Is Aid charity? October 27, 1961

Economic aid is a development that came after the Second World War. On the ashes of Europe, a new industrial might was created through massive economic assistance from the United States of America, a country involved in the war but spared from physical destruction.

The purpose of resuscitating Europe was not so much to build new cathedrals and institutes of fine arts on the debris of those devastated as to save Europe from being devoured by the whale of Communism. If Western Europe had come under the shadow of Communism, its march forward to the American continent would have been as certain as that of the locust that sweeps across from the Arabian desert to those of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent and Central China.

Aid has a definite purpose and that purpose is not charity. It is mutual self-preservation. To save others from totalitarianism is to save oneself. The threat of Communism has receded from a rehabilitated Europe. It is, perhaps, even more essential to assist the countries of Asia and Africa to maintain their freedom.

Europe undoubtedly suffered badly from the Second World War. But Asia and Africa have faced problems which wars create. Besides, some of the Asian countries were also overrun during the last war. However, more than the physical damage done to Asia and Africa by the horrors of war is the eternal poverty that the people of these two giant continents suffer from generation to generation. So much so that Asia and poverty are one. Our lands are rich but our people are poor. Disease is our heritage and the wailing of children is the voice of Asia. Beneath a very thin film of a privileged class lies a miserable sea of a sorrowful humanity. Is this a pre-ordained law, the unchangeable destiny of Asia?

It is doubtful if the collective conscience of mankind will tolerate for long such a condition of life. The call of Asian leadership is to wipe out the stigma of chronic mass poverty; to surmount this greatest challenge of all times, everyone must pull together. Not all the sacrifices at an individual level can dare to touch the fringes of the problems. For centuries non-Asians lived on and progressed from rags to riches on the toil of Asia. The insatiable thirst for the wealth of the Orient by “a sunless, spiceless and silkless Atlantic society” left us barren. The problem is theirs as much as it is ours. They must, at least in part, restore to Asia what belonged to it.

Aid is given for sound, pragmatic reasons. Governments that have extended aid to other countries know the value and necessity of such a policy. Realizing that assistance is an indispensable feature of modern diplomacy, they are constrained to call upon their people to make the necessary sacrifices in order to prevent a much greater sacrifice. The philosophy of aid, the need for its continuance, has been explained by these governments time and again to their people. And yet there are some who persist in saying aid is charity.

Recipient countries are grateful for the aid they receive and, in some form or the other, there is more than adequate consideration. Unfortunately, this aspect of the problem receives scant attention by those who term aid as charity. It is against the self-respect of a people, even the poorest, to promenade hat in hand at the doorsteps of the opulent nations. Indeed, had this been the sole concept of aid, had there been no reciprocity, it is doubtful if any nation could have endured for long such a state of life.

On the 20th August, 1961, a letter was published in The Pakistan Times from an American attorney-at-law who said:

“Your President came here to get additional handouts from our Treasury, and this must be replaced by further taxes upon our people who are already heavily over-burdened. Over half a billion dollars have already been given to your country. Now many of our people are unemployed, there is much hunger and want among them, and many are losing their homes because they are unable to continue their payments on them.

“These bad times are expected to worsen. For the numerous unemployed persons in want here I would petition your people to realize that most citizens here are not the wealthy persons our tax-paid representatives you see appear to be, and I would ask your people for my people to be most considerate in your requests for charity from this country.”

This letter was answered ably by a number of our patriotic citizens. The same feelings have prompted me to write on the subject.

People all over the world want adequate living, security, freedom, a sense of purpose and a sense of participation in achieving that purpose. These are basic human objectives which man has ever been striving to achieve.

The extent to which these wants have been fulfilled in a society is the measure of the stage of development of that society. Nowhere have all the wants been fully satisfied. There are vast areas of the world where even the most elementary human necessities have not yet been provided; where food, clothing, housing and health and education facilities are lacking.

Almost suddenly, the people of the underdeveloped countries have decided to do something about poverty, ill-health and illiteracy. The speed of communications, the multiplication of contacts between the highly advanced and underdeveloped countries, and the contagion of ideas, have created a new yearning in the hearts of these people. Even the struggles for independence were linked with the desire for economic improvement. Independence and awareness of the evitability of general mass poverty have fired the imagination of Asians.

