Bush travels to South Asia in pursuit of key strategic “partnership” with India
By Keith Jones – World Socialist Web Site
US President George W. Bush travels to South Asia this week with the aim of cementing a strategic and “global”
partnership with India. According to his aides, the trip is among the most important that Bush has made in his entire
presidency.
Rhetoric aside, the Bush administration has two interconnected objectives.
First, it wants to ensure that corporate America plays a major and ever-expanding role in India’s rapidly expanding
economy—as exploiter of cheap labor in the offshore-oriented information technology and business-processing sectors, as
participant in public-private partnerships (PPPs) aimed at furnishing India with the transport and energy infrastructure
needed to more tightly bind it to the world capitalist economy, and as purveyor of weapons and weapon-systems to India’s
burgeoning military.
The Bush administration is especially interested in prying open India’s retail trade sector—in which tens of millions
are employed in small, unregulated businesses for want of proper, full-time jobs—to companies like Wal-Mart and in
gaining greater access to India’s agriculture sector—which continues to provide over 60 percent of Indians with their
livelihood—for agri-business giants like Monsanto.
While Bush will tout the rise in India’s GDP as a spectacular “free market” success story, the post-1991 dismantling of
India’s nationally regulated economy has been accompanied by a rapid growth of social inequality and economic
insecurity. In “democratic India” hundreds of millions of people must struggle to survive on less than a $1 per day and
education and health care have for all intents and purposes been privatized with only the poorest of the poor using the
dilapidated public education and health systems.
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