Ah, so you want India to become a superpower – like America?

There are many Indians, politicians and ordinary citizens alike, who would like to see India become a superpower, much along the lines of the United States. Is this in keeping with the ethos of the Indian character? And to what end? To answer these questions, we need to understand what it is in the American character that enabled the US to grow from a 300,000 square-mile territory comprised of 13 original colonies bordering the Atlantic Ocean to a gigantic country covering some 3.5 million square-miles, extending out to the Pacific Ocean.

The growth of the US can be traced to three interconnected constructs – ‘manifest destiny’ and its ideological underpinnings, the 1823 Monroe Doctrine conjoined with the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary, and the presumptive superiority of the European race.

Though the phrase ‘manifest destiny’ was coined in 1845 by Democrat John O’Sullivan, the ideology behind the phrase was operative even back in the 1620s, when the first European settlers, the Puritans from England fleeing religious persecution, set foot in North America. Manifest destiny refers to the divine right to “tame and cultivate” the new country by displacing the “uncivilised,” non-Christian peoples who did not take full advantage of the land God had granted them.

This ideology served to justify the violent displacement of native peoples and military takeover of their lands. When the US purchased the territory of Louisiana (over 800,000 square-miles) from France in 1803, it essentially bought Native American tribal land which France neither owned nor controlled, if only to prevent Spain, Britain and Russia from colonising the area. This area is what is now known as Middle America, populated almost entirely by the ancestors of white immigrants from northern Europe.

The rapid expansion of the western US border would not have been possible but for the 1823 Monroe Doctrine whose key tenet was a pledge to not interfere in the affairs of European colonial powers and their colonies, but at the same time prevent further colonisation in the western hemisphere by Europe.

When newly-independent Mexico invited Americans to settle in Texas, one of its sparsely populated northern provinces, these settlers brought along slaves -- an act which sparked a war between Mexico and the US settlers since Mexico prohibited slavery.

The US sided with the settlers, and this led to the creation and ultimate annexation of what is now the state of Texas. A US-Mexico border dispute in 1846 resulted in Mexico losing 55% of its territory, including present-day California, to the US. Without a shot being fired, a treaty between the US and Britain resulted in the US acquiring 600,000 square-miles of uncolonised territory in the Pacific Northwest.

That the Monroe Doctrine was bestowed upon a willing Britain would serve to explain why the US did nothing to combat apartheid in South Africa and Rhodesia, or condemn the British Raj’s 1919 massacre of men, women and children at Jallianwala Bagh, Punjab.

Initially designed to prevent European interference in the Americas, the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary allowed the US to politically and militarily constrain Latin America and, over time, to intervene in the mostly non-white global south to contain communism and promote its version of democracy and capitalism.

That race has been a huge factor in America’s attainment of superpower status can be seen by examining legislation pertaining to immigration and trade over the last 200 years. While unrestricted immigration from Western Europe has always been allowed, it has been less so for Southern and Eastern Europeans but definitely not for Asians, unless they were slaves and indentured labourers. Even though it was cheap Chinese labour that built the American railroads in the 1870s, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 drove most of the Chinese out of America. American labour unions believed that Chinese coolies were responsible for declining wages and lowered standards of living.

The Asian Exclusion Act of 1924 ensured that no more than 100 immigrants from each Asian country were let in annually. Today, US companies are mostly reliant on workers in China for all manner of cheap consumer goods, and on lower paid Indian programmers for software products. In the agricultural sector, most US farms would be out of business but for cheap migrant labour from Central America, mainly Mexico -- the same Mexico whose lands were expropriated but whose people are still being shut out at the border.

Absent a moral or ethical compass, we suppose that any nation singularly focused on enriching itself can become a superpower. To quote John O’Sullivan, “Yes, more, more, more! . . . till our national destiny is fulfilled and. . .the whole boundless continent is ours”.