In a world where dramatic advances in sciences and technology leave no physical reasons for the existence of hunger, disease and ceaseless toil, improving the conditions of life is one of the greatest challenges of our time. This raging ferment is fraught at once with peril and promise.

So far the challenge has not been adequately met. Faced with rising populations and caught in the vicious circle of low income, low savings, low rate of investment and growth, underdeveloped countries rind that poverty breeds poverty. The existing disparity between the poor and the affluent continues to intensify, although poverty and plenty cannot co-exist much longer.

It goes without saying that the great bulk of the efforts for development must be made by the people concerned. It is in this context that radical reforms have been introduced in Pakistan in the past three years. The land reforms have provided new incentives for increased productivity and broadened the economic and social bases of political power. An attempt is being made, through Basic Democracies, to diffuse political and social confidence and thus to achieve the substance of a democratic system of government.

It must be frankly acknowledged that without aid the modest objectives of the Second Plan will not be realized. It is the external capital which will act as a catalytic agent to promote efficiency and effective use of domestic capital. Most of it will go into pre-investment activities, such as provision of education and health facilities, construction of access roads and communications and research; activities which build up the infrastructure of the economy and prepare it for productive investments. Obviously, such investments do not produce revenues, and bearing high interest rates loans do not provide a feasible alternative to grants.

We are doing all we can to overcome the crisis of want. It was not out of cussedness that the Government ordered the excess lands to be distributed among the landless peasants—the poverty incarnate of Asia—the symbol of the challenge of our times. But not all our reforms at the national level can provide the final answer to an international problem. We must have assistance from abroad. Sympathy is not sufficient.

Few people would today subscribe to the mercantilist view, expressed by Colbert, which regarded it as harmful to national prosperity that arts of manufacture “go out of the Kingdom.” Industrialization of underdeveloped countries would add to international trade and world prosperity. Experience shows conclusively that countries which are the best producers of manufactures are also the best customers of one another’s manufactures. As within a nation, so in the world community, business grows with the prosperity of customers.

Just as power and development of a Communist country is a source of strength to other Communist states, so also the economic prosperity of the “Free World” is the source of mutual benefit. The economic greatness of Britain, France, Germany and other imperial powers of Europe contributed in a large measure to the growth of the American economy. Today, the wealth and power of America is a source of immense strength to all nations called the Free World, and its economy is as indivisible as is the economy of the Communist states. A recession in the United States has immediate economic consequences, as does its economic vitality on other nations of the Free World.”

The permanent question is why should America and Europe make a contribution to ameliorate Asia’s poverty? Is there an obligation other than that of preventing the world from failing a prey to militant international communism?

The root of this obligation lies in the history of the not so distant past. There is richness in Europe and poverty in Asia and Africa. Had it not been for the rapine of the riches of Asia and Africa, it is doubtful if Europe would have attained its pinnacle of plenty. The era of imperialism is dead but its aftermath still haunts us. Imperialism’s record is a one-way plunder which took place in the name of laissez-faire economy.

We revive the past, but only because those who plan for the future must know something of the past. British colonialism brought a period of peace and security, roads and railways and some education and health. But the whole pattern of our economy was designed to support an alien economy, and education and administration were organized only to serve alien ends.

Errors committed in the past have to be redeemed in the midst of a turbulent present. The burdens of our people are not of our own making, the contribution that the developed countries make will be a major factor in how much of the burden can be relieved and how soon.

To a considerable extent aid is reparation. It is a return to the people of Asia of a part of the wealth taken away from them in the era of unbridled imperialism. There are, therefore, good moral reasons for the West to give massive economic assistance to the people of Asia and Africa. On the subject of moral obligation of the industrialized countries to the developing countries which they previously exploited there is a statement of President Soekarno which is rather interesting:

“It has been said that all schemes of aid originating in the West are only an attempt to redeem the evils of the past by a cash payment in the present, while hoping for a further dividend in the future. It has also been said that they are the present payment of conscience money for past sins, with the hope of absolution in the future.”

