DO INDIANS QUALIFY AS ‘ANTI-IMMIGRANT , COLONIALIST BIGOTS?”

Lorraine McNeill, the good leftist that she is, declares hers to be a vision of “anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, anti-racist, anti-misogynist, anti-homophobic social change.” LC July 9/07 For socialists, you see, it is all about human rights, not the environment. The relationship between man and man (oops, that dates me) …the relationship between humans takes precedence over the relationship between humans and nature---which doesn’t even warrant a mention. OK. Fine.

But speaking of “anti-colonialist”, one of the greatest “anti-colonialists” of all time, and a socialist too, Shri Jawaharlal Nehru, stated firmly in 1960: “We should be a far more advanced nation if our population were about half what it is now.” He wanted only 215 million people rather than the 430 million it had then.

Nehru’s successors did not follow his prescription, so that by 2005 India had 1,105 millions, 40% of whom lived in dire poverty despite 8% economic growth. Now its population is 1.2 billion and what little is left of its wilderness is being rapidly chewed up. With a shrinking land mass and a rapidly increasing population next door in Bangladesh that is even poorer and eager to penetrate Indian borders, India has built 1550 miles of fence in the past seven years, and will build another 500 miles more in a $1.2 billion project to keep Bangledeshi out. In closing its borders India is retroactively acknowledging Nehru’s insight. As Ajai Sahni of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management put it, “India has enough nightmares of its own without adding to them.”

The question I would put to Lorraine and her comrades on the LC is this, in sealing their borders and protecting what is left of their wilderness and forests from the prospect of an invasion of 150 million Bangladeshis, and following Nehru’s advice in keeping the national population down, are the Indians “racist, anti-immigrant bigots”? “Colonialists”? “White nationalists”? Or do people in the Southern Hemisphere get a free pass to do these sorts of things but not whitey? Americans can’t build a fence on the Mexican border but Indians can build a fence along Bangladesh and Pakistan?

Do you think there are any Indians on left-wing threads right now trying to convince other Indians that there is no problem at all in having 1.2 billion people in their country, that it is just a matter of getting middle class bastards to reduce their consumption so that the floodgates can be thrown open to those 150 million Bangledeshis? Reduce your footprint but increase the number of footprints. Solid left/green logic. Just buy some fluorescent bulbs, ride a bike and become a vegetarian and hell, the sky’s the limit. Right?

Oh, and get rid of capitalism. That will solve all of the world’s problems. Let North Korea lead the way.



Tim Murray