Obama's Visit To India

Obama’s visit to India is a renewal of marriage vows between two countries that have historically neglected one another. His tour has rekindled a passion that was never there. For India is at last getting some love, because the U.S. knows this union is good for business.

For Obama’s visit to India is as much of a tribute to an emerging power as it is an admission that the United States is a submerging power. The global financial crisis has laid bare the fragility of the West’s institutions. It’s Achilles heel grows in step with it’s increasing financial complexity.

Like an Ambassador car being hit by a bus, India has not only survived but has flourished. This robustness is something that is not easily ridiculed. Obama went as far as to say India was not emerging but had “risen”. He knows with this new wealth comes military power.

That military power is something the U.S. wants on their side, pointed well away from them. The badly kept dirty little secret is that India is perceived as being rather more serious at killing Muslims militants than Pakistan. Obama has consistently stated in his Mumbai trip that India has the greatest investment in Pakistan’s stability. Diplomatic speak for it is deeply in India’s interest to do more to suppress Muslim militancy in the region. The Americans are very fond of domino analogies and it would not have escaped their imagination that if the Afghan domino continues to fall too heavily on Pakistan’s it will topple. That would make India, in the American’s eyes, decidedly more essential in containing the ‘onslaught’. But of course under their enlightened leadership.

But the U.S. are comically out of their depth. With every passing day Pakistan looks increasingly like the multi-headed beast Kalyan. A multitude of Stately heads from the Army chief to the actual President, who is quite unintentionally ceremonial, and the madly swaying intelligence heads in between. Conflicting orders with conflicting policies. Fighting Talibanis on her western borders and then training and financing militants to infiltrate Kashmir to her East. This must be deeply confusing to U.S. State Department officials who habitually stop at red lights and like country music.

The U.S. are screaming for an ally who can be more easily understood and less shifty. But does India want to increase it’s co-operation with a nation that is has an occupying force in two countries in the region? Can India suppress it’s gag reflex when lectured by Obama on how to fight militancy when the U.S. have fertilized the fundamentalist’s ideology almost single handed?

Of course they can because it’s business yaar! India wants to be able to continue it’s startling rise as the U.S.’s call centre. Obama had made strong promises on his election campaign to slow the outsourcing of American jobs to India. This would be bad for India and simply catastrophic for Gurgaon. The days of the Non Alignment Movement are now dead and cremated. India can now be seen to be big buddy’s with the evil imperialist power and sell credit cards to people who have nearly killed themselves jumping out of the bath to answer the phone.

I have a fantasy that one day Americans working in a Texas call centre will have to learn Punjabi accents to take calls from India. This will take some time I fear but in this spirit Manmohan Singh placed an astronomical order for 10 C-17 cargo planes that will create 22,000 jobs in the U.S.! Was this a bribe to stop Obama cracking down on U.S. outsourcing to India?

What has not been reported is India’s huge medical tourism industry that must be bitterly anti Obama. Had his brave attempt at universal health coverage been a larger success India would have lost billions of dollars from uninsurable Americans staying at home to have a bypass. They must have breathed a huge sigh of relief when the Democrats were hammered in the polls.

However dysfunctional the marriage, the relationship will survive out of mutual necessity. India needs business. America needs allies in their war against an emotion. But above all none can afford to have a unified Pakistan under a militant leader with an undeveloped love for multi-faith democracies with a well developed nuclear arsenal.

Boat People And Plane People

Pic:Australia's first boat people.

The recent ‘information evenings’ on the opening of a new South Australian centre for boat people has dark importance for the Indian community. Yes, Indians come to Australia by Singapore Airlines but it was a rather frightening litmus test of this countries strong immunity to foreign bodies.

The widely televised proceedings had terrifying close ups of a mob that were very different to one another. Bronzed fair dinkum Aussies in singlets and thongs and pallid, long retired Scots in frayed jumpers their Mothers knitted for them in the war.

What sickened me to bottom of my guts was the uniformity in their expressions. Undisguised fear. Hysterical aggressiveness. Magpies defending their nest from invaders.

If this is a cross section of Australia how deep is the reserve of political will to continue Australia’s multicultural immigration policy? Today the Age reported that a majority of Australians supported the detention of asylum seeking children. This dark satanic fact proves the Australian well of human kindness is anything but bottomless and indeed may dry up.