The mechanics of imperialist exploitation took the following forms: In the case of the Indian subcontinent, the period between 1757 and 1815, saw a vast unilateral transfer of wealth from that area to England. Orme in his History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Hindostan describes the tributes which the British collected after Plassey:

“Never before did the English nation at one time obtain such a prize in solid money; for it amounted (in the mint) to 8,00,000 pounds sterling. From real or pretended difficulties, no more was received until the 9th August, when Roydoolub paid 1,655,358 rupees; and on the 30th of the same month he delivered gold, jewels, and cash, amounting to 1,599,737 rupees; the three payments amounted to 10,765,737 rupees.”

In all, Lord Clive asserted in later years, this initial exaction resulted in some £4 million (£40 millions in present day money) being “moved across the exchanges”, as we would say, between India and Britain, by way of both public and private payments, as the direct and immediate result of Plassey. This initial tribute was followed by a ruthless and systematic pillage of the country. Sardar Pannikar has described the East India Company rule of this period as that of a “robber state”. In order to end the rampant corruption of the East India Company officials, Lord Clive legalised their right to private trade even though they were its paid servants. Every officer now got his “appropriate” share in an orderly way, strictly according to seniority, a Colonel got £7,000 a year or £70,000 in present day money-value, a Major £2,000 or £20,000 per year. Prize money, or just the share in the loot and plunder of conquest, were powerful incentives to local military commanders to provoke wars with the native rulers of India. The extortions from the Begums of Oudh by Governor-General Warren Hastings are the most notorious of this kind.

Plunder and pillage, although dramatic and, therefore, historically the more notorious, do not, however, compare with the unrequited flow of capital from India to Britain which commenced with the assumption of functions of Government by the East India Company. The mechanics of the flow were different in form.

Ever since its foundation the Company had found that it had had to trade with the subcontinent by sending out means of payment, which it called “the investment”, with which not only to purchase but also to finance the production of cottons and silks by the Indian weavers. This “investment” had always consisted, for the most part, of precious metals, for there were few European goods for which there was a market in India. It was this export of gold and silver in its annual “investment” which had made the Company vulnerable to the mercantilist criticism that it was draining Britain of its reserve of precious metals for the sake of importing luxuries. After the conquest of Bengal, the Company ceased to send out an “investment” at all. In other words, the subjugated country as a whole got nothing at all in exchange for its goods. Of course, the individual weavers were paid, but the money to pay them, instead of being sent out from Britain, was now raised by taxation, primarily in the form of land revenue and as salt tax in the country itself. In a word, the subcontinent as a whole was made to pay for its own exports to Britain.

This is an extreme form of exploitation and it is difficult to assess the total magnitude of this unrequited flow of wealth and capital which went on year after year. Professor Holden Furber in his John Company at Work gives a detailed account of the cargoes on both the outward and the homeward voyages of the Berrington, the ship in which Warren Hastings returned to England in 1785. The Berrington had carried out to India various goods, namely lead, copper, steel, woollen clothes and naval stores, of the value of £27,300. She brought back from India cotton piece-goods, cotton yarn, indigo, redwood, silk and saltpetre to the value of £119,304. If her voyage was typical, as Professor Furber implies that it was, she was evidently transferring an unrequited value to Britain on this voyage of about £ 90,000.

After complex calculations, Furber comes to the conclusion that during 1783-1793, on which he concentrates his researches, about two million pounds (£ 20 million in present day money-value) a year was being transferred unrequited. Strachey describes Furber’s figure as “surprisingly modest” and says the calculations involved “much guess-work.” Another researcher, William Digby in his Prosperous British India calculated that “the drain” or “the tribute” of unrequited value exacted from the subcontinent averaged £18 million (£180 million in present day money-value) per year during the period from 1757 to 1815.

Apart from the magnitude of these sums, the economic costs to the subcontinent of these unrequited transfers need to be examined. The Bengal famine of 1770 was the first, but not the worst, of the consequences of the British conquest. Handloom weavers were wiped out by the Lancashire power looms. Nearly 80 years after the conquest of Bengal, a reforming Governor-General, Lord William Cavendish-Bentinck, reported that “the bones of the cotton-weaver are bleaching the plains of India.”

