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FIFTH
COLUMN
Nasty
Reality
Vajpayee's
boasts in the US fail to hide the inherent Third Worldism afflicting Indians
By
Tavleen
Singh
 India
is a Third World country. We know this but between the prime minister
and Bill Gates we were reminded last week just how humiliatingly Third
World we are. The prime minister did this through his tedious, humourless,
badly delivered speech to the American Congress and the Indian media did
it through Gates by giving him more publicity than the Indian prime minister
got in Washington or New York. One financial newspaper was so hysterical
in its adulation of Gates that it had five stories about him on its front
page under a banner headline that shrieked "And Now, We Give You
the Billennium Summit". News
of the real summit in Washington was buried in an inside page amid more
stories about Bill Gates. If media hysteria was not embarrassing enough
we had our chief ministers queuing up before Gates with begging bowls
in their hands. "Put your money in my bowl, oh mighty white raja,
please put your money in my bowl," they may well have said. How Third
World can we get?
 If
we go by the prime minister's speechwriters the answer is: the sky is
the limit. Atal Bihari Vajpayee's trip to Washington marked a new beginning
even before he left India's shores because it came in the immediate wake
of the first visit by an American president to India in more than 20 years.
It was a chance for him to seize the moment and talk about the sort of
issues that make the world the global village it has become. Environmental
issues affect us all as does the fight against poverty, disease, terrorism,
drugs. Of these he mentioned poverty and terrorism but in whining, "poor-us"
tones and in a speech filled with dreary Indian cliches of the "unity
in diversity" kind. And inanities like our "success" in
escaping the economic crisis that convulsed east Asia two years ago. Who
was he trying to fool? Our swadeshi warriors may not know it but everyone
else knows that we escaped the crisis because we also escaped the economic
boom in the 1980s that catapulted most east Asian countries ahead of India
by more than 20 years.
Americans
travel, so they know that countries like Indonesia and Thailand look better
despite the economic crisis than India does without it.
If Vajpayee's
visit was a success it was more to do with what his hosts had to say than
anything he did. President Clinton was more than generous in his praise
for India as a "rising economic leader, making breathtaking strides
in information technology". And Vice-President Al Gore saluted Vajpayee
as a leader who had won people over with his eloquence, a commodity sadly
absent from his address to Congress, especially when we contrast it with
Clinton's address to the Indian Parliament. But then that must be the
difference between First World speechwriters and Third World ones.
LET'S
ACKNOWLEDGE IT: There is much that distinguishes First from Third
but, perhaps, the most important distinctions come under the category
of infrastructure. We will remain Third World as long as we refuse to
acknowledge the third-rate quality of our roads, railways, airports, ports,
telecommunication systems and power supply. What is the point of boasting
as the prime minister did that "India and the US have taken the lead
in shaping the information age" when most of India does not even
have regular power supply? Where is the question of computers without
electricity?
The late
power minister Rangarajan Kumaramangalam went blue in the face warning
people about total darkness in two years unless power distribution systems
were privatised. He did this without being able to do anything about it
because the wheels of Vajpayee's Government continue to turn at Third
World pace.
The story
is not much different when it comes to roads. Vajpayee has, from time
to time, made grandiose announcements about linking India with a massive
network of new highways but he appears to do this without consulting his
surface transport minister. How else to explain why not a single kilometre
of a single new highway has even begun to be built? It is never going
to get built either because the minister seems to spend more time in Lucknow
than he does in Delhi and is believed to be keener on becoming chief minister
of Uttar Pradesh than on building roads. He is not the only wrong man
in the wrong job. A puzzling feature of Vajpayee's Government is that
nearly every major infrastructure ministry is headed by men who are truly
Third World in their perceptions and their politics.
So why criticise
the prime minister's speechwriters when they are only reflecting accurately
the malaise that afflicts his Government? Depressing, very depressing.
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