By M D Nalapat
Unlike
the now unwelcoming United Kingdom under Teresa May as first Home
Secretary and subsequently as the Prime Minister, the United States has
for decades welcomed professionals from India, three million of whom are
now citizens of that country. Across the US, communities of Indian
Americans have shown what the people of this land are capable of, if
freed of the oppressive restraints of the colonial model of
administration that is still the norm in Lutyens Delhi, and from there
in the rest of the country. Indeed, US citizens of Indian descent are
calculated as having the highest income per person of any ethnic group
in that immensely variegated country. Their performance gives the lie to
those who claim that there is a Colour Bar in the US, and that those
not of European descent have an advantage because of skin colour. The US
has come a long way from the days of segregation of the races, and in
this odyssey, among the heroes are Martin Luther King, Lyndon Baines
Johnson and Barack Hussein Obama, the country’s first African-American
Head of State and Government. However, it is disquieting that the past
few decades have seen a rise in inequality, and a constriction of
opportunities for those at the lower end of the economic pyramid. Much
of this has been caused by the ballooning power of Wall Street, which
has found no more loyal servitor than former Presidents George W. Bush
and William Jefferson Clinton. It had been expected that Barack Obama
would eliminate or at the least dilute this control over so much of
policy within the Washington Beltway, but the 44th President was careful
to choose Wall Street-vetted and approved hands to fill key slots, a
line of approach surprisingly resorted to even by the 45th President of
the United States, Donald Trump, who has chosen Wall Street’s own in
several key positions, including that of Treasury Secretary. It remains
to be seen if Wall Street, which is heavily invested in and dependent on
profits from China, will permit the new administration to fulfil its
pre-election pledge of being tough on the world’s second biggest economy
and Asia’s largest power.
Across the world, the United States has
been admired as an exemplar of freedom, hence it was perhaps not the
most appropriate action to impose a travel ban on six countries, the way
the Trump administration did within days of settling into their new
offices. While the countries selected certainly had more than a
sprinkling of terrorists in their midst, so do France or Belgium, not to
mention Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In fact, the latter country had the
doubtful distinction of having its nationals almost wholly responsible
for carrying out the 9 September 2001 terror attack on the United
States, an attack that changed the very chemistry of governance on the
globe, by making internal security the pre-occupation for several
governments, overriding concerns of accelerating growth. An omnibus ban
on travellers from an entire country is very similar to the responses of
the Ministry of Home Affairs in Lutyens Delhi in the past, whose mantra
has been “when in doubt, block, block and block again”. There was even a
mentally challenged policy of preventing a visitor with a valid visa of
returning to India for six months after a visit. Why such a measure, or
several others of similar levels of irrationality and foolishness were
resorted to, remains a mystery to those who are not part of the pampered
Lutyens set. Their approach has cost the country heavily, not least in
terms of growth, and it would be unwise for the United States to follow
the example set by Lutyens Delhi in the past. There should be careful
vetting, certainly, and those with the slightest probability of
indulging in acts of violence and terror need to be denied visas, but
genuine cases, including those involving family visits, health and
education should be permitted. The action of the court in Hawaii (the
home state of that close friend of India, Representative Tulsi Gabbard)
in blocking the Trump administration’s latest country-specific travel
ban should be the trigger for a reconsideration of such a blunderbuss
approach. The US should ban bans.
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