The economic gains to Britain, on the other hand, were significant. Indian historians, following the pioneering work of Ramesh Chandra butt, one of the first Indians to be appointed to the I.C.S., have taken the view that the fruits of the exploitation of India, in the latter part of the 18th and 19th centuries, played a major part in providing the initial capital for the contemporary industrial revolution in Britain. Mr. John Strachey, a former British Minister of War in the post-war Labour Government, has endorsed this view in his latest book, The End of Empire, published in 1959. He says:

“Though the notorious drain from India was by no means the largest factor in Britain’s pioneering industrialization, it played a very real part. That process was, in comparison with present-day developments, a slow one, stretching over more than one century. Nevertheless, at the critical moment. in the mid-18th century, it received the impetus of unrequited imports.”

The distinctive forms of 19th century exploitation of India by industrial capital did not exclude the continuance of the old forms of direct plunder which were also carried forward and at the same time transformed.

The “tribute,” as it was still openly called by official spokesmen up to the middle of the 19th century, or direct annual removal of millions of pounds of wealth to England, both under the claim of official “Home Charges” as well as by private remitting, without return of goods to the Indian Empire, continued and grew rapidly throughout the 19th century alongside the growth of trade. In the 20th century it grew even more rapidly alongside a relative decline in trade.

The nucleus of British capital investment in the subcontinent was the Public Debt.

In the hands of the British Government the Public Debt doubled in 18 years from £70 million to £140 million. By 1900 it had reached £224 million. By 1913 it totaled £274 million. By 1936 it totaled £719 million, divided into 458 crores of rupees (£343.5 million) of India debt, and £376 million of sterling debt or debt in England. Thus, in the three quarters of a century of British direct rule the debt multiplied more than ten times.

Much of the debt was built by the system of charging to the Indian Empire every conceivable charge that could be remotely or even fantastically connected with India and British rule: even to the extent of debiting India for the cost of a reception to the Sultan of Turkey in London, for the maintenance of the diplomatic and consular establishments of the United Kingdom in China and Persia, for a war on Abyssinia, and for part of the expenses of the Mediterranean fleet.

From 1914 to 1918, England increased its Indian expenditure by 550 million rupees. To meet this imperial debt, the Government spent Rs. 930 million out of a total expenditure of Rs. 1834 million for army, civil administration and debt services.

British taxes soared in the subcontinent in relation to imperial expenditures. Taxation increased 50 percent between 1850 and 1870. The total taxation which the British Government levied on India increased between 1858 and 1875-76 from £36,000,000 to £51,000,000. The guaranteed interest charges paid to English holders rose in the same period from £9,898,683 to £13,467,763.

It has been said that trade follows the flag. The advantage and immense gain of trading with subjugated nations come from the fact that it is possible to “sell dear and buy cheap.” Mr. Strachey in his The End of Empire examines this proposition. By a wealth of figures, Mr. Strachey attempts to prove that the assumption that it is possible to exchange goods and services with colonies in an inequitable manner is untrue because the British terms of trade have actually improved in favour of Britain since she lost her empire.

As regards this, it must be remembered that the gains which an imperial country exacts in the sphere of foreign trade are far more diffused than any simple consideration of the “‘buy cheap and sell dear” principle would indicate. The possession of subjugated markets enables the establishment of industries, professions and trade, which would otherwise not have been possible or profitable. The gains and earnings from such industries, professions and trades constitute a net accretion to the gross national product of the country. Manufacturers of export trade and armaments in Britain during the 19th century had an immediate relationship with the empire in India. James S. Mill has described the British Empire “as a vast system of outdoor relief for the upper classes.” Colonial possessions also enable the continuance of industries which have ceased to be low-cost producers and would, otherwise, have been blown away by the winds of free trade and competition.

Even in respect of the terms of trade, it is hard to believe that the figures of the British terms of trade since 1945 tell the whole story. Since the days of the Roman Empire, and even before, political domination has been used for every kind of trading on grossly inequitable “terms of trade.” In this context, it is also worthwhile to bear in mind that gain is often acquired simply by preventing the weaker peoples from interfering with the normal workings of international trade rather than by overt acts of exploitation. Who can compute what advantages were gained by Britain in terms of the exchange she established for her exports as against her imports by her prolonged control of the Indian market?

