Call this the double standards decade, or century, or millennium. Or call it an unrecognizable transformation of regional geo-politics post-11 September. For decades, India spoke loftily from the United Nations rostrum about Gandhi, ahimsa, nonalignment. Its prime minister of today wrote teary-eyed poems in memory of the Hiroshima dead. And then, with Atalji firmly at the helm, India decides to build the Bomb in earnest. Overnight, diplomats, media analysts and apologist academics willingly change their tune and compete for outdated hawkishness.
India used to rail against the Seventh Fleet and wanted the United States out of Diego Garcia, and now without batting an eyelid they offer all sorts of airstrips and support to the United States. Today, Diego Garcia is a fait accompli for the Pentagon, and not a peep out of South Block. As for the Mahatma, he is an embarrassment for those who want to globalise and go nuclear.
When the American ambassador to Nepal openly castigated the government earlier this year in the presence of the late King Birendra, chiding it for corruption – do you think he left some space for introspection? The ambassador's concern, like that of all good people, was Nepal's tardy development. But what of the fact that USAID had spent 50 years in Nepal (in fact, the occasion was to mark that milestone) as long as Nepal has been "developing". It must be mighty tempting to put all the blame of Nepal's underdevelopment on Nepali fatalism and corruption. You would have expected mature aid agencies to realise by now that pouring money into poverty is not going to reduce it. Perhaps there would be questions about why the breeding ground for Nepal's Maoists is actually the very region of the Rapti valley where USAID had its biggest integrated projects over the Panchayat decades.
Still on the subject of detached donors. There must be something to be said about the annual migration of the entire donor community out of the Subcontinent during the northern hemisphere summer. Why is it that the summer vacation comes above every other need of a developing country? The delays these cause in decision-making are almost as serious as the tardiness of our local bureaucracies.