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a TRAITOR helping the West colonize Asia !
Is India a TRAITOR helping the West colonize Asia ? Yes India the TRAITOR
Rising India remains torn between East and West
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/world/asia/14iht-VJ-India.html?_r=1
NEW DELHI — World War II thrust an acute test on India: Should Indians, then under British rule, join what Japan billed as a pan-Asian struggle to expel Western imperialism from Asia? Or should they fight with Britons, with whom many Indians expected friendly postcolonial relations?
The Indian reply was mixed. The British-commanded Indian troops fought valiantly to repel Japan, while the unofficial Indian National Army, garnered by the freedom fighter Subhas Chandra Bose, attached to Japanese forces.
The split reflected an ambivalence that bedeviled India then and is re-emerging today: Should India's rising fortunes be hitched to Asian solidarity or to a partnership with Western countries that would pit Asians against Asians?
India's dilemma now concerns not Japan, but China. And the Western power is no longer Britain, but the United States. Yet the questions this time echo an earlier choice over whether to look east or west: Will India and China partner in ways that crowd out U.S. influence in Asia? Or will India take part in an American strategy to contain China's rise by helping India advance as a world power?
"Will Asia be put up against Asia again? Will we become pawns in the game of the single superpower after resisting it so well throughout our independent existence?" Yashwant Sinha, the foreign minister in the rightist government that was ousted in elections last year, said in an interview. "We should not fall into this trap. No country ever makes another country great."
Asia's power balance is in flux as China's influence rises, Japan moves toward rearmament and U.S. influence in Asia diminishes. And then there is India, which is growing quickly and is increasingly eager to flex its muscles on an Asian stage.
"One of the missing pieces of the puzzle has been in the way in which the major Asian powers - Japan, China, India - had not engaged with the continent as a whole for most of the 20th century because two of them had significant problems internally and the third chose a militarist course, which it then had to live down," said Shashi Tharoor, an Indian writer and an under secretary general of the United Nations, who stressed that he was not speaking for the UN.
"Now, for the first time, you're seeing an opportunity for all three major players to develop themselves and engage with the continent," he said.
It is often overlooked that Asia, and India particularly, nurtured dreams of a rapidly maturing and coalescing region after the war - and then squandered them.
When India gained independence in 1947, its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, cast it as part of a sweeping Asian renaissance.
"There are powerful, creative impulses and a new vitality in all the people of Asia," Nehru said at the Asian Relations Conference that he organized in New Delhi in 1947.
"The masses are awake and they demand their heritage."
From the end of the war in 1945 to the British departure in 1947, Nehru and his peers worked to craft a new foreign policy with two principal points: India would replace shackles to Britain with bonds to long-neglected Asian peers, and it would eschew superpower alliances, keeping aloof to retain independence in foreign-policy making.
But during the Cold War, India's desire to engage with its Asian peers collided with its aversion to superpower alliances as several countries in East and Southeast Asia signed on to the U.S. effort to stop Communism's spread.
Many in India looked down on their neighbors as bartering away control over foreign policy.
When the Association of Southeast Asian Nations came together as a regional bloc, an Indian diplomat memorably dismissed it as a "Coca-Cola club," said Sinha, the former foreign minister.
India-Asia bonds languished for decades. India paid Asia little heed, posting more diplomats to London than to all of Asia, according to I.K. Gujral, a former prime minister. Asia returned the disfavor: Yonsei University in South Korea, like many others, taught an Asian history course that did not cover the subcontinent, according to the book "Rediscovering Asia" by Prakash Nanda, an Indian scholar.
But in today's resurgent India, the idea of embracing Asia is back. This time, though, the idea is not the philosophical abstraction of scholar-politicians like Nehru, but the conclusion of cold economic logic.
In 2004, India hit a milestone: Its trade with other countries in the Asia-Pacific region overtook the value of its trade with the United States and Western Europe combined. In that year, Asian neighbors bought 46 percent of India's exports, worth $29.4 billion, and sold India 35 percent of its imports, worth $26.6 billion.
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China visited New Delhi in May and declared the two countries the linchpins of an "Asian century." Japan's prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, visited shortly afterward to anoint India "as a major power," Yasukuni Enoki, the Japanese ambassador, said in an interview.
This reconnection of India to Asia echoes the resurgence of similar sentiments 60 years ago. But some fear the sentiment will again fall prey to Western power politics.
This time, the reason is China, whose growing economy and drive for global influence are posing a direct challenge to the United States' influence in the region. The Bush administration has turned to India as a potential counterweight, announcing a policy of helping it become a "major world power."
President George W. Bush recently called India a "responsible" nuclear nation. This label effectively ushered India toward a seat at the high table of world affairs and gave India a direct bond to the United States. Yet, there is worry that India is spurning a long record of geopolitical neutrality.
"I would argue that India actually has a greater interest in developing its own friendly relations with China, rather than being a counterweight," said Tharoor, the Indian writer.
Those who favor closer ties between India and the United States also cast it as a significant transformation of India's approach to diplomacy.
"Until the end of the Cold War, India had been the labor-union leader, just collecting the voice of the weak," said Enoki, the Japanese envoy, who also served in India in the 1970s. "Now, India seemingly has changed. India prefers to be an executive entering into the executive room."
A central question is whether that status jump, from labor to management, will prompt New Delhi to do the diplomatic equivalent of settling down.
The nuclear deal with Washington was partly intended to reward India for its commitment to nonproliferation. The deal, subject to approval by the United States and other countries, lets India buy fuel for its civilian nuclear reactors in exchange for opening its nuclear sites to inspectors and preventing proliferation. Yet even as India agreed to the deal, it was negotiating to build a pipeline that would carry natural gas from Iran, a country that Washington wants to isolate, alleging that it is working toward nuclear proliferation.
Similarly, the relationship between India and China reflects enthusiasm for increasing trade.
But Wen Jiabao's visit in May, seen as a sign of that enthusiasm, came after a trip to Pakistan, where he inaugurated a Chinese-built seaport in the city of Gwadar - an unabashed lift to the military capabilities of India's rival.
Diplomats and analysts in India wonder whether the country will retain relationships simultaneously friendly and troubled with both Beijing and Washington, or whether it will attempt to build a more enduring alliance with the United States.
"What many people want us to do is to say that we stand by this group or alignment or nations or that," Nehru said in 1950, at a moment much like today's, when the very theory of Indian diplomacy seemed at stake. "Now just look at it. What does it mean? It means simply that we cease to count for the moment, we have no views left. We are just taken for granted."
Is India a TRAITOR helping the West colonize Asia ? Yes India the TRAITOR
