U.S. Looked Down On India; Now Obama Goes There Looking for Work

From Nov. 6 to 9, U.S. President Obama visited India. Media reports said that this was his first visit to India since his rise to power. Three and a half days in length, this is also his longest overseas itinerary since taking office. This made Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh exceedingly happy. Other than visiting India, Obama will also visit Indonesia in passing, and then arrive at his true destination for this trip to Asia: He will participate in the fifth summit of G20 leaders in Seoul, South Korea on Nov. 14, as well as the APEC conference being held in Yokohama, Japan.

Indian officials have compared Obama’s visit to Nixon’s 1972 milestone visit to China. Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao had trouble concealing her joy at a news conference on Nov. 2, but said that India certainly does not expect this visit can bring forth “explosive” results. In the U.S., The New York Times also said that this visit by Obama to India was to expand and advance U.S.-India trade relations, cooperation on nuclear energy and to build a strategic partnership on political and military matters. The U.S. and India both appear to be taking matters seriously, and before President Obama had even departed on his journey, a jubilant and optimistic atmosphere had been built up.

Yet on Nov. 4, before Obama’s visit, he made a statement that the main goal of this trip to Asia was none other than opening up the market for the U.S. in order to be able to sell more American products, thereby creating more job opportunities of which Americans are in urgent need. The comparison of this statement to Prime Minister Singh’s bombastic “milestone” clearly reveals a large inconsistency, raising suspicions of whether this means Obama is going to India in order to look for work for Americans; this makes one feel rather awkward.

Perhaps it was indeed under the influence of Obama’s statement that the American media immediately raised questions about the President’s visit to India. On the evening of Nov. 5, before Obama and his wife, First Lady Michelle Obama, boarded the president’s special plane, “Air Force One,” on their way to India, Brian Williams, news anchor of NBC, one of the three major American TV networks, read a script on his show “Nightly News” with an air of complaint. The subject was Obama’s circumvention of the IT industry outsourcing capital, Bangalore, on his visit to India. According to Williams’ report, Bangalore is a city that makes Obama extremely worried because it is the largest center of American IT industry outsourcing, snatching job opportunities away from Americans left and right. The report said India’s IT industry is on the scale of $60 billion, with four million people incessantly busying themselves every day with handling electronic information products and network development, design and manufacturing, and get 60 percent of their business from American companies. Every major American power and electronics company has set up a branch here; electric power tycoon General Electric, for example, alone has over 4,000 Indian employees in Bangalore.

Besides, outsourcing business by American companies is still expanding, further increasing the scale of Bangalore. In Bangalore, every kind of vocational school centered on information technology is training, batch after batch, unending streams of young Indians awaiting recruitment. "Every day there are 400 new cars added to the streets here," said a heavy-set American business manager from Ohio, rather contentedly, in an interview with an NBC reporter. But when asked why America outsources so many job opportunities to India, someone who seemed to be an Indian engineer responded, “It's unimaginable that this could be done from the U.S. The cost would be 10 or 12 times what we are providing.”

Clearly, NBC questions if it is really the case that Obama is going to India in order to look for work, then why is he bypassing the city of Bangalore, the headquarters of outsourcing, which has stolen so many of the job opportunities Americans are hoping for?

On the other hand, Obama himself has endured unspeakable suffering. Think about it: The midterm elections on Nov. 2 have just passed, and the Democratic Party, which the president leads, was wiped out by the Republican Party, earning them a record of defeat. Originally, before the midterm elections, the Democratic Party had majority control of both House and Senate seats, but then on Nov. 2 the tides changed. The Democrats lost six seats in the Senate, barely upholding the 51-seat majority. In the House of Representatives, however, they had a major loss of 68 seats, throwing away their dominance as the majority party. As such, for the two remaining years of his term, Obama will have to confront the uncooperativeness and clamor of Republican representatives from his “lame duck” stance. This will make a string of his campaign promises from two years ago turn to dust, making it hard for him to deliver on them to voters. Take, for example, the issue on which his rivals defeated him this midterm election — “the economy doesn’t seem to be turning around and the unemployment rate is going up endlessly.” Obama feels that in the last two years, it’s not as though he himself put in no effort at all.

On Nov. 3, in an exhausted mood, he faced reporters, analyzing his own distress and helplessness. As for the continuously high budget deficit and unemployment rate, a reporter asked whether he accepted the view that, “any kind of spending to create jobs is dead at this point.”

Obama answered in a complaining tone, “I think the American people are absolutely concerned about spending and debt — and deficits…we can eliminate programs that don’t work, cut back on government spending that is inefficient…So the question I think that my Republican friends and me and Democratic leaders are going to have answer is, what are our priorities? …And that’s going to be a tough debate… We already had a big deficit that I inherited, and that has been made worse because of the recession.” Then Obama raised his voice, saying, “We just learned that China now has the fastest supercomputer on Earth — that used to be us.... We can extend unemployment insurance now, but that could instantly argue us into a big mess!”* Then he said with a sigh, “without any Republican support on anything, then it’s going to be hard to get things done. But I’m not going to anticipate that they’re not going to support anything.” From this we can see President Obama was in a bad mood.

In the past, the U.S. looked upon India with disdain, not respecting this South Asian power too highly. Remember that in the last century, in May 1998, in order to demonstrate its power, India exploded a series of five bombs, declaring itself a nuclear power. But the U.S. dismissed this, saying that this act by India was childish, and that just because the world didn’t know it, India was just making noise to draw attention to itself. However, much time has passed, and America itself could not have anticipated that today, 10 years later, the president would run off to India, which it previously disdained, to beg for charity. There was much publicity and accompanying fanfare for Obama’s groundbreaking three-day visit to India, but unfortunately, he is intentionally bypassing the city with the most U.S. trade and commerce and the most inseparable relationship to the United States: Bangalore. The reason is none other than this: If he went there, this consolation trip to drive away his cares from the crushing defeat of the elections would also be swept away. After all, this Indian city is truly the headquarters for snatching away Americans’ livelihoods. Those job opportunities all belong to high-end industry, like software engineers, for one, and are the jobs Americans dream of having.

Fortunately, on Nov. 6, Obama’s first day in India, he hurried to give the American people some good news: He signed a $10 billion business deal, selling India planes and arms, reportedly solving the problem of more than 50,000 American jobs; this brought a smile to Obama’s face. Yet 50,000 jobs is just a drop in the bucket, because news coming back from the U.S. that day told Obama that American unemployment in October was still as high as 9.6 percent.

On Nov. 8, one day before the end of his visit, Obama spoke at the invitation of India’s Parliament where he unexpectedly gave a pleasant surprise to his hosts. He said, “...the United States not only welcomes India as a rising global power, we fervently support it... I look forward to a reformed U.N. Security Council that includes India as a permanent member.” With these words, the whole room rose to its feet, applauding wildly with approval. However, despite this, in the joint press conference with Indian Prime Minister Singh that followed, Obama still forcefully refused to discuss the issue of looking for American jobs. Singh shot back, “Indians are not in the business of stealing jobs from Americans,” but, to the contrary, outsourcing business to India just serves to boost America’s production capacity.

*Editor’s note: The second half of this quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.