A classical writer on the subject, Hobson, found the explanation of imperialism to lie in the super-profits which colonial investments generated. From this point of view, colonial investments could be regarded as an effective mechanism for the transfer of wealth from the colonial possessions to the imperial country.

We are ourselves, as an independent nation, trying hard to attract as much foreign investment as possible. How can then we cavil at foreign investments as a mechanism for imperialistic exploitation? The explanation is to be sought in the difference which lies in foreign investments on a purely negotiated basis between independent countries, and colonial investments of a dominant imperial power in the territories which are under its control.

Even in the beginning of the 20th century, attempts to introduce a more progressive policy were not very successful. Lord Morley (the then Secretary of State), for instance, in his famous dispatch, “No Revenue” dated July 29, 1910, took the view of the European traders and negatived the establishment of separate departments of industries in the provinces. He also discouraged the idea that pioneer industries should be established or commercial production undertaken by the Madras Government (the case at issue), and merely sanctioned educational work and the dissemination of information. The managing agency houses, too, played a leading role in diverting capital towards commercial, rather than industrial uses.

The effects of the wholesale destruction of the Indian manufacturing industries on the economy of the country can be imagined. In England the ruin of the old handloom weavers was accompanied by the growth of the new machine industry. But in India the ruin of the millions of artisans and craftsmen was not accompanied by any alternative growth of new forms of industry.

To describe this as the export of British capital to India would be a parody of the reality. Over the period as a whole the export of capital from Britain to India was more than counter-balanced many times over by the contrary flow of tribute from India to England, even while the capital was being invested. Thus, the British capital invested in India was in reality first raised in India from the plunder of the Indian people, and then written down as debt of the Indian people to Britain, on which they had thenceforward to pay interest and dividends.

It does not require much imagination to see the difference between “foreign” investments as such and “colonial” investments; the aim of one is development that of the other is exploitation. It is not the taking of investment profits out of the country, but the distortion of the scope and direction of economic development and the deliberate slowing of the rate of economic progress, which is the crucial issue. The industrial underdevelopment of India and Pakistan today is the gross cost of the British rule in India, and a measure of the gain to Britain and her commercial interests.

One fact emerges clearly – the amounts needed for the economic development of the currently underdeveloped or the merely dependent countries do not bear comparison with the total of wealth and capital which have been, over the years, siphoned from them.

Pakistan, like the other underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, stands in dire need of foreign assistance. An impartial observer of the scene, Mr. Paul G. Hoffman, Managing Director of the U.N. Special Fund, made a recent analysis of the needs of the underdeveloped countries for investment capital, in the following terms:

“The dimensions, of this problem are staggering. Out of 82 nations which are members of the United Nations, no less than 60 can be classed as less-developed. More than a billion people live in these countries. Their income in 1957, according to the best available statistics, was in the neighbourhood of 120 billion dollars—or an average of $120 per person. In a number of these countries it is very much less. I might point out by contrast that the average income in the more advanced countries is about $800 per person and in some of the countries it is very much more.

“The present rate of increase in the national incomes of the less-developed countries is estimated at about 3 percent a year. Again, we should note that in certain countries it is more and in other countries it is less than 3 percent a year. Over against this figure one must set our statistics of population growth which averaged about 2 percent a year. The net increase, therefore, in national income in these countries is about one percent a year. This means a net increase in personal standards of living of about $1.29 per person. This rate of increase is not acceptable. It is too slow, dangerously too slow.”

This estimate of Mr. Hoffman is admittedly modest. According to a U.N. study, a total investment of $8 to $10 billion is necessary if the initial momentum for economic development is to be started in the underdeveloped areas. In any event no emphasis is required to show that the present flow of foreign aid cannot provide for an adequate rate of economic growth in the underdeveloped regions of the world. If we compare the spread of $3 billion a year, over one hundred countries and territories populated by more than 1.5 billion people, with the assistance of $13 billion extended to the small number of West European countries within a period of thirty months, considering the years of the actual flow of aid, for rehabilitating only 240 million people under the Marshall Plan, the inadequacy of what is being done to help the underdeveloped countries becomes only too obvious.

