to keep the ball rolling. Let us not waste out time waiting for empty compliments from others and let us not demean ourselves or our founding fathers by offering empty compliments to our former masters. Those days are over.
Related posts:
- Indians are weak in Science and Innovation
- Indians Morally Superior to Westerners?
- Indians Support of Democrats in America Defies Logic
- India and China: Contest or Friendship of the Century?
- No Preconditions for Talks with Pakistan but …
Category: Culture & Religion