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Editorial
Our Audacity of Hope
The World Sikh
News is a community newspaper and we would be more than happy to
confine ourselves to comment on community issues. Fortunately, we
are blessed to be part of such a religion that does not see the
community as isolated from the rest of the world. No Sikh offers an
Ardaas for a cause any less than Sarbat Da Bhala. So the affairs of
the world come very much under the umbrella of our community's
concerns, and looking at the way India and US political and
strategic relations are moving, we as a peace loving community
concerned about the welfare of the millions who live on the margins
of the society can have no choice but to make an intervention.
During her
recent engagements with India, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
has shown immense interest in increasing business for US companies
and cementing a new defence relationship during her India visit, but
what is being overlooked is a basic reordering of US priorities in
south Asia. It is long overdue.
The United
States must stop feeding the fires between
India
and
Pakistan and help put an end to the south Asian arms race.
Unfortunately, we perceive many contradictions and confusions in
United
States
policy in south Asia. US interests are now becoming limited to
making money and recruiting India as a strategic ally, which, in
turn, involve selling weapons and turning a blind eye to the
country’s nuclear weapons.
This is in
direct contradiction with the stated position of India, but bothers
us little because India never meant to keep its word and the entire
Nehruvian idea of non-nuclear position was a fraudster's pedestal.
Indira Gandhi's Pokhran and Vajpayee's nuclear tests proved that.
It is sad that
Secretary of State Clinton did not lay the kind of stress on the
nuclear issue as she laid on the "300 million members of India’s
burgeoning middle class”. She spoke so forcefully about the “vast
new market and opportunity” but not about the way
India
has been growing as a nuclear power.
Indian civil
society does not have a very loud voice, and
Clinton
could have helped it become stronger. No doubt the richie rich
Indian middle class is large. The current total
US
population is also about 300 million. And, this new class is greedy
for a more American lifestyle.
But is it
looking forward to learn better notions of democracy from the civil
society debate in the US? Oh no. India is happy that the focus is on
its market for US goods and services, and a source of cheap labour
for US corporations.
Sorry to disturb
the happy mirage but the fact remains that India is a land of huge
inequities and little has happened for the west to change its image
of India as a home of the desperately poor deserving charity and
needing development. India’s poor people number at over 450 million,
most of them living on less than $1.25 a day.
India and the
United States are now surely partners in peace, but are they
partners for peace? What role is India playing for ensuring regional
and international security? If the US goal is to help India become a
major world power in the 21st century, then must not we be concerned
with what kind of power it plans to become? And there are ,military
implications of it all also.
Teeming masses
of Indians live so far pushed on the margins that their voice is not
being heard by the world community.
India
has developed an immense capacity to not listen to what its
minorities are going through. The way it dealt with the Sikh
aspirational movement, the Operation Bluestar, the anti-Sikh
genocide are all pointers to the nature of the Indian brahamnical
establishment. Its attitude towards its dalits, tribals, Christians,
Muslims makes it more than clear that on its own, India will nto be
a fair power. It is time the
US
harks back to the ideals of the founding fathers so that it gets
inspired enough to help change India, and if need be, force India to
change. As India marks its Independence Day, is it our audacity for
having such a hope from the author of The Audacity of Hope?
12
August 2009
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