Lost in the great Indian paradox

Last week David Cameron flew to India in a chartered plane, accompanied by six ministers, innumerable corporate chiefs and even a few Olympic medallists.

Cameron has vowed to forge a "new special relationship" with the world's second-fastest growing economy, which the Labour government, infatuated with the old special relationship, neglected to build.

A foundation for this alliance was apparently laid when BAE signed a $791.3 million (Dh2.9 billion) contract to supply 57 Hawk jet trainers to India's air force and navy.

India seeks urgently and expensively to modernise its military. No one in the British delegation was pressing Indian flesh more eagerly than representatives of BAE and Rolls-Royce, who in India are vying for some of the world's biggest weapons contracts.

The foreign policies of the two countries remain at odds. While Britain sensibly advocates negotiations with the Taliban, India wants its own zone of influence in Afghanistan. India is much closer, politically and commercially, to the US than it is to Britain; the UK government's proposed immigration caps will further deter highly skilled Indians from contributing to the British economy.

And British business people seeking fresh openings in India's tightly regulated finance, banking, insurance and retail sectors are likely to be disappointed.

Nevertheless, the British government, and its approving media chorus, seems intoxicated by its Rip-Van-Winklish discovery of "Shining India". The old Jewel in the Crown has suddenly mutated into the new El Dorado, and this widespread but unexamined fantasy is already helping the coalition government to dismantle the most principled aspect of Britain's relationship with India.

Jo Johnson, the Conservative MP for Orpington, seemed to amplify a growing Tory consensus when, in Financial Times, he described British aid to India as an "anachronism". Citing India's grand projects and superpower ambitions, Johnson claimed that the country is "no longer a natural aid recipient".

Bold assertion

This is certainly a bold assertion. According to the latest measure of the United Nations Development Programme, which includes such indicators of deprivation as education and health, just eight Indian states have more poor people — 421 million — than the 28 poorest countries of Africa. In fact, undernutrition in India is twice as high as that in sub-Saharan Africa, with nearly half of India's 120 million children exposed to early death.

To take India's vanity projects, such as October's $2.37 billion Commonwealth Games in Delhi or India's planned junket to the moon, as evidence of inclusive economic growth is to fall for the flimsiest of illusions.

India's political and business elites have not only failed to provide basic public services to the deprived majority; their preferred model of economic development actively victimises the poor, provoking India's conservative Supreme Court to marvel at how "every step that we take seems to give rise to insurgency and political extremism".

Dfid, Britain's international development department, has occasionally been complicit in the kind of economic growth that strangulates the poor while making the richest even richer. However, with all its flaws, it is still more conscientious than most of its western peers, especially US aid agencies, which blatantly funnel large portions of "aid" money to American "consultants" while advancing the interests of large American companies.

Ample scope

Two-thirds of Dfid's outlay in India is spent on providing health and education services where almost none exist. There is of course ample scope for cutting down wasteful spending and reducing, if not altogether eliminating, corruption. But foreign aid is not an anachronism in a country whose more than 800 million people still live on less than $2 (Dh7.34) a day: a pitiable budget under assault by double-digit inflation.

It is surely no accident that Cameron's high-powered delegation could not find a place for Andrew Mitchell, the minister in charge of Dfid, which runs the largest single-country programme in India, accounting for nearly 30 per cent of all foreign aid received by the country. Mitchell himself probably put his name on the no-fly-to-India list. "About $395.6 million of public money spent annually on nuclear-armed India could be scaled back," he said recently.

Jo Johnson, too, cites India's huge defence budget as evidence that the country can attend to its own development needs.

But this defence outlay, which grew by an unprecedented 34 per cent last year and is almost entirely exempt from parliamentary scrutiny or public debate, is an exclusive bonanza for India's alarmingly numerous corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and army officers.

Flying into this gathering storm, the British delegation seemed to want little more than safe landing for its Hawk jets and other military hardware. But none of this can compensate for the severing of Britain's old links with India's great mass of ordinary people or the replacement of Dfid's lifelines to India's poorest with a "new special relationship" that at present promises to do little more than enliven the parties of Delhi's arms dealers.

Pankaj Mishra is an Indian author and writer of literary and political essays