We And The Big Uneasy

Ever since the Bush administration's decision to forge a special relationship with India, New Delhi has been looking for opportunities to cement it further. It may even be why India rushed in with an offer of $5 million worth of aid for Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans. But if that was indeed the motive, then New Delhi has made a monumental blunder. Speaking to a BBC interviewer last Thursday, Stephen Cohen, Brookings Institution fellow and long-time friend of India, made it clear that the numerous offers of aid from Third World countries had only angered most Americans—the American Right in particular—because all it did was to rub salt into their wounds. He went on to point out that in their current frame of mind, most Americans regarded these as deliberate acts designed to remind them of the hollowness of their pretensions to rule the world, cutting them down to size. This was presumably not New Delhi's intention, but the danger of its offer being misconstrued should have been foreseen.

American sensitivity arises from many sources—its five-decade hegemony over the western world, now very largely lost; its belief in its own exceptionalism and its manifest destiny to civilise and democratise the world. But none of these would have been challenged had the Bush administration not bungled the handling of Katrina in almost every way that can be imagined. Katrina's ferocity had been accurately measured and its path charted at least three full days before it actually struck. Both the state and federal governments therefore had three days of warning to prepare for every contingency. But Washington did absolutely nothing and the state government limited itself to urging all residents of New Orleans to leave before the storm struck.

Somehow, it struck neither Washington nor Baton Rouge that a sizeable proportion of the American population is too poor to own a car in which to drive away. An even larger proportion is too poor to leave its home and live for an indefinite number of days in another city at their own expense. Finally, the administration somehow forgot that there were old people in institutions and critically ill patients in every hospital who could not be moved even with the will and the means. Had the army been asked to move in and evacuate the poor and the ill before the hurricane struck—had the federal and state governments established reception centres for those who could not find or afford private accommodation outside New Orleans—the dead would have numbered at most a few score and not the thousands that it is now.

But none of this was done. Instead, a federal government that does not mind spending $300 billion to invade, occupy and destroy a country on the basis of a mere hunch sat paralysed like a deer caught in the headlights as nemesis approached. The first army rescue teams rolled into New Orleans full five days after the hurricane struck. By then, scores of sick patients had died; others were near starvation and had been exposed to contaminated water for days, and looters were having a field day taking whatever they wanted from abandoned homes.

The extensive television coverage of the survivors also exposed, mercilessly, the seamy underbelly of American society. With very few exceptions, all survivors interviewed by BBC and CNN were African Americans. These are the people among whom unemployment is the highest, salaries hardly breach the poverty line. They are the ones who couldn't get away. They are also the ones about whom there is a conspiracy of silence throughout the country. Can viewers in faraway Asia and Africa be blamed if they jumped to the conclusion that the authorities did not take precautions because those involved were African American?

New Delhi should have thought of America's sensibilities before it offeredaid. But what is far more difficult to understand is the mindset of officials who sit tight on their fists while thousands die of starvation and disease in Darfur and a famine brews up in Niger, but leap precipitately to offer help to a country that already has too much of everything except the compassion needed to put it to good use.

Indeed, India's pretensions of being first a regional power and now an 'emerging superpower' become laughable when one puts them beside the smallness of its self-image. This was apparent throughout its now abortive campaign to secure a permanent seat on the Security Council. All its arguments were couched in terms of what it deserved as the second largest country and the largest democracy in the world. Not once did it make its pitch on the basis of what it could do for the less fortunate peoples of the world.

India is in an ideal position to exercise such positive diplomacy. It has an abundance of food in its warehouses; its drugs are 30-40 times cheaper than those sold in industrialised countries. By using both to alleviate misery and disease, India can, over a decade, win so many friends and exercise such a powerful influence on world opinion that a seat on the Security Council will come to it almost by default. Fawning on a superpower and inadvertently highlighting its deficiencies is not the best way to win friends and influence people.