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| July 17, 2000 | ||
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ANGLE The Great Kick of Fiji To avert more humiliations India must nurture an imperial vision By Swapan Dasgupta
In retrospect, global inaction may prove a blessing in disguise. When the Ugandan Asians arrived in Heathrow in 1973, arrogant pundits dubbed them Britain's new under lass. Today, far from being a drag on the ruins of a welfare state, the Ugandan Asians are one of the most productive communities in Britain. They have thrived in a free market and the rule of law. If Australia is wise and far-sighted, the same experiment can be successfully replicated. Fiji can become the ethnographic museum of Speight's dream, like Uganda became under Idi Amin and Zimbabwe may yet become under Robert Mugabe, and yesterday's indentured labour can get on with what they always wanted to do: work hard and prosper. Forging a humane exit policy for Fiji's beleaguered Indian community should, ideally, form an important item of the agenda in the talks Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee will have with his Australian counterpart John Howard this week in Delhi. Of course, it won't because that would, in effect, be seen as a cop-out and a tacit acceptance of the racist logic of the Fiji coup. But if India assumes a certain moral responsibility for Fijian Indians, it is difficult to plot another worthwhile course. India has not reacted with the same degree of shrillness as Britain has over Mugabe's threat to appropriate white-owned farms in Zimbabwe, not because it doesn't care for Chaudhry and the Fijian Indian community but because it doesn't have a sense of imperial obligations. Not surprising considering that India's foreign policy over the past five decades has been built on the ideological foundations of contrived anti-colonialism and Third Worldism. Ironically, the same slogans that nurture adventurers like Speight. Fiji is as good a reason as any for India to now consider a foreign policy that eschews abstract posturing and prioritises national interests -- economic, strategic and human. There is an Indian diaspora that looks to India as its spiritual homeland. That's not good enough. India must become the natural guardian of all Indian communities throughout the world. It's an awesome project that involves having the requisite global economic clout and creating the institutional structures to sustain an imperial vision. This needs a mental shift in the way we perceive ourselves. This also requires a synergy between home and diaspora. |
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If
this was the 19th century and India the true inheritor of the Raj, there
would have been only one inevitable conclusion to the strange drama in
Suva centred on the ridiculous George Speight and his hostages. Gunboats
accompanied by crack commando units would have been despatched to Fiji,
and after a token show of resistance by the local army, the government of
Mahendra Chaudhry would have been ceremonially reinstated. Unfortunately,
this is the 21st century and India is not the US which can send Marines to
Grenada or Panama to serve the cause of democracy. India is just a
fledgling regional power that has got accustomed to seeing ethnic Indians
all over the world getting kicked in the butt. It happened earlier in
South Africa, was repeated in a lesser vein in Guyana and Kenya, and
reached its inglorious climax when Idi Amin booted out an entire community
from Uganda. Now, in Fiji, we are witnessing the creation of a new
apartheid state with Indians on the verge of becoming institutionalised
pariahs. The Commonwealth has reacted with suitable indignation but no one
talks of despatching the gunboats.