A strange and incredible fascination for George Nathaniel Curzon, a former Viceroy of India, seems to have gripped Delhi for some time now. These respectable men – and women, as the case may be – seriously admire the proselytising passion and determined self-conviction with which Curzon relentlessly pursued the idea of the British Indian empire.
Indian influence must transcend its physical frontiers, Curzon believed, and proceeded to browbeat London into cutting exclusive deals with the sheikhs and emirs littered across the Persian Gulf. He was a fully paid-up member of the Great Game Club, having been awarded by the Royal Geographical Society for “discovering” the source of the Amu Darya; later as Viceroy, he sent the young explorer Francis Younghusband on a trek to Tibet to discover if the Russians were undermining “legitimate” British Indian interests in those haunting valleys on both sides of the Yarlung Tsangpo (they weren’t even there).
My point here is that it’s high time we removed the strategic halo around poor Lord Curzon. Not only did he preside over the illogical partition of Bengal in 1905 – an enormously costly mistake that became a key ingredient in the creation of the Muslim League in Dhaka a year later – but he also didn’t bother to extend himself in allaying the great famine that upturned India in 1899-1900.
Between six and nine million Indians are believed to have died in the famine, and this is what the great Curzon said : “..Any government which imperiled the financial position of India in the interests of prodigal philanthropy would be open to serious criticism…”
Of course, the reason India’s Curzonians yearn for the roll of the drum is because they feel the current government is doing little or nothing to expand India’s rightful place in the world. Delhi’s refusal to send troops to Iraq or Afghanistan, supposedly in defence of the greater good – in this case, avenging western forces fighting the Taliban-Al Qaeda – or allying with the US to counter Chinese expansionism, or making bold moves in Central Asia or Iran or simply not being willing to assert India’s place in its own sub-continent, that’s what annoys these people.
That is why Hillary Clinton’s speech in Chennai last week, exhorting India to rediscover itself, is like oxygen to an asthmatic. To be sure, there’s some merit in what the lady is saying — even if it took her some time to discover it. The fact that she’s making amends today for her voting in favour of the 2007 killer amendment that nearly killed the Indo-US nuclear deal, is creditable, and we must applaud her for it.
But it must be in India’s national interest to make its own strategic moves, and if the US or Russia or Europe want to ally with India, so be it. On top of the agenda these days is the matter of paying Iran – or as Curzon would have it, Persia – for the large amounts of oil that Delhi buys from it (about 12 per cent of its total imports, amounting to about $10 billion annually) to feed its energy-hungry people.
Also Read
The US has clamped down on all payments to the Islamic republic and the Europeans have fallen in line — even though no UN resolution sanctions oil payments to Iran. India bought time recently by paying Teheran about $5 billion in one go, through a bank in the Gulf. But the crisis looms large again.
Not that the Persians, inheritors of their own, ancient civilization, aren’t skilful in stoking the fire. Around the same time as Hillary Clinton landed in Delhi that hot July night, Teheran’s news agency Fars put out a story saying it would stop all oil shipments to India if Delhi didn’t pay up its dues by August 1.
Of course, this was a delicious little game Curzon’s ghost would delight in. Of course, India was being asked to choose between its fancy new partner, the Americans, and its down-at-heel, somewhat frenzied civilisational ally, the Iranians. Of course, India was not going to choose, it would be silly if it did. But for the US to put Delhi in such a bind…Well, that’s not what friends do, do they?
There’s much that is wrong with the Manmohan Singh government, but if the recent India-Pakistan joint statement is anything to go by, you would have to admit it has the right idea on promoting ties with Delhi’s most recalcitrant neighbour. Unveiling the slow gambit, using trade as a bait to open up Kashmir, the two Punjabs as well as Rajasthan/Sind, tamping down the almost-genetic Pakistani insecurity that India wants to gobble it up by proposing that people, and not nuclear plants, should be at the centre of the relationship.
Even if you didn’t want to make the leap to Foreign Minister S M Krishna’s description of the talks with Hina Rabbani Khar as being full of “positive vibrations,” the idea of India being a cooperative instead of an assertive power, is so much more interesting.
So let’s give Curzon’s ghost a decent burial. Let’s, instead, use Hina’s Rs 17-lakh Birkin bag as the new emblem of bilateral ties. Imagine if the bag were to be made in Pakistan and sold to India’s wannabe-Page 3 lot? You would be able to watch India-Pakistan relations change, in slow motion.