WILLIAMS, NEHRU AND G20

DR. Eric Williams and Jawaharlal Nehru, first prime ministers of Trinidad and Tobago and India respectively, held similar worldviews and promoted comparable policies.

Anti-colonialists Williams and Nehru were about using the independence movement to educate and lift their people out of poverty.

They both spoke exhaustively on the development of the “global south,” meaning developing countries like their own.

The T&T leader also admired his Indian counterpart’s love of literature, and they were both committed to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).

Nehru was a founder, in 1961, of the NAM – Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Yugoslavia’s Josip Tito, Indonesia’s Sukarno, and Egypt’s Gamel Nasser were the others – as a foil to the superpowers.

In his early years as Prime Minister, Williams spoke profusely about Nehru, on one occasion saying the Indian leader’s ideals were similar to those of the PNM’s People’s Charter.

After Williams’ death in 1981, Kamaluddin Mohammed, a government insider, said the T&T leader had canvassed Nehru to lobby the American authorities for the removal of their war-time installations from Chaguaramas, Carlsen Field and Waller Field.

“The rest,” Mohammed reported, “is history.”

There is a mixed report card on the fulfilment of the Williams-Nehru vision, but an international development this week would have given them inestimable contentment.

India is hosting the world’s richest and most powerful countries at a prestigious two-day conference in Delhi of the G-20, which Narendra Modi currently leads.

Modi and India are naturally giddy with excitement.

Nehru’s India is breaking bread (or chapatti roti) with the big boys 75 years after a hard-fought election following the centuries-long raiding of the economy by British colonial powers.

India’s economy is now the fifth largest in the world, and Modi is utilising digital technology and other sectors to sidle just behind the United States and China by the end of the decade.

And he has his eyes set on developed nation status by the centennial of political independence.

“By 2047,” he asserted, “I am sure our country will be among the developed countries. Our economy will be even more inclusive and innovative.

“Our poor people will comprehensively win the battle against poverty. Health, education and social sector outcomes will be among the best in the world.”

Modi’s nine-year-old BJP administration has been an agent of positive change, although there is much more to be done in the world’s most populous nation.

The government says it has lifted 415 million people out of poverty, expanding education, improving infrastructure, boosting healthcare, empowering women, bettering rural life, and developing technology and other fields.

But in such a vast and often complex land, there are such challenges as communal violence, child labour and welfare, illiteracy, malnutrition, and gender bias.

In his cool, resolute manner, the 72-year-old prime minister has been confronting the problems, winning friends and influencing people to the point where he is often received as a rock star.

“Modi is the boss,” Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese recently said, voicing a refrain heard during the Indian leader’s regular international sojourns, including his June visit to the US.

The Indian diaspora – estimated in 2020 by the United Nations at 18 million – holds Modi in high regard, and he, in turn, salutes their meteoric rise in business and the professions.

The Prime Minister has termed the diaspora “role models for other communities.”

Nehru, who shaped India’s development through three five-year plans, would undoubtedly have been pleased with the growth in industry, science and technology.

As for Modi, he tells of assisting the global south on matters of debt repayments, infrastructure development, climate change, and other burning issues.

He also favours countries with Indian migrants; the lack of purposeful involvement in T&T is a matter Port of Spain could better explain, I am told.

Williams had hailed Nehru’s “personal interest in national economic planning and his extensive historical writings.”

Both leaders had a sense of history and an objective of using progressive ideas to advance their respective people.

The G20 conference in Delhi would have given them much satisfaction.