India: Is the frenzy over Obama visit nothing more than hysteria? (Shiv Visvanathan)

Is the frenzy over Obama nothing more than hysteria?

By Shiv Visvanathan

Published: Mail Today, 1 February 2015


The media wrote of President Obama’s visit as if it was the beginning of an Indo-American festival, a corporate celebration of solidarity, writes Shiv Visvanathan

Fevers and festivals have a lot in common. Both are seen as breaks in everyday normalcy and both challenge conventional ways of thinking.

The media wrote of President Obama’s visit as if it was the beginning of an Indo-American festival, a corporate celebration of solidarity.

At the core level there was sense of conviviality, an ease beyond the usual doubts and suspicions.

The warmth between Modi and Obama was obvious. The sceptic could ask is warmth by itself enough to create strategy? Probing further, many felt the symptoms of a festival, the hysteria, and the anxiety were signs and symptoms of a fever.

Let us honor the event by calling it – ‘Obamaitis.’

The symptoms are clear. A nation feels left out of the global club. Its rivals America, China seem overwhelmingly powerful. It feels desperate for recognition and it turns a visit into a fact of history, a thing for the ‘Guinness Book of Records.’

Look at the many firsts the media claimed for it.

Excitement

Obama was the first American President to come on a Republic Day. It presented his seven corridors of security as another achievement.

Behind the excitement, what one witnessed was the desperate attempt to please the US. It was as if the entire nation has turned diasporic and expressed a need to be part of Madison Square Garden.

In any psychological fever, anxiety and envy go together. India was waxing eloquent about the absence of Pakistan.

Our elite was behaving like an elder child happy that the younger one was not mentioned in the same breath.

Our leaders felt as if it was almost a coming of age for India because we were treated separately.

India almost plays ‘Abel’ to the Pakistani ‘Cain’, in which Obama condemns Pakistan in Old Testament style as a country that fosters terrorism.

The conviviality was obvious and business as a pressure group felt its time had arrived.

Yet if one looks closely at the Nuclear deal, one is not quite sure of the nature of agreement. It is true that Obama agreed not to track fissile material exported from USA. This is a function performed by the IAEA.

What one witnessed was a confusion between tracking and liability. Nuclear liability is a complex affair and involves supplier and operator liability.
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India almost plays ‘Abel’ to the Pakistani ‘Cain’, in which Obama condemns Pakistan in Old Testament style as a country that fosters terrorism

Further liability as a legal term and accountability and responsibility were confused. It is naïve to think that by adding to the pool of insurance, the problem of liability fades away.

The enthusiasm to hail achievement hides our elite illiteracy about technology.

The Indian fear of China was obvious throughout Obama’s visit. Obama himself mentioned that China and the US are major trade partners who have signed a major agreement on ‘Sustainability.’

In fact Obama treated India as a new entrant to a club where China and the US are seasoned members.

The ordinary Indian might be aspirational but he would not like India to be treated as aspirational in a league of nations.

Fear

Between Pakistan envy and China anxiety, India appeared more like an excited convert than a seasoned negotiator among nations.

The media talks excitedly about the bear hugs between Obama and Modi but as a cynic put it bear hugs are fine, as long as the honey follows.

There is a fourth symptom which was worrying. Many of our businessmen were gung-ho about the meeting.

Anand Mahindra, one of our leading industrialists, in fact claimed it was a time for change.

He explained the seeds of American innovation lay in the military industrial complex. He hoped some of that innovation would rub off on India.

Mahindra in fact felt that hostility to the military-industrial complex was a relic of the value frame of the sixties and that India should outgrow it.

The irony became even more obvious with Obama declaring Gandhi was alive and well in India.

Even before the Obama visit became passé, the regime declared that foreign secretary Sujatha Singh had been dismissed and the Indian ambassador to US Mr. Jaishankar installed in place.

It is becoming clear that Mr. Modi’s policy is falling in place and one can discern a certain binary of thought. There is a clear policy difference between economics, foreign policy and defence as cluster I and education, health and ecology, as cluster II.

It is very clear that cluster One is a hard, masculine category and cluster Two is treated as soft and feminine.

Foreign policy, security, defense have little place for education. In an odd way, the nation state is discounting the very basis of its culture by devaluing these three departments.

Revelation

What we see emerging is a new fever, delirious in its enthusiasm, showing signs of hysteria and envy. What one also witnesses is that it is an evangelical meeting of bureaucracy and state.

The ordinary man shows no symptoms of the fever and civil society is assumed to be immune and irrelevant.

Our media proclaims that anti-Americanism is dead, our experts claim that non-alignment is over and a new era of geo-politics has emerged.

What one misses is a frame of values, which Non-Alignment and our third world politics had. Even our scepticism of US intentions was healthy.

Our current enthusiasm for the US as a regime is sheer amnesia. It is as if suddenly the Kissingers are now forgotten and Afghanistan did not exist.
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The Indian fear of China was obvious throughout Obama’s visit. Obama himself mentioned that China and the US are major trade partners who have signed a major agreement on ‘Sustainability’

This raises an even more acute question of whether this celebration is premature, and undemocratic.

What one saw was a majoritarian polity celebrating a nation state spelling out official meanings of development, and patriotism while hinting that words like secularism and socialism need to be dropped from the Constitution.

One wonders whether our nation’s sense of value, memory, history disappear in this millennial enthusiasm for America.

Gossip columnists and policy experts may vouch for such a conversion. In fact the real ‘Ghar-Vapsi’ seems to be the Indo-American rapprochement. Whether it is delusional or a new revelation only the politics of the future can tell.

The writer is a social nomad

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/article-2934713/Is-frenzy-Obama-hysteria.html