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New York Times | President Bush Goes to India    [

    Bush in India: Just Not Welcome
    By Arundhati Roy
    The Nation

    Monday 27 February 2006

    On his triumphalist tour of India and Pakistan, where he hopes to wave imperiously at people he considers potential subjects, President Bush has an itinerary that's getting curiouser and curiouser.

    For Bush's March 2 pit stop in New Delhi, the Indian government tried very hard to have him address our parliament. A not inconsequential number of MPs threatened to heckle him, so Plan One was hastily shelved. Plan Two was to have Bush address the masses from the ramparts of the magnificent Red Fort, where the Indian prime minister traditionally delivers his Independence Day address. But the Red Fort, surrounded as it is by the predominantly Muslim population of Old Delhi, was considered a security nightmare. So now we're into Plan Three: President George Bush speaks from Purana Qila, the Old Fort.

    Ironic, isn't it, that the only safe public space for a man who has recently been so enthusiastic about India's modernity should be a crumbling medieval fort?

    Since the Purana Qila also houses the Delhi zoo, George Bush's audience will be a few hundred caged animals and an approved list of caged human beings, who in India go under the category of "eminent persons." They're mostly rich folk who live in our poor country like captive animals, incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically dispossessed over the centuries.

    So what's going to happen to George W. Bush? Will the gorillas cheer him on? Will the gibbons curl their lips? Will the brow-antlered deer sneer? Will the chimps make rude noises? Will the owls hoot? Will the lions yawn and the giraffes bat their beautiful eyelashes? Will the crocs recognize a kindred soul? Will the quails give thanks that Bush isn't traveling with Dick Cheney, his hunting partner with the notoriously bad aim? Will the CEOs agree?

    Oh, and on March 2, Bush will be taken to visit Gandhi's memorial in Rajghat. He's by no means the only war criminal who has been invited by the Indian government to lay flowers at Rajghat. (Only recently we had the Burmese dictator General Than Shwe, no shrinking violet himself.) But when Bush places flowers on that famous slab of highly polished stone, millions of Indians will wince. It will be as though he has poured a pint of blood on the memory of Gandhi.

    We really would prefer that he didn't.

    It is not in our power to stop Bush's visit. It is in our power to protest it, and we will. The government, the police and the corporate press will do everything they can to minimize the extent of our outrage. Nothing the happy newspapers say can change the fact that all over India, from the biggest cities to the smallest villages, in public places and private homes, George W. Bush, the President of the United States of America, world nightmare incarnate, is just not welcome.

    Go to Original

    President Bush Goes to India
    The New York Times | Editorial

    Tuesday 28 February 2006

    When President Bill Clinton went to India six years ago, he danced to folk music with women in a rural Rajasthani village, ate bowls of black lentil stew at a posh restaurant in New Delhi, and spotted a rare Bengal tiger at a wildlife reserve south of Jaipur. He was cheered wildly in India's Parliament.

    President Bush's visit to the world's second most populous nation will likely be less entertaining visually; Mr. Bush, after all, isn't even planning to visit the Taj Mahal, let alone address India's legislature, which both nations have decided is too raucous to risk an appearance by this president. But Mr. Bush's two-day visit, to begin tomorrow, is a far more significant presidential trip, for both strategic and economic reasons.

    Relations between the United States and India have never been more important, thanks to global terror in the post-Sept. 11 world, the search for sustainable energy resources and the United Nations' pledge to halve world poverty by 2015. More than 500 million of the world's poor are Indian villagers. India is also home to one the largest Muslim populations in the world.

    So it's a pity that this trip, which should focus American attention on such a rich array of issues, now revolves largely around whether India and America will manage to conclude a nuclear deal that shouldn't have been initiated to begin with.

    The United States is at an important crossroad in its relations with India, home to more than one billion people and an economy that is growing at around 6 percent every year.

    For decades after India's independence, American policy toward the huge country was one of adversarial neglect. During the cold war, Washington viewed India through the narrow prism of the geopolitics of that era. And since the collapse of the Soviet Union, things haven't gotten that much better. Relations between the United States and India chilled when India tested a nuclear bomb in 1998, going further south after Washington imposed punitive sanctions. Now the Bush administration appears to be looking at India primarily as a counterbalance to China's growing ascendancy.

    Against that backdrop, Mr. Bush would be well employed simply building bridges between the world's two largest democracies and focusing on economic issues of common concern.

    The president is planning the obligatory trip to a center of high technology, although White House strategists, mindful of election-year fears in the United States about call centers and outsourcing, chose the more diversified city of Hyderabad instead of the call-center capital, Bangalore. Hyderabad has a big Muslim population, so it is also a chance for Mr. Bush to try to counter some of the damage done lately to relations between Muslims and the West.

    But there's not enough substance to these parts of Mr. Bush's schedule to disguise the fact that this trip is built around a bad nuclear deal.

    President Bush's wrongheaded decision last year to make an end run around the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by agreeing to share civilian nuclear technology with New Delhi took America's contain-China-by-building-up-India strategy a step too far. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty's basic bargain has been to reward countries that renounced nuclear weapons with the opportunity to import sensitive nuclear technology to help meet their energy needs. For decades, America has imposed nuclear export restrictions on India - and Pakistan, for that matter - in response to those countries' refusal to sign the nonproliferation treaty and their open development of nuclear weapons.

    This carrot-and-stick approach has dissuaded many other countries capable of building or buying nuclear arms from doing so, from South Korea to Turkey to Saudi Arabia. Now President Bush wants to carve out an exception for India. That's the worst possible message to send to other countries - Iran comes to mind - that America and its nuclear allies in Europe are trying to keep off the nuclear weapons bandwagon. Already, Pakistani officials are requesting the same deal for their country, although it is a request that is unlikely to be granted.

    Congress would have to approve this nuclear deal, and it should kill it. If lawmakers approved the arrangement with India, other countries that signed on to the nonproliferation treaty would be tempted to reconsider the cost-benefit bargain that kept them from developing nuclear weapons.

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