Tale of Two Powers

Times ^ | Excerpts

[Irreverent]

IS IT RESURGENCE OF POWER BY PROXY-II

Bush stumbles on a trump card in a dangerous world – India
Simon Jenkins

George Bush’s visit to India was such good news that it is hard to know where to begin. No, he was not greeted with garlands, dancing girls and hippies chanting peace and love. There were no pictures of him and Laura by the Taj Mahal, though Bush did say “we pledge to be invited back”. This was India modern not exotic. The only chanting was from chief executives waving contracts and the only tigers were generals patrolling fast breeder reactors.

Bush came to Delhi as the nearest he gets to a supplicant. Despite its Hindu majority, India has one of the world’s largest Muslim populations, it is a democracy, a nuclear power, an emerging global trader. Indians have watched America’s (and Britain’s) cringeing appeasement of Chinese dictatorship and wondered how long the hypocrisy would last.

The West’s two “beacon democracies” in Asia — Iraq and Afghanistan — are beacons only of instability. Bush’s two regional allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, are exemplars of authoritarianism. In visiting Pakistan yesterday the president honoured a military regime that is an epicentre of regional terrorism and nuclear proliferation. Democratic, English-speaking, freedom-guarding India, the one country Washington should crave as an ally, had been ignored.

That neglect is now over. The reason is not just that India is looking as rich as China, but that Washington is badly in need of Asian friends. With American foreign policy in disarray the balance of world power is shifting by the year. America and Europe are facing oil starvation and population attrition. Energy-rich Latin America is moving leftwards. Russia is turning in on itself in an agony of reconstruction. The once-vaunted tiger economies of the Far East have relapsed as they start to consume their own growth. The giants of China and India are flexing their muscles as if awakening from a long sleep.

Bush’s Indian visit was part hard, part soft. The deal on nuclear exchange is a flagrant breach of the non-proliferation treaty (NPT). America is rewarding India for not signing it. India is left in unmonitored control of its eight fast breeder reactors yet with American supplies to maintain its 14 civilian stations. Nobody will control transfers from the one to the other.

This indulgence goes beyond even America’s milder appeasement of the nuclear programmes of Israel and Pakistan. It enables India to emerge as what Manmohan Singh, its prime minister, calls “a full member of the new nuclear world order”. This renders the NPT defunct.

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British experience in India was one of the longest and most significant in the Imperial story. Beginning with the formation of the East India Company under Elizabeth I in 1600, it only ended formally and officially in 1947.

India has always retained an exotic, faraway and seductively oriental appeal in the British imagination; the country was also the source of vast profits and a haven for investment; the Indian Army was an invaluable and free (at least for British taxpayers) extra resource for the British armed forces, allowing Britain to avoid Continental-style conscription until the crisis of 1916, as well as enabling it to punch above its weight in international military terms. Above all, India symbolized Imperial grandeur, and seemed to underwrite Britain’s superpower status for most of the nineteenth century and some of the twentieth – as the Viceroy Lord Curzon expressed it, a touch dramatically, in 1901, “As long as we rule India, we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it we shall drop straightway to a third rate power”.

(Excerpts of two Articles from The Times, London)

[NZerFromHK]

Simon Jenkins has always been quite ambivalent about the United States. He is quite a quintessential Whitehall (British Foreign Office) establishment voice (some would say High Tory, but others say he's wet).