Commentary/Ashok Mitra

Bill Gates, the world's richest person, was visiting us. We, the champion panhandlers, went berserk

Some names are worth invoking in both due and undue seasons, others are not. V K Krishna Menon falls in the latter category, a near-forgotten star in the remote sky. 1997 happens to be his centenary year, along with that of quite a number of other eminences. After much prodding by a handful of his leftover admirers, an official function was organised in the nation's capital to pay homage to Menon's memory.

Doordarshan could not bother to report the event; from its point of view, for good, honest reasons. A young foreign gentleman, Bill Gates, was visiting New Delhi. He is the world's richest person. Any one who is a foreigner and a whitey and at the same time a billionaire is, these days, the object of cringing admiration on the part of our entire officialdom, beginning with the prime minister and ending with the lowliest joint secretary. Doordarshan, understandably, had to have its priorities right; Krishna Menon was obliged to make room for the world's richest gentleman.

Besides Bill Gates, another visitor was in town too. Henry Kissinger, once upon a time secretary of state of the great United States. He is now consultant to umpteen multinational corporations. Our media naturally had to make a beeline for him. Once again, proceedings of the meeting called to honour Krishna Menon had to be edited out in the reporting room.

In the circumstances, there was no surprise that Cheddi Jagan's passing received the barest mention in the media here. Be reasonable, not even one-half of one per cent of television viewers and newspaper readers in the country would have heard of Jagan, or would remember who he was. When he died earlier this month, he was president of the Republic of Guyana.

We are getting globalised at breakneck speed, but again, be reasonable, why should our media show any interest in Guyana, does that minor country have any money to spare for us? And yet, /for the few who care to remember those distant fifties, the name of Cheddi Jagan synchronised with dreams and hopes of the loftiest romantic genre.

Guyana was, for more than 150 years, the prize instance of peaceful, protestless colonial exploitation. Until Jagan arrived. His People's Progressive Party mobilised and united the till now altogether docile Indian and black sugar plantation workers, radical slogans rent the air, several hitherto unheard of things began to happen. In 1953, the PPP walked over the compradors on the payroll of the British planters in the first general election in Guyana. This instantly because global news. For Jagan's party went much beyond conventional patriotic slogans; it talked in terms of radical socialist reconstruction of the post-colonial economy.

Panic and consternation in the Western capitals. Were the wretched Communists, all of a sudden, getting a toe-hold on the fringe of Latin America? For once formally installed as prime minister, Jagan did not allow any grass to grow under his feet. He rushed to establish contacts with the Soviet bloc, and aligned with the forces that were at work to breathe life into the Non-Aligned Movement. He sent a message to Jawaharlal Nehru, who promptly despatched a member of the faculty from the Delhi School of Economics to advise Jagan on the methodology framework of co-ordinated economic planning.

The British were still formally in control of Guyana. A doddering Winston Churchill, still the British prime minister, was outraged by Jagan's audacity. It was time for his last hurrah. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles were equally concerned: communists in this backyard, it was synonymous with having reds under their bed. The Americans promised the British instant action. Churchill, on his part, ordered his warships to sail into the Caribbean Sea. Jagan was packed off. The brief days of radical dreaming were over. The media lost interest. The non-aligned governments, some of them protested in United Nations fora; their empty gestures were immediately recognised as such.

Was Jagan a Fidel Castro, at least six years ahead of Fidel Castro? Not quite. Castro survived and triumphed, Jagan could not, perhaps because he and his fraternity did not learn how to disappear into the hills. With his ejection, the Progressive People's Party, till then a solid phalanx of the black and the Indians, fell apart. The sequence of splits and bickerings continued over a long spell of two-and-a-half decades; a patchwork of reconciliation took place only in the course of the past decade. By then, it was a transformed world, the old co-ordinates were all gone. Cheddi Jagan was installed as Guyana's president, but the radical programme was, however, a faded cause.

Given that even Krishna Menon, the terror of the West in the fifties and the sixties, is a near forgotten name, and even in his own country, it is fair enough the Cheddi Jagan's name would cease to ring a bell. Guyana is a republic with a population of a sparse few millions, of whom migrant Indians constitute the majority. Our authorities have little interest in such minor countries though.

The Guyanese do not have surplus resources to lend to India; if anything, they might, good grief, enquire whether we have any sparable funds for them. Such countries are to be avoided. A theory of international relations has sort of emerged though a process of trial and error: we shun the company of the poor and make a beeline for the fat cats.

It was anyway the wrong week for Cheddi Jagan, whoever he was, to die. Bill Gates, the world's richest person, was visiting us. We, the champion panhandlers, went berserk. The prime minister, Union ministers, chief ministers of different States, principal civil servants, the leading lights of industry and commerce, prostrated themselves, abjectly, servilely, before this lanky young man. Our own cultural pattern of sycophancy would, it was assumed equally impress foreigners: because we lick their boots, they would flock to our country and flood it with goodies and capital funds.

Foreigners too are only humans, they do not mind the sycophancy they are the target of. But whether to sink their money here is an altogether different proposition. They have their own devices to assess facts, facts concerning this country's income and employment growth and savings and investment processes. If there is any hanky-panky in the estimation of production or employment in different sectors, they are able to find that out in double quick time. A nation under the hegemony of a social category infested by sycophants, these foreigners, who knows, could perhaps conclude, has little immediate prospects of sustainable growth.

Is not this where the difference with China shows up? In the case of the Middle Kingdom, foreign investors run after domestic decision-makers. The latter set the terms which foreigners have to accept. Over here, it is the other way round, we run after foreign investors; the running after is of little avail in case the objective reality is decked against us.

The objective reality is brought out by the kind of budgets Indian finance ministers present, year in and year out, addressed to 25 or 30 million of the citizenry at the top of the social scale. The rest, 900 million or more, are considered to be of no importance. In contrast, in China, the State's efforts are concentrated on raising the quality of living of the entire population of 1,200 million. Foreigners sit up: a potential market of 1.2 billion is immensely more attractive than one likely to consist of up to a bare 25 to 30 million.

Such thoughts will be regarded as otiose by those who currently matter in this country. These will fail to make the agenda, just as remembrance of the Menons and the Jagans has failed to.

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