Why are we giving $10 billion to the poor West?

To forgive is divine, but to forget is definitely silly. It should be as simple as that, still confusion confounds us. Who are we and what is to become of us? That has been our civilisational dilemma; precisely the stuff that through karmic inaction has led us to repeated bondage.

Yet it has not stopped us from dreaming big and having exaggerated notions about ourselves. Shining India is a recent example, but we have long regarded ourselves as a golden bird; hearing of which we were plundered and conquered regularly in our unfortunate history. Incidentally, the foreigner has not always shared this lofty opinion by us of ourselves; Al Baruni and Babur were scathing in their criticism and the Gulf Arabs still describe us as Hindi Miskin, miserable Indians. That does not mean that there were no sympathetic accounts; we have always attracted groupies. For every Naipaul, we have a Mark Twain to flaunt.

But really speaking we have habitually bent over, like a riverside reed, to celebrate the conqueror. Look at the way we revere the Mughals and the British; the first we call the Great Mughals and the other the Great Educators!

Now, at long last we might ourselves become great. Unaccustomed as we are to such a role, it is only natural that we should be puzzled as we stand poised to enter the parlour of the global greats. We think we are almost there, and to gain a definite entry we must do all that is necessary to ensure our place. Hence this desire to please the western world. In this newfound role, we feel it does not behove us to think in terms of pluses and minuses, or of the calculations of give and take; all that is petty.

We have decided to concentrate instead on the bigger picture, and by this the big boys don’t count loose change. At least that’s what we are being told. So a $10 billion here or a couple of billions there are all a part of this great status behavior.

If the encouraging noises from Obama and his band of ministers are to be believed, the already great are pleased with our performance so far. Why else should there be a visit a month to India by his cabinet ministers? Well, well, you might turn around cynically and say that they are coming here to seek orders for their industry. Otherwise they aren’t particularly enamoured of India. You might even add that Obama himself was unabashedly seeking $15billion-plus orders for various American companies during his visit. So what are we driving at, you might enquire irately?

Nothing, we wish for nothing in return, as we Indians are wont to say. It is all a part of selfless Karma! That’s why we have decided to give $10 billion to the poor West.

Now, that brings us to the forgive-and-forget theory. Remember, we were in deep financial trouble once. We weren’t exactly bankrupt and none of our banks had huge bad debts. It is just that we were slow in moving with times and needed some money to tide over a shortage. But the West was outraged. It saw a chance to rub our nose in ground all over again. For a relatively small sum of $6 billion, compared to hundreds of billions in debt relief it is now seeking, the west imposed humiliating conditions and constricting conditions on us. We were made to pledge our gold reserves as collateral; and they weren’t satisfied with mere words, they made us airlift that gold to western vaults!

We have long since forgotten all that in the mistaken belief that it was all for our good; and that the process of reforms started thereafter. But that is debatable. After all, as Manmohan Singh said in his budget speech then, it was an idea whose time had come. Rather, that time had already started to tick when Rajiv Gandhi pushed for the IT and Telecom innovation in the country. So there was no great favour that the West had done to us in those dark days of 1991. If anything, they left us feeling small and slighted.

Therefore, even as we are being generous in seeking no conditions when they are down, let us also be clear that the West is not going to spend its dollars to help us build our infrastructure. Even now, even in its desperate condition, it would want multiple dollar returns for every cent that it chooses to invest on commercial terms in India. That’s how the Big League sets the terms of its game; and that’s how they continue to stay in the big league.

A former Ambassador, the writer is a novelist and an artist
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