India is right. They don't need or want our aid
No good deed ever goes unpunished. That must be the thought flitting through the mind of International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell as he contemplates Sunday's front pages: "India tells Britain - We don't want your aid."
Most people find it staggering that in the midst of the biggest spending cutbacks since the 1930s, Britain is not only maintaining its foreign aid budget - it is increasing it.
We are currently spending about £9 billion a year and under our commitment to increase total aid spending to the UN target of 0.7 per cent of GDP by 2013, we are on course for about £12 billion by 2014. As a percentage of GDP, the UK spends more on aid than any of the G8 group of large and wealthy countries.
More and more people also find it staggering that we are giving India another £600 million over the next three years and have already given them.
£1 billion over the last five years.
After all, the Indian economy is growing at 10 per cent per annum and is set to overtake the UK's in total size within a decade. India has nuclear weapons and a space programme. It has more billionaires than Britain. Its giant £83 billion industrial conglomerate Tata (made up of over 100 companies worldwide) actually owns the iconic British car firm Jaguar Land Rover and what is left of our steel industry.
So why are we giving them money? Shouldn't it be the other way round?
Certainly, the Indians seem to think that the days of the Raj and British paternalism are gone.
As Pranab Mukherjee, the Indian Finance Minister, told the Indian Parliament last week: "We do not require the aid. It is a peanut in our total development exercises." Delhi wanted voluntarily to give it up.
But the British would not let him. According to The Sunday Telegraph, officials in our Department for International Development (DFID) told the Indians that cancelling the aid programme would cause "grave political embarrassment" to Britain.
The officials added that ministers such as Mitchell and David Cameron had spent political capital justifying Indian aid to the British people.
This sounds like something out of Alice in Wonderland. A cash-strapped Western country, forced to slash its police budget by 20 per cent, close libraries, sack soldiers and get rid of its aircraft carriers and Harrier jump jets, is giving money to an emerging Asian superpower. And the superpower does not even want the cash on the grounds that handouts damage its image.
Nor has our largesse bought us influence. In a spectacular slap in the face, India has chosen the "Asda" option, placing a provisional £6.3 billion contract for fighter jets with the French, rather than the "Waitrose" choice of our superior Typhoon planes.
How to make sense of this? We are seeing another example of the bizarre effects of Cameron's "detoxification" strategy.
Committing the UK to hitting the 0.7 per cent target is all of a piece with other measures designed to neuter the Tories' so-called nasty party image.
So we have had hugging hoodies (now largely abandoned) and hugging huskies (still part of the mix). But the price for these dubious political gestures is high and rising, as the looming revolt by 100 Conservative MPs over £400 million subsidies to ugly and useless wind farms demonstrates.
All this might be justified if it was paying rich political dividends. But the polling suggests that Tory support - in the high thirties - has been largely flat from the period six months before the 2010 election until today. The only significant bounce Cameron has achieved came when he did a thoroughly "nasty party" thing and vetoed the proposed fiscal union treaty back in December.
Some sense has been injected into the DFID budget. Aid to China and Russia has been stopped and Mitchell can argue that with a third of the world's poorest people (450 million) living in India on about 80p a day, we should be giving them help.
But there are poor people in every country, even the United States. And no one is suggesting that we start giving aid to California, even if some of them are having a rough time. Barring extremis like an earthquake or a tsunami, the poor people of countries like the USA or India are fundamentally the responsibility of the domestic government. India could cut back on some of its more grandiose schemes, like their nukes or their space programme, if they wanted to help their own poor.
Under Labour, Britain was giving aid to about 100 countries, nearly half the world. Sensibly, this has been cut back and aid is better targeted on the poorest and those most in need.
But India's plea - to keep our aid money for ourselves, or those who need it more - should be heeded in Whitehall. Most of us don't want to fork out extra cash so Dave and Co can feel better about themselves.
India is right. They don't need or want our aid | Mail Online
