Kipling ghost smirking at G-8

JYOTI MALHOTRA
Gulf News, Dubai, June 2007

You may have caught the ghost of the great imperialist Rudyard Kipling smirking faintly before he disappeared into a cloud of self-indulgent, anti-globalisation protesters at Germany’s G-8 summit recently. East is East and West is West, he seemed to be saying, and the twain only meet at the Bob Geldof-Bono soirees.

So when the music’s over and everyone’s returned home on their respective jet planes, it may be time to do the sums. Nicholas Sarkozy clearly looked like he was having a great time (or at least Belgian TV thought so), Vladimir Putin pulled another Cold War rabbit out of the hat when he suggested Azerbaijan instead of Poland to station the missile defence system and George Bush was at last felled by a stomach virus.

As for the Outreach-5, there wasn’t a more unlikely congregation. First of all, whoever suggested the term had clearly no idea he was walking into a minefield of raw nerves. (We’re not out at all, we’re right inside the world, said a testy Indian foreign secretary, Shivshanker Menon.) Secondly, if this group was meant to pick the best and brightest from every continent, then Asia had two representatives, India and China. Certainly the label of the ``developing world’’ couldn’t apply here, because China’s economic indicators far outstrip at least those of Russia.

At the outset I must confess to being a part of the Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh’s media party to Heiligendamm. When you fly in and out of Germany on Air India One, luxuriating in five-star-plus treatment, it’s a trifle difficult to condemn the big, bad West for turning its uppity nose on the desperately poor and unprivileged of the Third and Fourth Worlds.

Still, the best part of the G-8 summit was watching the world’s richest and most powerful nations, albeit from the sidelines, openly bicker with each other. By washing their dirty divisions in public, they allowed the Outreach-5 -- or Group-5, as Brazil, South Africa, India, China and Mexico preferred to call themselves – to slip off the hook. Unable to decide between themselves how to fix the world, the toothless G-8 was simply incapable of making the G-5 fall in line.

If truth be told, George Bush, who has made the world more dangerous to live in than any other leader in recent memory, is probably the G-5’s favourite person. It’s easy to see why. Bush trashed the Angela Merkel proposal on climate change so effectively that he reduced the G-8 talkshop to a mass of quavering pleaders.

The Europeans were furious, but just as they did in Iraq, they had to swallow their bile. The receding ice-caps on Kilimanjaro or Fujiyama or the Hindukush mountains did little to move Bush. Après moi, he seemed to be saying, it didn’t matter whether there was a deluge or not.

India and China, amongst the world’s worst polluters, were jubilant. Neither had been subject to the Kyoto Protocol’s targets in the past, because of their developing country status. At Heiligendamm, Manmohan Singh and Hu Jintao argued they were simply not about to abandon their growth rates of 9-10 per cent per annum, for the sake of controlling greenhouse gas emissions.

Commonsense demanded, argued the G-5, that the polluter must pay for its misdeeds.

Bush, however, was refusing to pay heed. Canada’s Harper, unwilling to annoy Bush, maintained a strategic silence. The Alberta oil sands, a source of rising pollution and lucrative jobs in an unstable market, largely remained a secret in Heilingendamm. Only Merkel, used to the tough and disciplined life from her GDR days, promised to crack the whip on all Germany.

Still, Manmohan Singh had another idea for the G-8 on climate change. India’s emissions, he said, would at no time surpass that of any G-8 nation. By putting the onus on the richer countries, the Indian challenge also indicated a subtle shift in its traditional position.

As it negotiates a nuclear deal with the US that will allow it to become the world’s sixth nuclear weapons power in everything but name, New Delhi wanted to signal that it was willing to shoulder some of the responsibility for cleaning up the world.

Meanwhile, the G-8 talkshop was fast disintegrating. Even on trade flows and investment, a key ingredient of a market-friendly, globalising world that the West considers its primary dharma, European nations simply refused to cut subsidies on agriculture. The old deadlock, between the East and the West, continued.

In the end, one may well ask, why did nations like India accept the invitation to Heiligendamm if it was only so much hot air? Prime Minister Manmohan Singh articulated the grumble on his return journey on Air India One. The G-8, Singh said, had not even had the courtesy of discussing its draft declaration with the G-5, but had presented its discussions as more or less a fait accompli.

Truth is, as India exercises its elbows in the new world order, it badly wanted to be part of that exclusive photo-op. Put it down to Delhi’s vanity, rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful, was considered well worth the time and money spent. Even someone like China’s Hu Jintao had accepted the invite, hadn’t he?

There’s a final lesson India brought back from Heiligendamm, and that is the importance of strength. None of the Europeans, it didn’t matter how old their civilisations or how strong their GDPs, could say anything to George Bush. The man may have turned the world upside down, but no one had the courage to oppose him.

It is this ability to exercise raw power that continues to send a shiver of excitement through the heartbeat of India.

ENDS