Rethinking India

The question was posed in perfect English. There was no confusion in its intent, no malice in its delivery. And yet I could not bring myself to respond.

The Indian gentleman with whom I had been conversing on the streets of New Delhi looked at me quizzically, and opened his mouth to begin again. "So, what do Americans think of India?" he repeated, unnecessarily elevating the volume of his voice and carefully enunciating every syllable to compensate for what he perceived to be my lack of understanding.

In the back of my mind emerged a response too shameful to be articulated, but yet too truthful to be suppressed by a quickly formulated lie.

"Americans," I said, in an uncharacteristically hushed tone, "don't think of India much at all."

The bluntness of my answer was unsettling to the gentleman, though not perhaps as unsettling as it was to me. Slapped in the face by the self-righteousness of my homeland, I was forced to accept the mediocrity of U.S. concern with Indo-American affairs.

Sustained by media generated sound bytes and oversimplifications, the American intellect is starved of any real knowledge of the Indian subcontinent. Pigeonholed into a single-issue agenda, Americans are left with a portrait of the country that is both inaccurate and ill-informed. To most Americans, India is a nation embroiled in a nuclear arms race with Pakistan and an ethnic battle over the state of Kashmir. The victim of news analyses too watered down and politicized to be of any real informational use, the depth and complexity of the country's social, political and economic condition are lost to the American public at large.

Two weeks ago Indian Prime Minister Atal Vajpayee spoke before the United States Congress, signaling what the New York Times called the beginning of an historic "'tilt' towards India." Marking the potential end of an era of hostile relations dating back to the Nixon administration, the visit opened the door for what many hope will be a new epoch of closer, and more hospitable, Indo-American affairs. However, while the visit showed a willingness of behalf of Americans to welcome the Indian government onto its soil, it did not demonstrate a willingness to genuinely refocus the lens through which the country is viewed. Politicians and the press alike evaluated the success of the visit based entirely on its potential effects with regard to nuclear non-proliferation. The wealth of other areas in which Indian and American interests are at odds or intersect were ushered to the background.

Ostensibly, grounding Indo-American affairs in a nuclear calculus is intended to create an international and domestic climate that nurtures the security and well being of Indian citizens. However, the paramount position that the U.S. affords to arms control actually shields our country from having to treat seriously other issues that potentially pose as great an immediate threat to the stability of the Indian state. Rampant overpopulation, judicial corruption and abuses of child labor, among numerous other domestic ills, are pressing concerns to the Indian people and arguably should inform, if not dictate, certain American foreign policy decisions.

The shape of U.S. policy decisions, however, remains uni-dimensional and flat and, much in the same way that that the recent obsession with normalizing trade relations with China has marginalized concerns over the justness of the Chinese government, the enduring drive to box India into nuclear submission has marginalized U.S. interests in the justness and equality of the Indian state. Gleefully referring to India as "the largest democracy in the world," the U.S. demonstrates a profound lack of interest in or a desire to rectify the ways in which India is decidedly non-democratic. What ensues is a foreign policy that is at best impoverished and at worst adverse to the universalism that undergirds the ethics of the United States.

However, not only does boxing India foster ill-informed government policy decision, it also fosters ill-informed electoral decisions as well. According to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, 54 percent of Americans claim that foreign affairs will be very important to them in the November presidential elections. Yet, 37 percent of Americans admit that they haven't heard enough to accurately evaluate the true status of Indo-American relations. Consequently when Americans hit the polls in 41 days, they will be doing so without the knowledge necessary to make an informed decision about U.S. policy with what will, in less than 50 years, be the largest nation in the world. And they will be electing a President whom they cannot hold accountable to a detailed policy of Indo-American relations.

But the oversimplification of India also engenders deeper and more morally pressing issues.

To conceive of India as a nation of warheads and missiles as opposed to a nation of people, is to foster the kind of moral ambivalence for which the United States has consistently garnered a disreputable image abroad. It is to allow Americans to sit in an ivory tower, wrapped in a tightly woven cloak of arrogance and ignorance, that prevents and excuses them from showing any genuine interest in lives of those individuals living outside the hallowed border of our state. And it is to give breath to the hypocritical philosophy that American interests in equality and rightness end at the fault line between the domestic and foreign realm.

Pigeon holed and oversimplified for far too long, Indo-American relations must be deepened and broadened in the years ahead. It is time to start thinking about India, in more ways than one.

Lauren E. Baer '02 is a social studies concentrator in Dunster House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.