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Whitewash for the White Man

Dear Mr Clinton,

As you arrive in India, I'd like to tell you about something that happened a few years ago. Someone I know was walking with a friend through the streets of Bandra, a Mumbai suburb. They passed several large piles of garbage left on the streets by our always indifferent municipality. My friend made some exasperated sounds about them. Her friend said: "Well, you lived in Washington." This is true. My friend once spent three years not far from the house you have occupied for the last seven years. "But you can't expect Washington standards here. This is India!" she was told.

Yes, Mr Clinton, this is India and welcome to our part of the world, but do remember that we Indians cannot expect your city's standards here. That is an absurd idea.

Except, of course, if you're coming. That changes a few things. For weeks before your arrival, we've been getting news about clean up campaigns in your honour. As far back as February 25, a deputy municipal commissioner in Mumbai pronounced, "The road from the airport to the southern tip of the city has to be extremely clean" for your visit. To that end, the municipality -- the same familiar, indifferent municipality -- has been instructed to "paint the kerbs on the roads and also the trees with a stripe of white."

These are not mere words. The municipality is putting its usually lackadaisical cleaning crews where its commissioners' mouths are. On March 8, my morning paper told me about Dalal Street, our financial nerve centre, right in that southern tip of Mumbai. Courtesy the municipality and your visit of course, it has "a brand new whitewashed look [and] mounds of rubbish have been removed... A huge mound of debris, which had been [there] for close to three months, was ... levelled in one day flat."

One day flat, Mr Clinton. It could not be bothered to do this mere day's job for three months, but now our municipality "is bent on proving that when required, it can work with American efficiency."

For those of us who walk Dalal Street, dodging the holes and leaping the garbage every day, the photograph accompanying the report was bewilderingly foreign. Almost American, you might say. "I hope a VIP comes here more often," said one office-goer. He might have been speaking for all of us.

And in Agra, officials are possibly in even more of a tizzy. The administration has asked for a large sum of money for a "face-lift" to the city. It includes painting electric poles and illuminating the route you will take through Agra. The Taj Mahal is being scrubbed and mended. For you, even Agra buffaloes "wallowing in the slime" are going to be driven away.

We read of all these developments, Mr Clinton, and are bemused. We wonder why that one road in Mumbai has to be extremely clean for your visit. Why not all our roads? Why any at all? Why does Dalal Street need rubbish and debris removed because you will wander past? If the municipality "can work with American efficiency" in your honour, why can it not work with any efficiency in ours? Why is efficiency required when you turn up, but not otherwise? Why does the Taj -- our own glorious Taj -- not get a scrub when we go there?

We wonder, above all, why what's good enough for our Indian eyes -- garbage and three-month-old mounds, buffaloes and the slime they wallow in -- is not good enough for your American ones.

Your Indian hosts are whitewashing us for you, Mr Clinton. Yet you are the man we love to mock and hate. We still gloat over your troubles with Monica Lewinsky. The day I write this, a cartoon in the paper indicates that you have taken a detour to see the erotic temples in Khajuraho on your way to the Taj Mahal.

We were incensed when you slapped sanctions on us after our nuclear explosions. We are perpetually bristling at stray remarks you make about Kashmir, seeing underhand motives when you urge us to sign the CTBT, we are sensitive about any perceived tilt you make towards Pakistan. Two days ago as I write this, another cartoon had you questioning Vajpayee about the enormous increase in our defence budget, unmindful of the rain of bullets from across our Western border.

On the evidence, we don't like you or trust you much. We enjoy laughing at you. Yet those feelings only apply when you are in far-off Washington. Not if you are coming here. As soon as you announced you will grace us with a visit, we dropped the distaste and instead worked ourselves into a kind of intoxicated feverishness. Some of us went into overdrive trying to persuade you not to visit Pakistan -- oh, the horror! the American president treating us on par with that rogue country! -- and failed. Others, not far nor long removed from their fierce critiques of you, manoeuvre feverishly for invitations to the events you will be at. And still others are busy with the whitewash job.

The truth is, Mr Clinton, that under the bluster and scorn, we secretly long to impress you. Your visit, still other news reports tell us, will "boost the image of India abroad." That's why hawkers have volunteered to be "off all the main routes [in Mumbai]" and beggars will be "cleared for the week" by the police. Yes, in India we "clear" beggars -- it's all "for the prestige of our country." One more municipal officer says "by March 24 Mumbai will be squeaky clean and ... all ready to impress Clinton."

This is your welcome, Mr Clinton. To impress you and boost our image abroad, we shove our dirt under your red carpet, polish your narrow route through our lives, hope you won't accidentally see our warts.

Yet we are also secretly aware exactly what our image is in our own eyes and it shames us. It shames us so much that we can't bear for you to see us as we truly are. We can see the way we are and that's okay, but we can't show you. And so this elaborate hoax to "boost our image abroad."

So this is an appeal to you, President Clinton. Ask your Indian hosts to show you the real India, not the whitewashed trompe l'oeil they will whiz you through. Ask that for the rest of us Indians. Because if you come to India, you should see our country as it is, as we do. And if you see it like that, perhaps one day we'll find Washington standards can apply here after all.

Dilip D'Souza

Dilip D'Souza