WSWS : News & Analysis : Asia : India
Bush travels to South Asia in pursuit of key strategic partnership with India
By Keith Jones
28 February 2006
US President George W. Bush travels to South Asia this week with the aim of
cementing a strategic and global partnership with India. According to his
aides, the trip is among the most important that Bush has made in his
entire presidency.
Rhetoric aside, the Bush administration has two interconnected objectives.
First, it wants to ensure that corporate America plays a major and
ever-expanding role in Indias rapidly expanding economyas exploiter of
cheap labor in the offshore-oriented information technology and
business-processing sectors, as participant in public-private partnerships
(PPPs) aimed at furnishing India with the transport and energy
infrastructure needed to more tightly bind it to the world capitalist
economy, and as purveyor of weapons and weapon-systems to Indias
burgeoning military.
The Bush administration is especially interested in prying open Indias
retail trade sectorin which tens of millions are employed in small,
unregulated businesses for want of proper, full-time jobsto companies like
Wal-Mart and in gaining greater access to Indias agriculture sectorwhich
continues to provide over 60 percent of Indians with their livelihoodfor
agri-business giants like Monsanto.
While Bush will tout the rise in Indias GDP as a spectacular free market
success story, the post-1991 dismantling of Indias nationally regulated
economy has been accompanied by a rapid growth of social inequality and
economic insecurity. In democratic India hundreds of millions of people
must struggle to survive on less than a $1 per day and education and health
care have for all intents and purposes been privatized with only the
poorest of the poor using the dilapidated public education and health systems.
The second and even more important objective of Bushs trip is to harness
Indiathrough increased military, civilian nuclear, and geo-political
collaborationto Washingtons drive for global supremacy. In short, the US
wants to transform a rising India into an economic, military and
geo-political counter-weight to China.
Last March, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice publicly announced that
the US wants to help India become a world power. Subsequently, Washington
and New Delhi initialed a series of agreements meant to pave the way for
enhanced military cooperation, including sales of advanced US military
equipment and joint foreign interventions without United Nations sanction.
In a patent attempt to use the Indian elites lust for recognition as a
global power and to give a democratic veneer to its predatory foreign
policy, the Bush administration proposed, and Indias United Progressive
Alliance (UPA) government accepted, the creation of a US-India Global
Democracy Initiative, under which the US and India will work together to
promote democracy in Asia and around the globe. (The precedent for such
collaboration is Afghanistan, whose conquest by the US in 2001 was
sanctioned by the Indian government and whose US-installed government has
enjoyed strong political and financial support from India ever since.)
However, far and away the most pivotal agreement in realizing the Bush
administrations objective of harnessing India to the USs global
geo-political strategy and ambitions is the proposed Indo-US nuclear accord.
full: http://wsws.org/articles/2006/feb2006/bush-f28.shtml
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