Images of the 2004 tsunami, appearing along with news of Iraqi resistance and US missions of "freedom and democracy", remap Asia onto a visual regime that reappears, not as farce, but as tragedy. A new Asia that affirms every old stereotype of the First World emerges in the US media, complete with inept governments, docile suffering populations, political insurgencies, and catastrophic natural disaster. When assisted by a benevolent West, poverty-stricken natives are able to tap into their inherently ennobling innocence, resilience and flexibility, but only when washed clean of their inherent tribal animosities with a dose of Christianity.
As we critique the naturalization of a helpless Asia in global media images, we must enlarge our critique to include not merely the colonial legacy of "underdevelopment", but also the present unevenness of the neo-liberal economic and political world order. The images of the refugee camps in Chennai that now find their way into prime-time US television must not eclipse the fact that India actively plunged into the "informatization route" to development beginning with Rajiv Gandhi and Sam Pitroda. Investing heavily in communication technology from the late 1980s, India signed on global information technology agreements that clearly benefited only its upper classes. The information crisis that created India's unpreparedness for the tsunami was neither natural nor inevitable. As an Indian Express story revealed, the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) in Port Blair, Andamans, had only an old analog system rather than a digital one; it printed out a blank piece of paper because the scale of the earthquake and its aftershocks exceeded the range of its calibration. Why had a nation which takes pride in its cyber czars and cyber "coolies" not updated the Andamans geophysical equipment?
Even more ironic, the first IMD communique went to the residence of former science and technology minister Murli Manohar Joshi, rather than his successor, Kapil Sibal. No coastal warning was issued. The Indian state and information technology multinationals make their choices, shaped by national priorities, about which fields of technology they should invest in. This may change now that tsunami-warning systems are a budget priority, but there were numerous opportunities to make this allocation earlier, when free-market development priorities demanded that money go to the cyber medicos in Bangalore who read X-rays of American patients from Boston, Massachusetts, in minutes and the call centers that ensure 24-hour productivity for the West.
The information fiasco in the hour that preceded the waves that hit the Tamil Nadu coast was a classic case of the gaps - structural, not accidental - produced by neo-liberal underdevelopment. The heavy infrastructure investments to facilitate multinational information-technology (IT) investment, the reduction of tariffs that made India's white collar labor pool attractive for IT outsourcing, the Rupert Murdoch-style media globalization that created huge markets for corporate lifestyle brand products: these and other Indian economic trends point to the new world order's valuation of information systems as commodities rather than as potentially transformative social practices. Sadly, the disaster of the world information economy that the decolonizing world sought to prevent 30 years ago has now become the nightmare in which we live. As the sea waters clear, one wonders to whom the windfalls of the disaster will accrue: the Indian government has now asked Microsoft to digitize its collection of satellite images, remote sensing data, and information about the country's terrain.
The devastation caused by the tsunami was by no means uniform across caste and class. Watching victims' grief on American television screens, Western viewers were given no way to understand the distribution of tragedy - it seems like cruel fate that those who've lost entire families are the poor. Little wonder that even the well-intentioned turn to mystified religious explanations or assumptions of the inherent abjectness of the Third World.
Coastal demographics in South Asia invert the Western neighborhood model. While the super rich enjoy ocean views on California and Cape Cod coasts, it is the poorest and the most marginalized South Asians who populate the beaches of the sub-continent. Fish workers have long been ostracized both because of their low position in the caste hierarchy and because of their economic marginality. Despite having some of the richest ocean resources in the world, fish workers have suffered the effects of neo-liberalization more cruelly than most, while middle men and fishery multinationals have monopolized value-additive processes and profits from the fishing industry. Despite the fact that fish workers live by a complex science, and continue to call for access to more environmental data, the assumption is that low-caste poor sectors have little to do with science and technology. Social policy organizations "deal with" the fish workers' unrest when it explodes onto the streets, but funding is reserved for those middle-class scientific and environmental priorities: high tech, high finance and the saving of large endangered species capable of building tourist revenue.
Particularly disturbing in the aftermath of aid flows is the way in which the disaster is being deployed to cast the coastal communities into long-term debt traps. The Kerala government has struck a deal with insurance companies to provide loans to coastal residents: Rs5,000 (US$114) as a loan to each tsunami-affected family at 7% interest – all at a time when international aid is flowing in as interest-free capital to those who can control these transnational flows. The money will indirectly flow back to the those who have it, because another Rs6,500 will be given for purchasing consumer durables at 4% interest. Again, each affected person will also be eligible for a loan of Rs75,000 for purchasing boats and fishing gear. These loans will carry an interest of 7%.