For the message that migrant communities are hugely beneficial to Australia is simply not out there. It is a political hot potato. If Labor openly evangelized that immigrants are indeed a great asset to the nation they would lose a great amount of support and in these knife edged times would lose power. Which is a frustrating paradox as a great deal of Labor’s electorate is a people smuggler’s passenger list.

But this message must get out. How long will this insane concentration of hate towards a comically small amount of boat people last? How long will they be the fall guys for the wider immigrant community? For it as wildly strange as it is true that in Australia it is politically correct to be repugnantly racist against someone who has arrived here on a fishing boat but not by Qantas. Socially acceptable to vent jaundiced frustration with the wider immigrant community on to ‘queue jumpers’. Will a hatred for other modes of transport transpire?

Could the focus of this irrational hatred spread towards Indians? It tragically has, evidenced by the atrocious attacks on students, but not to it’s terrifying potential because we are enjoying prosperity. They are happy for Indians to do the jobs they don’t covert. Until of course severe recession strikes and suddenly Indians will be taking all the jobs from ‘Fair dinkum Aussie fellas’. Because the message has not reached Australians who do not have the foggiest clue how much their economy is supported by the vast numbers that arrive here annually. The robust property market is heavily underpinned by the thousands resettling here. Indians make up an unusually high proportion of the new property buyers in the outer suburbs of the country’s metros. Shamefully it must also be noted that the goras have become addicted to the cheap labor that Indian migrants offer in the convenience store and taxi industries. Ten years ago the Premier of Victoria reportedly begged the Immigration Department to stop checking Indian driver’s working hours because all the taxis had disappeared.

But don’t worry. In less than a generation you’ll own the 711 and a fleet of taxis which makes a very important point. The Australian is not entrepreneurial. In the fast shrinking world of globalization the Australian laid back attitude will simply not cut the mustard. Coal and gold are finite resources. They need the relentless energy of a Punjabi boy who could sell a television to someone who is legally blind and then sell a stereo to their half deaf sister. Any of you who have conducted business in Sada Bazaar will know an Australian would lose his shirt before he sipped his first morning late.

The next general election will be a blood bath. Will Gillard, still petrified from her brush with political death, succumb and follow the German Chancellor by declaring the multicultural society a disaster and then heighten the Indian proof fence around this Island? Winning the votes of individuals who would fail miserably to settle in their own country if they themselves were subjected to the very point system that they devised.

To do so would be disingenuous as India’s criminally undervalued talent pool is cheap and easy. For Australia is the only country in the world that suffers a brain drain from experts refusing to leave.

One Billion Are Not A Minority

India has to euthanise her deep inferiority complex. Paul Henry’s racism has turned on the well-dusted sixty-year-old babu gramophone, that still plays childishly over defensive records. This was only matched by the New Zealand Government’s infuriating over-defensiveness when it made a formal apology to the Indian Government, bewilderingly setting a precedent for taking responsibility for racists and intellectual midgets not in her employ.

I was born a Kiwi but the entirety of my life is India connected, and I love her with a depth that is at least as deep as my love for New Zealand. I want the whispered prophecies of economic superstardom to be a glorious roar, not a sulky whimper from imagined slights against chaste Mother India from populations that would barely qualify for a Lok Sabha constituency, or be a less-than-respectful turn out for a single day at the Kumbh Mela.

Like India, we carry our Bal Thackerays grudgingly. We ignore better judgment and restrain from publicly hanging them for destroying hard won international relationships, a labour of many years, with single sentences. Though please take solace in the knowledge that if Henry’s fate was in my hands, he would be begging to be hanged, but the fickleness of democracy dictates that I am not New Zealand’s Prime Minister. (That Henry’s name is not reminiscent of any Punjabi abuse, is also a cruel, cruel fate).

India, stop running to mummy when some half wit gora calls you a name in the international playground. It betrays a lack of confidence. It is unbecoming of your future ‘Superpower Number One.’ Superpowers are not home to leaders with egos so embarrassingly fragile to obscure sensationalists. If the United States were distracted from nation building by the multitude of criticism it receives, they would still be a rabble of disorganised drunks. One billion people are not a minority. Stop being one. Jai Hind!