Aid with strings is unacceptable

The very day that the Indian Air Force announced that its $10.2 bn MMRCA contract would go to French Dassault's Rafale, the British House of Commons erupted with anger. One MP put it succinctly, "How can a country, let alone a former colony, that receives so much in British aid, choose the French over us?"

The comments coming out hence called for freezing about £250 mn in British Aid to India. The Indian media retaliated by quoting Pranab Mukherjee from a past conversation, wherein he said that British aid was 'peanuts' and that "we don't need it." Yet, the dichotomy seems to continue - a British Government weary of giving aid to India and an Indian Government weary of accepting it - but the aid still flows!


The truth of the matter is that India does need that aid. The few tens of thousands of children who received food and education because of that aid need it. It's all very well for politicians to claim, in association with the chattering class, that India has grown enough to reject British aid. But the truth is that India has the most poor people in the world and some of them are not just below the poverty line, they are below the starvation line. They need that aid - and the Indian Government has not, in 60+ years, been able to pull them out of poverty. Hard, cold facts. But facts.


Then again, we should also look at this in perspective. Britain occupied India for over 200 years and sucked the economic life out of it. Indians became British subjects, meant to do menial, clerical tasks and buy goods from their British paymasters. The British colonization of India was the root cause of India being born as one of the poorest nations in the world in 1947. The British cannot simply walk out after sucking the life out of a nation for 200 years - that aid is a small return for the wrongs committed on India during the occupation. Whether British MPs would like to acknowledge it or not, the truth remains that colonialism is still the cause of many failed states, broken economies and instability throughout the world. And British aid to India - and indeed, to many of her former colonies - should be seen as a small acknowledgement of the wrongs committed then.


Therefore, Britain must not believe its aid to be meant to push through diplomatic aims. Indeed, aid is usually meant to do just that - just see India's lines of credit to its neighbours - but that equation changes when you look at India and Britain, whose economies are, amazingly, nearly at par from a macro-perspective. India cannot be expected to kowtow to British interests in return for aid which, truly speaking, is a small amount in the overall aid that Britain gives. The British should learn to compete with the world, including France, instead of cribbing about how their country has become a has-been in International politics. 

Indo-British ties are indeed strong, but that does not mean one is negotiating from a position of weakness. If the British want to give aid, they should look at those mothers in UP who go hungry at night so that their children don't. That should be the strategic aim of Britain. If not, then truly, we don't need that aid.