Wednesday, October 19, 2005

NYT: Pride and Politics

An interesting article on the quake and aid.

NEW DELHI, Oct. 18 - Calamities of nature do not just test the capacity of a state. They can also offer unexpected opportunities for political craftsmanship.

Take India. The government has announced that it needs no international aid to recover from the Oct. 8 earthquake that leveled villages in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, killed an estimated 1,300 people there and displaced roughly 30,000 families.

As temperatures fall to near freezing in the hilltop hamlets of Kashmir, the most liberal estimates suggest that fewer than half of the surviving families have tents to sleep in. Yet a full nine days and nights after the quake, Indian officials say they have no need for the United Nations, nor foreign aid agencies, to bring tents from abroad.

[snip]

"New Delhi has adopted an enlightened approach to helping Pakistan during this tragedy, and a backward approach to accepting foreign humanitarian assistance on its side of the Kashmir divide," said Michael Krepon, president of the Washington-based Henry L. Stimson Center, which studies security issues. "Part of this has to do with national pride, which is compounded by sensitivity to foreign governments making landfall in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir."
This is a very keenly felt sentiment, this sense of wanting to be self-sufficient, and standing on one's own feet. Perhaps it has roots in the independence movement, and the strong push for swadeshi (Indian-made). Certainly the years of Nehruvian socialism fostered this. Often, it ends up being a kind of inferiority complex, especially in relation to the West and the US in particular. A recent example of this sentiment was (is?) an email doing the rounds, comparing the July floods in Mumbai to the effects of Katrina on New Orleans, and basically, gloating how well India responded to the disaster compared to the United States. Apples and oranges, of course, and, to me, a sign of a rather adolescent nationalism.

Or maybe, I've just gone completely amrikan.

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