HOW HE SEES IT President's visit to India will miss the good, bad

By LLEWELLYN KING
KNIGHT RIDDER/TRIBUNE
WASHINGTON -- When George W. Bush touches down in India today, he may or may not understand the cornucopia of contradictions that is India.
It is the world's largest democracy, and its most improbable. It is a place that should break into 100 pieces, with its proliferation of languages, religions, castes, and geographic divisions.
Yet in the 59 years since Britain struck the Union Jack on its most precious possession, India has held together in good times and in bad, in war and in peace. Now, it is fulfilling its own dreams as a global force -- although subtly, it has been affecting the world for centuries.
Indians like to tell Westerners that they have learned something from each wave of conquest over 5,000 years; conquerors that have included the Greeks, the Arabs, the Mongols, and mostly the British. But the conquerors have been as affected by India as India has been affected by them.
The invaders have carried away with them architecture, couture, craftsmanship, cuisine, produce, language and sports. But it is the British who left more of themselves in India, and were more radically changed by India, than any other of its temporary overlords.
Imperial architecture
You can see the British influence in India in imperial architecture, the English language and literature, military organization, and parliamentary democracy. But in England, the influence of India is more pervasive and will be more permanent.
If Bush has admired the glittering British regiments on parade during a past trip to London, he may not know that their finery was developed in India. Cheap labor and raw materials combined to make the changing of Guard, the opening of Parliament, and the Trooping of the Color international spectacles.
It has been said that the national dish of Britain is no longer fish and chips but curry and rice.
Then there is the radical expansion of the English language courtesy of the Subcontinent. Hundreds of words were brought to Britain from India. A few of those words: bandanna, chintz, chutney, cot, cummerbund, dinghy, dungaree, guru, juggernaut, jungle, khaki, loot, nirvana, pajama, pundit, and shampoo. These words became very swiftly integral to the language. They were not adornments for the educated, but practical words to describe everyday things.
Bush may want to wonder why there should be such astounding verisimilitude between the faded imperial power and the emerging nation of 1 billion people. Truth is, there is a dovetail-fit of similarities between the British and the Indians. They both support an aristocracy, a stratified social order, and enjoy some respect for the best of each other's cultures. Bush may think about this when he is served fine, black tea by an attendant in white gloves, who looks as though he came out of a 1930s raj movie.
While the Indians will try to dress Laura in a sari, out in the streets, affluent women will be made up and attired as though they were on the King's Road in Chelsea, London.
Today India boasts a middle class of 175-million people, an education system that is among the best in the world, and world domination in software.
Yet there is still another India -- an India unchanged through ages, oblivious to the new India. Hundreds of millions of people who live in a squalor hard to conceive: People who are conceived in the street, born in the street, live in the street, and die in the street.
Horrific sights
If you leave the main streets in an Indian city, you will find yourself, with every sense, assaulted; contemplating horrific sights of deprivation, and smelling the stench of rotting garbage, human and animal feces and urine.
Yet India is improving all through its complex social structures. Civil rights for the lowest class, the untouchables, is a major issue. And gradually, the lot of the poor is improving. Famine, for example, is no longer part of the cycle of life.
Unfortunately Bush will not be in India long, nor will he leave the bubble in which he travels. The tragedy of presidential travel is that it is more like a visit to Disneyland than to the cultures and aspirations with which an American president must deal.
X Llewellyn King is chairman and CEO of the King Publishing Co., publisher of White House Weekly and Energy Daily, Washington, D.C. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.