The complexities of the problem of maintaining an adequate level of international investment has been highlighted in the last few years by the fall in the price index, of primary commodities and the consequent change in the terms of trade against the underdeveloped countries. The fall in the price index of primary commodities has reduced the export earnings of the underdeveloped countries by 7 to 8 percent from mid-1957 to mid-1958. This drop, coinciding with a rise in import prices of manufactured goods represents a national loss in import capacity to the underdeveloped countries equivalent to about one-sixth of the official gold and foreign exchange holdings of these countries, or to about six years lending to them by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development at 1956-57 rates. It may also be pertinent to mention here that in the case of Pakistan the total financial aid which we have received from different sources up till now, is equal to the total loss which we have suffered on account of the fall in the price of our primary commodities.

It may be added that the future, as far as one can see it today, does not hold prospects of any improvement in the present situation. All trends indicate that the cost of manufactured goods in the industrialized countries will, mainly because of the wage increases and other social benefits, continue to rise, that the manufacture of substitutes will continue to reduce the demand for primary commodities and that the demand of the underdeveloped countries for manufactured goods, in order to increase their production of primary commodities and industrial products in keeping with the increase in population, will continue to rise. These pressures “cannot but lead to the widening of the gap between the standards of living of the people of the underdeveloped countries and those of the industrialized countries. The extremity of such consequences can be judged from the estimate that even today no less than 1,362 million inhabitants out of a total of 1,800 million living in underdeveloped countries have a per capita income of $8 per month as compared to the $9 per day in the highly industrialized countries.

The moral obligation of the richer nations of the world to extend economic assistance to the less fortunate countries has been set forth most convincingly by Mr. John Strachey in The End of Empire as the following paragraph would indicate:

“To abstain from imperialism is not enough. To turn our backs in well-fed indifference upon the hundreds of millions of striving and suffering men and women whom we once ruled would be as great a crime as to try to continue ruling them against their will. The opposite of imperialism is not isolation in a Little England, prosperous, tidy, smug. If we wish to be as great in the future as in the past, we must work and serve wherever we once ruled and led.”

Perhaps, Asia’s poverty is not all of colonialism’s making; perhaps, poverty cannot be wholly eradicated in any system of society. But wherever it is as widespread and as total as it is in Asia and Africa, its reduction is no mean achievement. It is not that we are unaware of its presence in the rest of the world. It is not that we think that the streets of America are paved with gold and that its citizens are either diamond-studded movie stars or oil tycoons. America has her problems of want and of unemployment as does any other country. To expect to see America and Europe without poverty is like expecting to find only snake-charmers and fakirs in Asia. We have seen the miseries of a Harlem and the slums of a Maxwell Street. But the grotesque poverty of Asia cannot be compared with the slums of New York or with the backwash of Los Angeles. The poverty of Asia is more cruel than all the slums of America and Europe put together.

The full magnitude of poverty cannot be sensed by those brought up in it, by those who “sleep with the dogs and get up with the flies.” We can only realize the extent of our poverty when we are out of our own surroundings or when others describe it to us. It was an Englishman who first made me realize the meaning of poverty, a classical Oxford scholar and his name was Verrier Elwin. He has been regarded as one of the best prose writers of our times and his work in anthropology has been described as “among the great modern contributions on the subject of Man.”

Verrier Elwin has said:

“We are so used to poverty in India that we often forget what it is. I remember one day a family coming to us in tears, for their but and all they possessed had been destroyed by fire. When I asked how much they wanted to put them on their feet again they said, ‘Four rupees’—the price of a single copy of The Brave New World!

“That is poverty.

“In Baster State once, a Maria (an aboriginal type) was condemned to death and on the eve of execution they asked him if there was any luxury he would like. He asked for some chapati (wheat bread), and fish curry made after the city style. They gave it to him and he ate half of it with great enjoyment, then wrapped the remainder up in the leaf plate and gave it to the jailor, telling him that his little son was waiting outside the prison door. The boy had never tasted such a delicacy, but he should have it now.

