Standing on the rubble of the United Nations headquarters building in Port-au-Prince 10 days ago, Shashi Tharoor removed a four-year-old stain on Indian diplomacy. The first Indian minister to ever set foot in Haiti, he told its president, René Garcia Préval, that New Delhi had not merely pledged five million dollars for relief after the devastating earthquake in one of the poorest countries of the world: it had already deposited the cash in the UN’s account in New York so that there was no delay in reaching help to those who needed it most in Haiti.
For a change, there was little red tape when it came to responding to this natural disaster. Slightly more than four years ago, on September 4, 2005 to be precise, many Indians had hung their heads in shame and embarrassment after the United Progressive Alliance government gave five million dollars in assistance to the richest nation on earth, the United States of America, to help victims of Hurricane Katrina in the American south.
The aid to the US was a decision that puzzled many people, including some of the very officials at the Indian embassy in Washington whose job it was to hand over the money to the American Red Cross.
That Indian aid to the US was diplomatically dumb, morally bankrupt and ethically unacceptable. On that occasion, this newspaper had highlighted the hollowness of New Delhi’s action with a picture that very day of how Sonia Gandhi was distraught at the conditions in a hospital in Uttar Pradesh. It was outrageously unethical that India should then have frittered away five million dollars on a notoriously corrupt organization like the American Red Cross when the crying demand for healthcare in UP could have been partly addressed with that kind of money.
But with the donation of five million dollars to the people of Haiti who are reeling under the devastation caused by last month’s earthquake, the stain caused by the irrational decision to rush help to the US has finally been wiped off.
Haiti was not on Tharoor’s itinerary when he set out on a 19-day trip to Africa and Latin America on January 12. After the earthquake displaced an estimated three million Haitians, in a rare display of timely coordination between various government agencies in New Delhi, including the Prime Minister’s Office and the ministry of external affairs, the junior foreign minister took the initiative to change his programme to include Port-au-Prince, relief aid was dispatched and everything else was done to demonstrate that India cared.
Tharoor’s stop in Port-au-Prince was necessary not only to demonstrate that India in the 21st century was a responsible global citizen, preoccupied not merely with what was happening in its neighbourhood, but even in places halfway across the earth. It was vital also because, as Shrikant Kishore, commander of the 141-strong Central Industrial Security Force personnel engaged in UN peacekeeping told Tharoor, “you have given us strength.” By sending the minister to Haiti, India swiftly signalled that the country was behind its men who were serving a noble cause under very difficult conditions far away from home.
After the Asian tsunami in 2004, Indian naval relief ships were the first to reach some of the affected communities, from Sri Lanka to Indonesia. Last month, by a coincidence, it was Indian blood which initially saved Haitian lives after the natural disaster. That was because only the day before the earthquake, the CISF personnel had given blood to the Red Cross in Port-au-Prince. That blood came in handy when the first victims were brought to hospitals in Haiti.
The CISF contingent had two doctors. They immediately began treating victims who sustained crash injuries. Since the doctors did not have amputation equipment, they could only be of limited service, but that was a moment of pride for India, indeed.
The other source of light from India amidst the darkness of Haiti’s continuing misery comes from that ubiquitous Calcutta-based institution, Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity and its Order of Brothers. For Tharoor, who spent considerable time with the Missionaries, there was the added satisfaction that Sister Patsy, who was leading the work of the nuns in Haiti, was from Kerala, which he represents in the Lok Sabha.
His now famous Blackberry, which was dead during a visit earlier to the Dominican Republic, began working at the precise moment when Tharoor was laying a wreath at the rubble of the UN headquarters and before meeting Sister Patsy and others. It was said that a small miracle was wrought that the first message that landed on Tharoor’s Blackberry was from the widow of his long-time friend at the UN, Luiz Carlos da Costa, secretary-general Ban Ki-moon’s principal deputy special representative in Haiti, who died in the earthquake. She asked Tharoor to pray for the victims of the disaster along with the Indian peacekeepers and other blue helmets.
It is quite likely that Tharoor’s visit to Latin America would have entirely escaped the attention of this columnist had it not been for his initiative to make a timely detour to Haiti, ensuring that India demonstrably shared the hope and the heartbreak even of a people so far away but in dire need. It did not come a day sooner for a country that is aspiring to soon take a seat at the global high table.
Once Tharoor’s Haiti visit prompted an examination of his Latin American itinerary, it was interesting to discover that this minister was actually addressing a chronic shortcoming in the Indian system: a ministerial and bureaucratic habit of promising the world during a high-level visit, either to a foreign country or on a return visit to India, and then forgetting all about those promises and completely failing to do any follow up.
The annals of India’s bilateral relationships, especially in Africa, West Asia and Latin America — which are all looked after by Tharoor — are full of such unfulfilled promises. When the Dominican Republic, for instance, opened its embassy in New Delhi on May 1, 2006, the then minister of state for external affairs, Anand Sharma, promised that country’s foreign minister, Carlos Morales Troncoso, that India too would set up a mission in Santo Domingo.
Nearly four years later, no one in New Delhi would have remembered that promise had not Tharoor pored over the files preparatory to his travel to Santo Domingo. As a result, the normally circuitous and time-consuming procedures for opening an Indian embassy in the Dominican Republic have just been expedited and the Union cabinet will soon approve the proposal. The Dominican Republic is at a crossroads of Hispanic- and English-speaking America: some of its people, descendants of freed slaves from the US, speak a dialect of English known as Samaná English.
Because of its role at the linguistic crossroads of the western hemisphere and because the Dominican Republic is a member of three American trade blocs with extensive free trade arrangements to access large markets in the region, an Indian presence in Santo Domingo was a promise that should have been fulfilled as soon as it was made by Sharma.
It was the same story in Peru, another country which Tharoor visited last fortnight. The last time there were any signs of life in Indo-Peruvian relations was when the present foreign secretary, Nirupama Rao, was ambassador in Lima: that was between 1995 and 1999. After a decade of subsequent inactivity, Tharoor persuaded the Peruvians to offer as many as 65 unexploited mines in this mineral-rich country to Indians.
What is the guarantee that Peru will follow up on its offer? The current president, Alan Garcia, is term-limited and cannot contest the next election due in 2011. His most likely successor is Lima’s mayor, Luis Castañeda Lossio, who fêted Tharoor with an honorary citizenship of the capital city. Lossio’s only request was that Tharoor should persuade Ratan Tata to send that new symbol of Indian soft power, the Tata Nano, to Lima as soon as possible. It does not look like a bad deal: a few Nanos in exchange for 65 unexploited mines.
Name of Source: The Telegraph