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3rd April, 2008
Minister of State for External Affairs (Shri Anand Sharma): Mr. Navtej Sarna, Head of the External Publicity Division of the Ministry of External Affairs; my friend Mr. Tarun Basu, the CEO of India Abroad News Service; eminent Editors and journalists from Africa and India present here; friends:
I am very happy to be with you this morning to share some of my observations and at the same time to underscore the significance of the exchange that will take place between you all. Navtej was saying that over the years there has been a visible effort to make the Indian and the African media come together on platforms to share their experiences and also their views on the evolving situation regionally in Africa, in South Asia and in the world as such.
India and Africa do have a very special relationship, a relationship that is rooted in history, a relationship that has been time-tested, and a relationship which unfortunately - as Tarun was saying - does not get the due recognition and respect when it comes to the coverage that we find in the print and the electronic media. You all are in a profession and in a position to influence and shape public opinions. Therefore, informing the civil society at large about our respective experiences and the enormous significance of the engagement of Africa and India is important. Not informing would be a disservice not to ourselves but to our respective people.
It is important in my mind that while we talk of present we must remain connected with the shared experiences and struggles of the past which have led to a deeper understanding between the political leadership and people of India and Africa. It will not be out of place to mention that in the last century both India and Africa, our respective people, were struggling to find our voice, our dignity, and struggling for our respective freedom. That was the period when our leaders forged a special bond.
It was Mahatma Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who had gone to South Africa as a lawyer. But the experiences there transformed him. He stayed on in South Africa for 22 years. The world knows him as Mahatma, a title which was given to him by India’s Poet Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, but he became that in Africa when fought the discrimination, the humiliation of the people there only because of the colour of the skin, the denial, the depravation which moved him deeply and he forged his tools of Satyagraha.
He returned to India and mobilized tens of millions of our people by the sheer force of his philosophy and the values that he espoused. But his philosophy of nonviolence - not passive resistance as it repeatedly gets mentioned but active opposition to injustice and discrimination - gave voice to the millions of our people and they were able to stand up to challenge and vanquish the mightiest empire of that time.
We may have left the last century behind. But we must not forget how we have arrived in the 21st century carrying some of those memories and at the same time much of the burden that was there both in Africa, in Asia and in India. It was the same Gandhi who had said after India’s Independence that India’s freedom will be incomplete as long as Africa remains in bondage. These were powerful words.
Equally strong was the commitment of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister and architect of modern India, the author of India’s foreign policy and engagement with the world where the emphasis clearly was on understanding and unity of the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, countries which are called the third world countries, the poor countries, countries which were denied access to modern tools of development, countries which were robbed of their resources, continents which had missed the Industrial Revolution.
You all know about the journey of a few decades, but important decades, of the last century when the developing world found not only a common cause but also a common voice which was articulated in the multilateral forums understood sometimes - misunderstood and misinterpreted most of the times - by the entrenched vested interests and those who could not reconcile to the emergence of Asia, Africa, not to mention the potential that we have.
We have to, therefore, reflect in the contemporary context where we stand and what we can do together. It will be important to do so because Africa and India together account for one-third of humanity. India in the last 60 years has achieved many milestones in its quest for development and the economic and social empowerment of its people. That is exactly what Africa is seeking to achieve and that is all that Gandhi had stood for.
I have come back to Gandhi because I feel it is important, because Gandhi talked of poverty and hunger. He talked of education; he talked of empowerment of the people; he did talk of environment and models of development which would be in harmony and should be in harmony with the nature and environment. In the 21st century the world is grappling with all these issues. I often wonder that he was a visionary who could recognize these pitfalls and the problems a century before the others. All the wise people in the world are today commenting and writing. You look at the cover of the Time magazine, you look at the Newsweek, you switch on the CNN, BBC - I am not talking of today, last few months - there are stories, there are expressions of concern, the looming disaster because of the climate change and the other attendant issues and problems. That is where I feel Africa and India together have much to contribute. That is because in our own experiences of development we have been confronted by some of these very challenges. We have overcome some; we yet have to address others.
At the same time the credit goes to our leaders, also the people, the creative people in the different fields, whether our scientists, our farmers, the workers who are toiling in industry, who had the determination not to be overwhelmed by these challenges but to confront them. They are experiences. India has expertise in many fields not only in the development of our agriculture sector, the villages or the small and medium enterprises, but also what is called the high end of technology.
As I said, when we have shared experiences of the past we have shared concern for the present together. We still have the problem of abject poverty and hunger. India today is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. In Africa also many countries have registered impressive growth rates. There are robust economies developing in Africa. Democracy is taking firm roots. African leaders have come together to work for regional integration. But at the same time in my country if we have the largest middle class in the world by global standards - without quarrelling with the statistics or the figures which are given to me on this and on many other issues - even if we say it is 22 per cent of our people living in poverty, and as has become globally fashionable those who survive on less than a dollar a day, it is still more than 230 million people.
