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An antidote to bland approval

EU-INDIA RELATIONS — A Critique: Edited by Shazia Aziz Wülbers; Academic Foundation, 4772-73/23 Bharat Ram Road (23 Ansari Road), Darya Ganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 695.

This short, clear, and informative book is a welcome antidote to the bland public approval too often given to international organisations, treaties, and deals involving India. The critique is direct and well supported with detailed evidence. For example, in respect of aid, a fundamental problem is that the European Commission (E.C.), the administrative branch of the European Union (E.U.), is the main actor in E.U. development cooperation with India. While the E.U. as a who le rightly focuses on poverty alleviation — India has 400 million people in apparently permanent near-starvation — the E.C. has introduced concerns about governmental reform into the aid process. But aid then goes to states which meet the E.C. reform criteria rather than to those where it is most needed. The reform criteria are themselves not above suspicion; the E.C., notorious for its secretiveness, has a free-market agenda which is often at odds with the European Parliament’s stated commitments to fairness and justice; indeed, especially in respect of agriculture and mass poverty, the E.U., perhaps overriding the E.C., has sometimes abandoned demands for reductions in the role of the Indian state.

The under-examined topic of Indo-E.U. strategic issues receives some overdue attention here too. Despite the bleakly Hobbesian epistemology characteristic of many such, room for further cooperation is identified, and telling reminders are provided of earlier international — including British — equations of India with Pakistan (it is not widely known that it was the U.S. which coined the phrase “the economic miracle of Pakistan” in the 1960s). This passage leads into a demonstration of salutary differences between the E.U. and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). The E.U. is genuinely supranational though confederal, has no one state economically or militarily much more powerful than the others, and has extensive institutional processes for the resolution of bilateral disputes. The SAARC, in contrast, is far more top-down in conception and operation, and explicitly avoids bilateral issues. The argument put here, incidentally, amounts to an excellent caveat against the very idea of a science of comparative government, as well as a demonstration of the way philosophic issues are intrinsic to any social-scientific work that seeks to transcend sterile positivism.

Interestingly, the weaker papers reveal the considerable strengths of the other contributions. These weaker papers make too much of the E.U. as an economic entity and are clearly ignorant of its primarily political origins; one paper is also complacent on the U.S.-India relations, and says nothing about how money paid by India for PL480 wheat was directed by the Nixon administration to finance far-right candidates in Indian elections in the early 1970s. Similarly, although the Indo-E.U. summit in Lisbon in 2000 is mentioned, nothing is said about the summit’s context; it was initiated by the E.U. during a nasty trade war with the U.S., in which the E.U. faced substantial sanctions on exports to the U.S. and therefore sought trade partners elsewhere. Fortunately, Indian government officials knew exactly what the context was. One of these business-derived papers also says within the space of a few pages that the U.S. is India’s biggest trading partner and then that the E.U. holds that position. Furthermore, these papers rely on an unthinking economic determinism which would trouble even diehard Marxists.

Fortunately the other papers are much stronger. One of the best contrasts contemporary European society with its now well-established broad equality of condition and a history of a mighty working-class contribution to industrialisation and to the humanisation of industrial capitalism through mass working-class parties, and powerfully effective public services and institutions with the scarcely-credible inequalities and stratifications of Indian society. In India, some of the worst exclusion and oppression, motivated by religion, is perpetrated against Dalits and Adivasis, who together constitute almost a quarter of India’s population. Even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is quoted here as saying the extent of illiteracy in India is the result of an elite conspiracy (Myron Weiner, in one of his last works, despairingly concluded that child labour continues in India because it is essential to the maintenance of Indian social hierarchies). The highly-developed capacity of the Indian urban elites and middle classes to dilute and evade the issues is also noted, as is the tendency of public and private international bodies, not least the E.U., to deal almost exclusively with the upper-caste-dominated institutions of the Indian state and the Indian civil society.

While the paper on that topic is largely cautionary, it is at present hard to see if or how any grouping or tendency in India can play the transformative part documentedly played by the working class in Europe in the early 19th century. It seems unlikely that the French Revolution, in which an enraged peasantry slaughtered a brutal aristocracy and created their own republic, will be repeated in India, but it seems equally unlikely that the Indian ruling classes will follow, say, the British ruling classes and episodically relax their grip on the state enough to ward off violent revolution while yet maintaining their social pre-eminence. That this collection identifies such questions, that it reminds us of the significant differences between the E.U. and India, and in effect punctures any complacency about Indo-E.U. relations is a notable achievement.

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