The campaign to round up Delhi's beggars and brush them under a carpet of mobile courts, biometric database and special institutions before next year's Commonwealth Games is a tactical mistake. If India's capital looks too spick and span, aggrieved Britons might feel even more strongly they are being taken for a ride by doling out money to a country savouring thoughts of Chandrayaan, a nuclear sub and plans for fighter aircraft and another aircraft carrier as it celebrates 62 years of independence.
Well might they grumble for Her Majesty’s Department for International Development is committed to giving India £825 million over three years, against £1,045 million during the previous five years. The generosity recalls a character in a Ted Allbeury thriller defining aid as “poor people in rich countries giving money to rich people in poor countries.” British unemployment (2.4 million people without jobs) is at a 14-year high and accounts for a surge in drug addiction, alcoholism and domestic violence. It encourages a spurt of what looks suspiciously like race crimes, and increased support for the ultra-nationalist British National Party. Conditions may worsen if the GDP shrinks by 5.5 per cent as the Bank of England governor fears.
India’s prospective aircraft carrier has become a symbol of the paradox, especially since the Royal Navy has been forced to consider putting on hold its own £4.9 billion plan for two aircraft carriers. A letter in a leading newspaper first voiced the grievance. The argument has snowballed since then on the internet, with a blogger saying India’s economy is 50 times bigger than Britain’s and there are more millionaires in India than in Britain. “So why should British taxpayers continue to help?” Even a former Labour minister, Dennis McShane, questions the justification for helping an obviously buoyant country. When someone explained that India’s population is 18.7 times more than Britain’s, and the average Briton is 12.5 times richer than the average Indian, the respective per capita incomes being $37,100 and $720, the retort was “If India is so poor, why are they buying aircraft carriers?”
The question provoked a backhanded rebuke. “Well after they’ve paid for their military and space programmes, there’s very little left for food. Hardly their fault is it you fascist, racist, holocaust denier!” The writer went on to explain the purpose of British aid. “It’s a bribe to stop them hating us. We’re now the fat kid whose dad owns a sweetshop buying friends. It’s pathetic.”
My middle-aged English secretary when I was posted in London in the late sixties was more openly indignant when an aid package was announced after Indira Gandhi’s visit. “We must be mad” she told me while taking dictation. “We ought to have our heads examined!” Politicians never explain global inter-dependence. Or tell simple folk that aid is investment. But another blogger writes that every pound Britain gives India will yield £10 in what he calls “commercial exchanges.”
What all this boils down to is that appearances matter. Watching the extravagant tamasha of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s arrival for a Commonwealth summit in Canada, Lee Kuan Yew, the most canny Asian leader of our times, reflected that “the poorer the country, the bigger the Cadillacs they hired for their leaders.” Mujib’s chartered plane idled on the runway for days on end being loaded with crates of his entourage’s purchases. It would be more rewarding, Lee mused, for Third World politicians to “set out to impress the world that they were poor and in dire need of assistance.”
He would have been aghast when Nawaz Sharif spent an estimated $2.5 million on a 10-day visit to Bill Clinton with eight officials and 20 journalists in a special PIA Airbus. A fleet of 40 limousines ferried them around during what Pakistani papers dubbed a ‘begging bowl’ trip.
What’s the remedy? Berthing the nuclear sub, recalling Chandrayaan or cancelling plans for the fighters and aircraft carrier would be too drastic but let’s keep them under wraps like Japan does. Meanwhile, London taxis painted ‘Incredible India’ in brilliant colours are not such a clever idea since the slogan also draws attention to India’s ‘incredible’ contrasts. Also, let the capital, which I once called the last cantonment, not look too manicured. A Delhi that more closely resembles, say, Calcutta would prompt fewer doubts among donors. A scattering of destitutes begging alms would help. If this offends patriotic pride, we can always cut our nose to spite our face and refuse to accept a single paise of British or other foregn aid.