“Poverty is to see little children taken from you at the height of their beauty. It is to see your wife age quickly and your mother’s back bend under the weight of life. It is to be defenseless against the arrogant official, to stand unarmed before the exploiter and the cheat.

“Poverty is to stand for hours before the gate of a court of justice and to be refused admission. It is to find officialdom deaf and the great and wealthy blind.

“I have seen children fighting over a scanty meal of roasted rat.

“I have seen old women pounding wearily at the pitch of the sago palm to make a kind of flour. I have watched men climb trees to gel red ants to serve instead of chillies.

“Poverty is hunger, frustration, bereavement, futility. There is nothing beautiful about it.”

No death is more humiliating than that by poverty. We in Asia and Africa have witnessed such an end in every village by each sunset. In the Bengal famine of 1943 we lost 3,500,000 of our people by the simple and inexpensive expedient of starvation.

At the time of the famine I was a boy of fifteen and too young to know the full meaning of its disaster. And yet that tragedy has left an inerasable impression on my mind. The more I read of it and the more I became aware of its implications, the sicker I grew with the pains of poverty.

1. F. Karaka has written a vivid account of the famine in his book, I’ve Shed My Tears:

“In Bengal, jackals and dogs were seen attacking human bodies in which life was not quite extinct.

Thousands, hungry and destitute, had left their villages, their kith and kin, in the most desperate food hunt of our generation. They had sold their belongings. They had even sold their children.

In Bengal, gaunt, hungering people, panting and exhausted, dragged themselves over hundreds of miles in search of a bowl of rice. in the villages one heard them groan in the quiet of the night. The wailing of children filled the air. They cried for fan, the starched water of the rice.

In the streets of Calcutta lay human bodies with nothing more than just skin on the bare bones. They fretted with hunger till they appeared to become unconscious. When the smell became too objectionable they were removed and thrown away.

Men were digging in the dustbins for a scrap to eat. Elsewhere in the same province of Bengal a child was struggling to drink milk from his dead mother’s breast.

Dogs shriveled up because there was nothing in the scrap heaps left by man to eat.”

That is hunger.

That is poverty.

We need aid to reduce hunger and poverty. The ethics of the times will not allow us to be denied assistance in the gravest crisis that man has faced since the dawn of life.

We have just begun to hear the laughter of our children. Only now have our people begun to realize that the pavement is not their home. We have just begun to see the smile on the face of our hari (peasant) and the look of hope in the eyes of the aged.

When Europe suffers, the privileged world feels the suffering in personal terms; when Asia groans, the feeling is not quite just the same. A starving child in the streets of Europe arouses deep emotions, a hundred such infants in the alleys of Asia are the miserable urchins who form a part of the Asian way of life. Aid to Europe was massive. Aid to Asia is sliced at each stage and given more hesitatingly although two-thirds of humanity lives in Asia.

If two billion years of biological evolution towards perfection can be staked for the future of a city in Europe, why is it not natural to expect a universal crusade for the preservation of the flower of manhood? If the future of a city is not negotiable, how can the future of the heart of civilization become negotiable?

More compelling and cogent than the economic and moral considerations for extending aid are the political and strategic considerations but these have been omitted as they are so clear and so pregnant as to be obvious to all. Whatever the motivating force behind aid, one thing is quite clear—aid is not charity.

Knowing the conditions of Asia, the origins of its deadly problems, the President of Pakistan told the Congress of the United States of America:

“We appreciate the assistance you have given from time to time. We value your friendship with us…I sometimes get the impression in reading American papers that foreign aid is a real whipping horse. It gets whacked damned hard.

“I can understand the reason. It is a slogan which does not catch votes. There is no particular lobby for it. It is not easy really to part with your money. But may I say that we are pressing you as friends?

“If we make good, I think you will in some fashion get it back; in many ways you will get it back….It is possible the Americans are getting a bit tired of this story but I would like to suggest to you: you better not get tired.”

We are writing the most vital pages of our re-awakening and we will not tarry until we have done everything in our power to “wipe out every tear from every eye.”

If a united front is to be forged against a common menace, it must be united in spirit and form, in which the liberty of each and every one cannot have a different meaning. A cause with a duality of standards is a cause as real as a mirage.