LaRouche Presents Strategic
Overview to Indian Audiences
by EIR Staff
Amidst meetings with high-ranking Indian leaders during his Nov. 30 to Dec. 6 visit to India, U.S. economist and Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. keynoted an EIR seminar at the India International Center on Dec. 3. The invitation-only session was attended by 35 persons, among them former national cabinet ministers, high-level economic advisers, key intellectuals, and selected journalists.
LaRouche's presentation was entitled "Growing Global Crisis: The World Needs a New Monetary System;" the presentation and discussion at that seminar—one of a number of important public and private meetings—is published below. Among the other important events was a seminar with the faculty of the School For International Studies of India's leading Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
Lyndon and Helga Zepp-LaRouche met two former Prime Ministers of India, Chandra Shekhar and I.K. Gujral, and leading officials of the present government of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. On Dec. 5, they were officially received by India's President, K.R. Narayanan.
New Bretton Woods and 'Strategic Triangle'
For the LaRouches, it was a return visit after 18 years (Helga Zepp-LaRouche had visited China and India in 1999) to a country where they have many friends going back to the governments of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In the late 1970s and up until her assassination in 1984, Lyndon LaRouche's economic program-outline, written for her government, was very widely studied in India. It was India In The Year 2020: A 40-Year Program To Make India An Industrial Giant. LaRouche made an extensive visit to India in 1982 around this policy of combined heavy investment in economic-technological infrastructure, and universal education.
The current, urgent context for the discussions was twofold. First, the immediate need for LaRouche's New Bretton Woods monetary reorganization of the collapsing international financial system. And second, the embattled potential that a "strategic triangle" relationship may emerge among Russia, India, and China, focussed on the development of high-technology economic infrastructure for all of Eurasia—the Eurasian Land-Bridge. Seminar participants discussed the recent sabotage of that perspective by the Cato Institute and other Anglo-American Mont Pelerinite think-tanks, which intensively threatened the Clinton Administration against the "strategic triangle" idea.
The EIR seminar was opened by Prof. Devendra Kaushik, retired chairman of the Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and present chairman of Maulana Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Calcutta. He called LaRouche "one of the most powerful thinkers of our time, for whom economics is not a subject of money and finances, but a commitment to the General Welfare and the Common Good." Professor Kaushik also welcomed Helga Zepp-LaRouche and her "tireless campaign for the idea of the Eurasian Land-Bridge."
In his presentation, LaRouche stressed the importance of learning real history, in particular learning from the fight to create the sovereign nation-state, the key achievement of the European Renaissance in the 15th Century. He then discussed the "American System of political-economy," and its impact in Europe, Japan, China and Russia during the 19th Century. The key achievement was the building of railway systems, such as the Trans-Siberian, as the basis for inland economic development. It was to counter this that British geopolitics was founded, he said.
This approach to economics demands a new approach to education, LaRouche said, based on re-creating the crucial discoveries made in history—a vital issue for India, with its huge population and problem of underdevelopment and poverty. India must emphasize infrastructure, water management and power supply, with the nuclear high-temperature reactor as the appropriate technology for power generation there. Public credit is required for investment in new industrial technologies, and machine tool investments. All this requires long-term thinking: "No government is thinking, unless it thinks 25 years ahead. We must choose the road for the future. Think like a parent, who fosters the development of a child for the future."
In his closing remarks, LaRouche emphasized once again, that "the present global financial system is finished," and must be superseded by a "New Bretton Woods" reorganization. The Eurasian Land-Bridge is the right development perspective. The nations of East and Southeast Asia need a rapid infusion of technology, based on long-term credit at low interest rates for great infrastructure projects, and with Russia serving as transmission belt. We can bring the nations into the new system—"if not, we are headed for a new dark age."
Helga Zepp-LaRouche delivered a report on the Eurasian Land-Bridge. This idea was developed in 1989-92, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now, with Chinese infrastructure planning, and with Vladimir Putin as President of Russia, the Land-Bridge is no longer an idea, but concrete steps are under way to realize it. "We have come to India, this time, to help the Indian elite to recognize that a renewed effort is necessary. The present crisis can be used to put the Eurasian Land-Bridge on the agenda," she said.
