Carter in India
Paul Macdonald
New Delhi The village of Daulatpur-Nasirabad may lie twenty miles or so to the southwest of the Indian capital and it may, unusually for India, have a double-barrelled name. Virginia Water, however, it isn't. It's all dust and chickens (26,705 of them, to be precise), hookahs and handlooms, a plant that makes methane gas out of cow dung (but isn't actually quite working), one hundred radio sets and, in the yellow mud building that passes for a town hall, one splendid Indian-made black and white television set. Such is rural India on urban India's front doorstep — and last Tuesday, all swept out and gleaming, Daulatpur-Nasirabad crept nervously into the headlines by having the dubious privilege of a visitation from no less a deity than Jimmy Carter, Rashtrapathi, as they say here, of America.
The White House said that the hour which the Carters spent in this Indian Akenfield was 'unplanned — well, we decided eighteen hours beforehand that he'd go.' The American Embassy, however, said it had dispatched two field teams to the place as long ago as last October; when it was first suggested that the man from the plains of the south might like to meet some men from the plains of the east. In the event, it all made what Jody Powell said afterwards has 'the fixings for a darn good campaign film for '79', and viewers of the next American campaign can be sure they'll have the trip thrust down their corporate throats two Novembers from now. Try and get him in all that dust,' yelled Mr Powell to a cameraman at one stage. 'Dust is just great.'
Nothing could be easier, of course, than to poke fun at the whole exercise. There were some memorable moments: the sight of US Air Force Lieutenant Peterson, the man who carries the President's bomb codes in a black leather briefcase labelled `if found return to military liaison office, the White House, Washington', moving ponderously through the mud and straw holdlit bunches of marigold garlands discarded by his Commander-in-Chief. The sight of Evan S. Dobelle, the US Chief of Protocol, fiddling with the plastic viewmaster (complete with colour pictures of the state of Georgia) the President was to give to the village school. `Goddam this thing, why'n hell won't it work?' No batteries, someone pointed out: and so, while Mr Carter was busily inspecting manure, or a sugar-cane crusher, or something, batteries were found and fitted and, with seconds to spare, the colour pictures of Georgia flickered onto the small screen. 'Neat little mothers, these viewmasters,' said a secret service man. 'Bet it gets bust out here pretty quick.' Like I said, it's easy to laugh. There was the matter of the brand new Gobar gas plant. A splendid device that turns cow dung into gas for cooking, lighting, or for running small generators. DaulatpurNasirabad's plant was installed two days ago. But the weather in the Haryana flatlands has been too chilly of late for the mixture to work properly. 'We had to add a few chemicals to make the gas for your Mr Carter,' explained an obliging young man from the State Agriculture Ministry. But he obviously hadn't added quite enough. For when the single gas lamp was turned on it flickered dimly for a second or two, then went phut. The President was reduced to asking technical questions about the dung. `Do you use your own, or bring it in from outside?' he inquired of a fellow-farmer. 'He uses all his own,' intoned the everhovering Morarji Desai, who has a special interest in matters like this.
There were some touching scenes for those of an imperial persuasion. Tucked into one dusty corner of a yard, a little off the President's route, were three 'old men, listening to a commentary on a battered wireless set that, despite the Hindi of the announcer, had an unmistakably Arlottian tone about it. We tried to ask the obvious questions. What's the score? How many? Who's batting? And then, in Hindi, kitne hai — the bazaar phrase for 'How much?'. Quick as a flash, the three responded: '372 for eight.' There is some corner of a foreign field . But cricket is all Chinese to American journalists, and if any of the 'tight pool' permitted to follow Mr Carter around the village noticed the vignette, they didn't show it. The cameras and the microphones tended to get their most strenuous exercise when Mr Carter stopped to look at an old man sucking on a hookah ('The smoke is filtered by the cold water, it passes up this tube, down this one . . . ' the government guide droned on, while the Carters, their foreheads dotted with bright red `tilaks', nodded sagely) or when a Mr Prithvi Raj offered a pair of handmade slippers to the President. 'I sure wouldn't like to wear those out in the dirt,' Carter said, while the US Navy cine-machines, recording the event for future use, twisted their lenses to home in on the utterly sincere 'Thank you' Mr Carter mouthed at Mr Prithvi Raj before passing on to the next event, a display of village veterinary work.
The whole event had a familiar ring of
Disneyland about it. Everything was so neat and tidy, and the villagers so colourful and cheerful that it seemed as though there should be little electric buttons beneath each window — buttons which, when pressed, would galvanise the model people inside into pot-stirring, baby-rocking, firestoking activity, but of course, that's the cynical view. Any village in India would be proud — unbelievably so, by Western standards — to entertain a visiting President, or monarch, or even — as in Gujerat next week — a British prime minister. Although the visit was hardly spontaneous (every one of the 1,353 villagers was checked by the secret service nearly a month ago for possibly dangerous political leanings), and although the banality of the occasion might be too much for subcontinental purists to stomach, it quite probably did do something for this American President's view of what the third world is really all about.
It's probably not too much to hope that, once he had settled back into the plush blue nylon seats of Air Force One on its way to Riyadh, Cairo, Paris and home, Mr Carter thought back, even briefly, to the fine details of what he had seen that cold and crisp morning. Did he see how blessedly simple the living was in DaulatpurNasirabad, with its mud streets and its wattle houses, its people in homemade cotton cloth, living on diets of rice, chapattis, beans and curd, learning a little, wanting a little, blissfully unaware of the complexities of the kind of life Carter and his flunkies seem to like to live? Did he understand just a little of the real problem of the third world — the desire to enjoy the benefits of modern life without assuming, at a stroke, its tribulations as well? Might he have reflected on the ruin that an aggressive programme of western generosity might bring to places like Haryana and its thousands of villages that, while dirtier and scruffier, are carbon copies of Daulatpur-Nasirabad?
One hopes that he did. The Carter doe trine, this new American interest in the third world that seems to be putting down firm roots in Pennsylvania Avenue, is a vehicle both for bringing the most fearful harm and the most profound benefit to a place like Daulatpur-Nasirabad. Take the villages of Haryana seriously, one might say to Mr Carter, and be sure you never forget their Plight when tucking in to your T-bone back at home next week. But if you offer your help and your interest, be sure you take good care not to overdo it, or India will turn into one great Disneyland, with southern Californian problems to boot. If the American President can remember to tread softly through the problems of the east, he will have earned all the undoubted benefits that Jody Powell's campaign film, with all the lovely dust, will bring in two years' time.
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