SHEKHAR GUPTA - Indian Express

Different Strokes by Sucheta Dalal

February 03, 2001

When the world felt Gujarat’s tremor
Burying old mindsets

If Gujarat is India’s most globalised state and the earthquake our first post-globalisation disaster, is it any surprise that the impact has even been felt at The Leela, the five-star hotel at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport. No, the hotel has not been deserted. It is filled to capacity, what with NRI relatives of the quake victims making overnight stops on the way to their home state. They are coming in not merely with concern and sympathy but also money and the promise of more. One reason the international community has been so forthcoming with help is indeed the preeminent status the Gujjus enjoy within the Indian diaspora.

That Gujarat is no Orissa shows not only in the NRI involvement and contribution but also in the very different manner in which the world media is covering the quake. You no longer have the same old stories of a Third World disaster. There is a very different kind of empathy this time. Rail crashes, ferryboat disasters, plagues and even cyclones and floods are easier to dismiss as typical Third World problems. After all, even floods and cyclones give you warnings and better governed nations are able to move people to safety. An earthquake, on the other hand, has that humbling quality.

What can a people do, as The New York Times pointed out in a marvelously touching editorial, when they lose faith in the firmness of the earth? Some of the richest and the most powerful countries in the world, the US and Japan in particular, have known the power of a genuine quake from close and nobody doubts that a subterranean twister of this intensity would have caused plenty of damage even in Osaka or Orange County. A quake, therefore, is not seen as a typical third world disaster, man-made or preventible. And when it happens in a state that has not merely India’s finest infrastructure, physical and human, when the collapsed structures are multistorey concrete blocks and not merely thatched huts, when relief websites are sprouting by the dozen, the world views it entirely differently. Amazing, isn’t it, how a little bit of prosperity converts pity into sympathy? Nobody is saying what else could you expect from these bungling Indians. They say, instead, what can anybody do about an earthquake of this scale? Incidentally, 7.9 is the widely accepted Richter rating on the quake the world over. Wonder for what metaphysical reason are our sarkari scientists still sticking to 6.9?

THAT is why, sitting smugly and safely away from the disaster zone, in a Manhattan hotel, it is possible to look at this quake as some kind of a global calamity rather than another of those disasters on our eastern seaboard. Surely, in the newspapers and on television screens there are stories of mismanaged relief, of foreign rescue teams not knowing where to go and of people’s anger.

But there are no hungry, begging faces, no mention of hunger and starvation. There is even some awe, particularly in the German press, over the quality of roads and telephones in Gujarat. Here is a scary thought. What if, in some macabre irony, this exposure to a ravaged Gujarat persuades the hordes of these ambulance-chasing international hacks on the disaster beat to somehow come back with the impression that this is the way even the rest of India looks. They will be in for a nasty shock the next time — God forbid — they go to cover a calamity in coastal Orissa. Or even Andhra Pradesh.

In the past we steadfastly refused to accept foreign aid and relief in our calamities. Even charitable relief was supposed to be channelled through official agencies. Now the Danes and the Norwegians and the Germans and so on can land straight at Ahmedabad and walk straight out looking for survivors to rescue much in the anyone-here-been-buried-and-needs-help manner.

Planes with relief supplies from Pakistan and Israel are parked close at the same airport and their crews even give on-the-spot TV interviews. Teams from more than a dozen countries, with state-of-the-art technologies, are already present in Gujarat. The government, instead of trying to control, restrict or even regulate these activities, has actually asked its missions to ease up on visas and generally give up the old cussedness. The favourite Gujarat story of the European newspapers, understandably, is about their own rescue teams. Two questions arise. Could this have happened even a couple of years ago? Could it have happened if the calamity, though still in Gujarat, was the plague instead of a quake?

One reason we are much less hesitant of accepting foreign help this time could be a simple one. A quake is not a national embarrassment like the plague, or even a drought. So you do not tend to get defensive the moment an outsider expresses sympathy. But equally significantly, the reason why we are a lot less suspicious of foreign help now than in the past is obviously our rapidly globalising mind. A more confident, solid, even if poor nation is less paranoid of the foreign hand. Surely, there was suspicion when the Chinese offered to send their seismic experts as there would have been if the Americans sent a planeload of microbiologists to pick the plague samples. But, overall, our ready acceptance of foreign help shows a rapidly modernising mindset that does not view the rest of the world in necessarily hostile terms.

IT is difficult to pinpoint exactly when this change came about and why and how but you could safely say that one reason is simply the success of the Indians abroad. It has given the rest of us a new assurance. It has persuaded the West to speak of us in less condescending terms. If the population of ethnic Indians is touching 1.7 million in the US, with a per household income about 50 per cent in excess of the American mainstream, and if the richest amongst them happen to be Gujaratis, it does change the psychological equation a bit.

But another turning point, let me suggest, was Kargil. The classical Indian suspicions of the West are rooted in our history of strategic insecurities. We look at it this way: The Chinese attacked us so unabashedly and yet the world went out and embraced them. The Pakistanis have been trying to wrest Kashmir from us and the entire West seems to side with them and has confirmed that view with its voting record on the UN Kashmir resolutions. Those who asked how a society with such a rich diaspora and whose elites did all their business in English could be so wary of the world, missed the point that Indian xenophobia was always more strategic than cultural.

And then Kargil happened. When a nation, after decades of strategic isolation, suddenly finds the world on its side in such a grave moment of crisis it is bound to leave a lasting impact on its mind. The US, the P-5, the Saudis and the Iranians — all the old rogues — had seemed to be such friendly powers during the Kargil war that it is now not so easy to view them all with the old suspicions again. At least not without any provocation.

Our economy, therefore, may still be a long way from genuine globalisation, our PSUs may still be under the thumb of the redoubtable joint secretary in the Government of India, ministry of this or that, but politically and philosophically we are more willing to reach out to the world than ever in the past. If our minds are opening up faster than our economy, it is a change for the better and we need to celebrate this even if it has taken the Gujarat quake to underline it for us.

Postscript: The very old German lady sitting next to me on the flight knocked down Dom Perignon faster than I swallowed my Evian, hoping it would work as a good antidote to jet lag. She was reading the popular magazine Bunte, with rap singer Sabrina Setlur on the cover. A bit much to celebrate her liaison with Boris Becker as yet another NRI success story but she is surely making more covers than Sabeer Bhatia or Kanwal Rekhi ever will.

‘‘Beautiful girl, from your country. But what’s wrong with her? Why is she going with Becker. He has nothing up there,’’ the German lady said, tapping her head gently with her champagne glass. ‘‘And where is she from? Gujarat? Are you also from Gujarat?’’

In New York, the devout Gujaratis have something else to worry about. The famous city magazine Timeout has Lord Vishnu on its cover but the caption describes Him as ‘‘Lakshmi, Goddess of Wealth’’. The Gujjus, as usual, have been in the forefront of the protest. But the editor found an escape when some callers confused the God on the cover with Krishna instead of Vishnu. You have so many gods, the editor said, that even you get confused. So why blame us if we mixed them?