In case of Africa, it is over 40 per cent of the population. So, it is a huge challenge. But Africa is also a resource-rich continent, a continent which is rich in every respect, its history, its song, its music, the people are vibrant, its rich biodiversity, the forests in Africa, and the enormous resources. Minerals, metals, hydrocarbons, there is nothing which the world looks for which Africa does not have. That is why I made a comment a few months ago while delivering a lecture in London that it is the tragedy of our times that a continent which is so rich in resources is also seeped in abject poverty. This is because of the exploitation of the past. That is exactly the reason I feel, and we in India do feel, strongly that Africa and India have to come together, step forward and make not only our presence felt, that is felt and acknowledged, but make our own contribution in the 21st century by ensuring that we access technologies and also see that our people benefit from the fruits of development.
India is willing and happy to share more than what we have been doing in the last almost five decades, our own experiences of development, our technology. We have been sharing even the meager resources that we had in the 1960s when we were confronted with monumental challenges of development and dealing with this issue of poverty and hunger. That is where Africa and India come together as partners, partners in development.
I, like all of you, read in the magazines and in the newspapers - it is not that I have to wait for days or weeks together, the frequency is increasing - if I have to politely put it, inadequately informed analyses, reports and writings that India is also trying to engage with Africa like China is doing because of Africa’s resources, like Europe is doing, India is also trying to catch up. There is nothing which would have pained me more. I pity those who have such little knowledge and are making such patronizing and sweeping comments. Our engagement, as I said, is ancient, it is over millennia. We understand each other. We feel for each other.
India is not embarking on a new journey to discover Africa and that should be made clear both by the media in Africa and by our distinguished Editors and representatives of media in this country. If you look at what I said about the 1960s - we were not a rich country, we are not even today - but we were sharing. Tens of thousands of students from Africa come here to study, take their professional degrees and go back. Many of them have occupied important positions in Africa, they continue to. Many of them are Heads of States, Heads of Governments, Heads of important institutions. If there is one singular contribution which India has done, that is the ITEC programme and the scholarship schemes.
The focus of India has been, and I must emphasize shall continue to be, on capacity-building and human resource development in Africa. That is the first priority for my country. If you look at it, it is increasing now. There are more friends from Africa who come not only to study but there are batches which come for dedicated courses in capacity-building. The field is vast and I am sure that it is going to expand further. But in addition to that there are other areas where we have identified to work together. They are health and food security, agriculture, infrastructure development, energy, and climate change.
At the same time, when I refer to capacity-building let me also quickly mention about one recent engagement. In the last 25 years, or two decades to be precise, our people have done us proud by ensuring that India leapfrogged to a leadership position in the field of information technology. A few years ago, our then President while traveling in Africa had made this offer to gift Africa with a project, a dedicated satellite, to bridge the digital divide. The Pan-African E-Network Project today has taken off. It is operational. The hub from Senegal will soon be operational. I see our friends from Senegal here. Already 29 countries have been linked. It is a revolutionary leap in tele-education and tele-medicine, linking leading universities of Africa with the leading universities of India, linking hospitals in Africa with super-specialty hospitals in India. Nothing of that is known or reported except that when your leaders will be coming as our honoured guests in few days it is being referred to as both of us Africa and India struggling to catch up.
This Partnership Forum Summit which is taking place is not something which has happened abruptly. It was in 2006 that we first proposed to be precise in February, 2006, when I in my humble capacity had suggested to my Prime Minister that we must take steps to institutionalize India’s engagement with Africa. But we wanted to do it guided by Africa, the leaders of Africa and it is through the Africa Union that we were able to take this process forward.
It is a Forum Summit and the leadership from Africa has been pre-selected by the African leadership, by the Africa Union. We have the five founding members of NEPAD along with Ethiopia, which is the Implementation Committee Chair; and all the eight regional organizations, because India is engaging with Africa and with all the regional and sub-regional organizations, we already are engaged; and also the current Chair of Africa Union, the President of Tanzania; and the immediate past Chair the President of Ghana. From Algeria we will have the honour of receiving the elder statesman from Africa President Bouteflika. Same is the case with Burkina Faso, Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, the Prime Minister is coming. From Libya, of course, we do have a senior Minister leading the delegation. Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Zambia, all of your leaders will be here. We do hope that together they will be able to address these issues that I was referring to, and give a new hope to our people.
Before I conclude, I may mention - and if I do not I will not be doing my duty properly - that when we are together on partnership and sharing of experiences, the four things which I did briefly mention - the food security, health security, energy security and climate change - are deeply linked. We cannot address one by ignoring the other three. We cannot decouple them. Food security definitely is linked with the health security, the malnourishment of the people. How many women and children die both in Africa and India and in other developing countries!
For health security, again when we look at the pandemics of today these are transnational challenges - not only HIV AIDS but tuberculosis, malaria - they are not confined to one region. It has been a mistake, if I may say, of the developed world to think that these are problems only of the poor countries. It is clear that they have a cascading effect.
When we look at the energy security, it is not only the fossil reserves, the hydrocarbons, the renewables, but in the quest of energy security the run for bio-fuels, particularly the diversion of food grains, and we have been cautioning for quite some time that this is an area which should be very carefully looked into. Now we know that the food prices have been pushed up. There is food scarcity. It is not only the soya or the corn. Whether the diversion that has taken place has brought about energy security or not, definitely it has severely undermined food security. And we have woken up when this has become a serious challenge of our times.
So, all these four issues have to be addressed together. I think the developing countries, India and Africa, have the capacity to so. Our people deserve a better future. We do share a dream that we will overcome the burdens of the past and together write a new chapter of rising Africa and resurgent India.
Thank you.
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