Author: Ajit Kumar Jha
Publication: The India
Express
Date: September 25,
2000
Most Americans aptly
fit Thomas Hobbes' description of humans: for them reason is the ``spy
and scout'' of passion. And in love and partnership are hidden self-interest
and need. To satisfy their interests, both the Bills need India.
And because both are terribly smart, they have decided to charm us by appealing
to our hearts rather than our heads.
Bill Clinton's need for
India is both personal and political. Having been caught philandering,
he needed a catharsis. Being a spiritual civilisation, India has
been the last resort of all sinners, junkies and hippies in the past.
Devastated after Monicagate, Clinton's spin doctors decided that dancing
with poor Rajasthani women and talking of female empowerment would somehow
remove his taint of infidelity, purify his soul. The Taj Mahal visit,
without the Hillary he betrayed, just added the right touch of Devdas.
Wooing India also satisfied
a bigger need for Clinton. Suffering from retirement pangs almost
at the end of his career, the passage to India could very well immortalise
him. Remember the Cold War era when President Nixon achieved such
a feat by sending Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to China, to forge
the immensely successful ping-pong diplomacy. Courting a Communist
China to isolate the major foe, the Soviet Union, was for the Americans,
the need of the hour. Today, forging a strategic partnership with
India, the world's largest democracy and perhaps the world's biggest untapped
market, is for the globalising Americans, the need of the times.
A nuclear India ready
to sign the NPT, with no overtly expansionist design, and grappling with
terrorism and structural reforms, suits President Clinton's òf40óweltangschaung.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are hotbeds of terrorism and, therefore, dispensable.
But democracies have a record of never attacking each other so why can't
they be `political partners' and trading allies in the new global order?
And with a million-strong wealthy and highly educated diaspora to boot,
Indians can be relied upon even for campaign finance. Not to talk
of cheap cyber labour. Clearly for Clinton, India fits his bill.
For Microsoft chairman,
Bill Gates, India serves both his short-term and long-term interests.
Facing the Democratic party's wrath and Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's
ruling dividing Microsoft into two, Gates, sleepless in Seattle, needed
to search for greener pastures. Other than hardselling his latest
innovations, the Microsoft.NET and the Windows Millennium, Gates wanted
to ally with Indian business groups such as Infosys, that has a comparative
advantage in terms of cost competitiveness and technical expertise.
In a persuasive piece ``From Microsoft Word to Microsoft World,'' Internet
scholar Nathan Newman argues: ``The raw fact is that Microsoft is now a
financial behemoth which, when it fails to create viable competitive software,
readily uses its financial resources to buy out start-ups and key technology
to maintain its stranglehold on the industry.''
Less than five million
of us know what a PC is but that doesn't deter Gates. His long-term
vision has fathomed the potentials of e-governance and e-commerce in a
developing country just awaking from its long slumber. While it's
India that has feted Gates (NASSCOM's Dewang Mehta even said, ``We love
you.''), it's Bharat that's key to the bottom-line of this billionaire
Geek. Remember Microsoft controlled the operating system of 94.1
per cent of PCs sold in the market even as it finished off a $150-million
investment in Apple Computer to tie the remaining 5.9 per cent of new desktop
sales into an alliance. Such is Gates's massive appetite. With
its monopoly broken in the US and its hegemony challenged in Europe, Microsoft's
gameplan is to deepen its involvement in the developing countries.
And given India's numero uno position in this rapidly expanding market,
and the relatively low wages demanded by its highly trained software labour
force, the burgeoning tribe of body-shoppers, Gates has ended up becoming
thenumber one tapper and poacher of this country's potentialities.
Surely with both Indian labour and capital under his belt, Gates is so
much in love with India that he adores being called BillG.
It will be pointless
to deny that India is equally in love with the two Bills. Never has
any world leader, least of all an American President, been mobbed in Parliament
in the way Clinton was right after his address to the joint session.
MPs, cutting across the political spectrum, fell head over heels, just
to shake his hands. Shahjehan might have built the Taj Mahal, but
it is Clinton's visit that is now aggressively selling it to the world.µThe
Microsoft chairman faced an even warmer welcome. CEOs and business
magnates, including the òf40óswadeshi variety, jostled with
one another to get a òf40ódarshan of the Almighty BillG.
The marathon with the ten chief ministers provided a touching as well as
an amusing site. Gates, like the anchor of òf40óKaun
Banega Crorepati, mesmerised his seekers. One chief minister after
another from far-flung states, like schoolchildren thrilled after passing
their exams, said Present, Sir, and babbled `my state is the best governed
BillG.' Charmed by Bill's fabled billions, all of them patiently awaited
the locking of their fate. Never has any NDC meeting ever generated
such discipline, such euphoria and such dedicated focus on basic concerns
of governance.
Indians possess a native
enterprise that was in evidence when Marwari traders of Calcutta outwitted
their British counterparts, between the two World Wars. The colonial
masters ridiculed and exploited it. Even the post-colonial state
repressed that entrepreneurship. Indians love the two Bills because
they are the first outsiders, immensely successful ones, who recognised
their inherent talents. Christopher Columbus might have been searching
for India 500 years ago. Today, at the turn of the millennia, the
two Bills have rediscovered an India that we as Indians are proud of.
But let the passions of the two Bills not cloud our reason. Because
unless the Rajasthani women who danced with one Bill and the Chief Minister
who drooled over the other don't get together, the love for the two Bills
could prove to be merely a crush. Like what one intern had for her
Boss.
