From Empire to Island: Britain Will Pay the Price for Xenophobia

India already pays a price as trade with its close neighbours is only 7.25 percent of total, writes Abheek Barman

(Photo: Around the world in eighty days play)

In 1872, a wealthy Englishman called Phileas Fogg bet members of his club that he could circumnavigate the world in 80 days. His confidence stemmed from a new railway line in India. The wager: $2.5 million in today’s value.

This is the plot of Jules Verne’s much-loved ‘Around the World in 80 Days,’ published in 1873. The journey takes Fogg, his butler Jean Passepartout, a tenacious policeman and a Bengali widow, Aouda, on a trip that starts in London, passes through Suez, Egypt; Bombay and Calcutta, India; Victoria, Hong Kong; Yokohama, Japan, San Francisco and New York, America and back home.

In 1624, the English poet John Donne wrote:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.

Well, now the Brits have gone and turned Donne’s wisdom on its head, by leaving the continent – the European Union. From an Empire where the sun never set, Britain is now an island ghetto. Donne, Verne, Fogg and Passepartout would have shaken their heads in disbelief.

Before WW-I in 1914, the world was an open space, free for anyone to travel and live in. A good example is Amitav Ghosh’s non-fiction book, ‘In an Antique Land.’ Here, he tries to trace the life and times of a Jewish-Indian trader, Abraham Ben Yiju and his Indian munshis, Ashu and Bomma, doing business in Egypt in the 12th century, through their correspondence.

Hammerlock on Trade and Investment

This was no exception, but the rule: Even during Europe’s internecine wars of the 16th to 19th centuries, merchants, agents and visitors moved freely across Asia and Europe without too many hassles.

Paperwork, travel restrictions – and walls of bureaucracy and paranoia that encouraged these – sprang up in 1914, at the outbreak of war. In India, it was introduced as part of the Defence of India Rules, and continued thereafter. Why not? By then, every nation state had similar rules.

This put a hammerlock on global trade and investment between 1914 and the early 1980s. Economic historians call this ‘autarky’ – closed economies. Autarky survived WW-II: hatred generated by the Cold War restricted economic transactions to pockets. The ‘capitalist’ West would trade among itself; the ‘communist’ bloc with its allies; India, somewhere in between, got the worst of both worlds.

Fallout of Recession

Nationalist, neo-Nazi, ‘conservative’ forces are on the rise in Europe.

The underlying factor is misery brought about by the Great Recession of 2009, which shows no signs of letting up. ‘Leave’ supporters in the UK point to fruit, vegetable, cheese and wine imported from other European nations as symbols of economic serfdom.

East Europeans, willing to work for low wages, are blamed for snatching jobs from ‘Britishers’. Yet, among these ‘Britishers’ I count my first cousin, who went to the UK in the 1980s and is a prosperous, respected researcher in medicine.

He is an immigrant who, ironically, voted to leave the EU. He is revolted by the idea of more immigrants – and ‘Muslims’ – streaming in and spoiling ‘British’ culture. This of course, is a classic example of folks already inside a train compartment, trying to push out those trying to get in.

Supporters of leaving the EU celebrate at a party hosted by Leave.eu in central London as they watch results come in after EU referendum. (Photo: AP)

Blow to Liberal Ideals

Britain has set a new standard of xenophobia and racism. It has mortally wounded liberal ideals nurtured in Europe for over 400 years. Now, who’ll mock Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall around Mexico? Who has the moral authority to criticise the rabid Right in Dutch, French or Italian politics?

Certainly not Indians. We’ve set world-beating benchmarks for bigotry at home. Kashmiris can’t be trusted, because, well, aren’t they anti-national? Everyone from the north east is a ‘chinki’, their women have suspect morals because they wear skirts and high heels, and their menfolk fight our valiant jawans, when they’re not eating dogs.

In Bollywood, 1968’s Padosan was regarded as a comedy hit. But its portrayal of the ‘madrasi’ music teacher Master Pillai (played by Mehmood, no madrasi himself) as a villainous buffoon accurately reflected racist prejudices.

Any excuse – religion, ethnicity, colour, language, diet – is good enough for one Indian to scorn another. But don’t get me wrong: we also export the loathing generously. India does not have a single neighbour with which it has genuinely cordial relations.

Lessons for India

The distance between Mumbai and Karachi is 882 km; that between Kolkata and Dhaka is 249 km. The India-Pakistan and India-Bangladesh trade, exports plus imports, was 0.74 percent and 2.14 percent, respectively, of India’s total trade last year.

In contrast, India-North America trade was 35.5 percent, even though Mumbai and New York are roughly 12,550 km apart. Mumbai and Frankfurt are 6,600 km apart; the distance to London is around 7,200 km. Yet, trade with the EU (which included Britain till June 23), was a little less than 35 percent of our total last year.

South Asia has been called the least economically-integrated part of the world with due reason: India’s total trade with its immediate neighbours is a measly 7.25 percent of its total.

This is the real cost of fear and loathing of ‘others’. India pays a very high price for its scorn for neighbours. After Brexit, the UK will have to cough up its own xenophobia tax.

(The writer is a Delhi-based senior journalist.)

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