by GARGA CHATTERJEE
Britain has decided to stop all financial aid grants to India after 2015. The largest post-Partition segment of the erstwhile British domains in South Asia has seen a GDP rate of growth that has been outstripping the ‘mother ship’ for quite a few years now. At long last, the proud father can look at the 65-year-old young man and say ‘Look at you. How much you have grown. You still don’t look like I looked in my youth, but that is OK. We were made of different stuff. They don’t make them like that anymore.’ As a rite of passage, the father has decided to discontinue pocket money. The confident son has acted adult and proudly stated that ‘aid is past, trade is future’.
But poverty is the present. And if we cannot hear the ‘giant sucking sound northwards’ that finance capital creates by investing in ‘emerging markets’, it will be the future. Data from the IMF for 2011 shows that measured in purchasing power parity terms, India’s share of the world GDP is 5.65 %. Around the time of the Battle of Palashi (Plassey for the Anglicized) in 1757, the subcontinent accounted for 25% of the world’s GDP (Angus Maddison’s The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective). This was slightly more than all of Western Europe’s share (Britain included). And then Britain happened. The Chinese Empire’s share of the world GDP was over 30% in the 1830s. The timing is crucial. For them too, Britain happened, in the form of the Opium Wars. Drug running and colonial empire building has always been closely linked.
In Britain’s decision, there is political expediency at play. Possibly the government cannot be seen to be showering largesse on a group of people whose public faces never tire of talking about their unfathomably deep appetite for market goods and their ‘arrival’ on the global scene. With huge egos pumped up by ill-gotten wealth, the vulgar trot of the ‘global Indian’ on the ‘international stage’ (from European holidays to the Commonwealth Games) is not appreciated by those Britishers whose social safety net is shrinking.
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