Kalu Ram Meena is a villager. He belongs to the Scheduled Caste. He is a sarpanch, a council member of his village panchayat. The village Naila is in the desert State, Rajasthan. This is where President Clinton had gone to understand the deeper meaning of India.

This rustic villager shocked the American President with a question. He asked him straight: "President Saheb, most Americans think that our country is backward and poverty stricken, where people die of hunger, and which is full of snake charmers. You also think so?"

The head of the strongest and the richest nation was taken aback. He never anticipated this, especially at Naila village. And, never from a Kalu Ram. Against the background of whatever he had been told by Indians and Americans about Kalu Ram's country, he would have expected Kalu Ram to ask from the world's richest ‘Raja’—this is how the Naila people called Bill Clinton—for some favours, for himself and for his village.

But Kalu Ram wanted no favour. His profound question travelled way beyond Bill Clinton's understanding of India. He challenged the very picture that some of the best minds in the country, including ministers and prime ministers—whether it was Nehru then or Vajpayee today—officials and columnists, non-government organisations and intellectuals have presented about India to the Americans, to the West and even to us, Indians.

Recovering from his shock, Clinton responded: "No. India is not a poverty stricken nation. My visit will help to correct this wrong impression of my fellow Americans that India is poor." Bill Clinton understood that Kalu Ram's question also contained the answer, and, that is, this nation is not a poor nation, as the whole world is made to believe.

It would have been shocking only if Bill Clinton were not shocked. That India means hunger and poverty, superstition and illiteracy, snake charming and bride burning, married children and prostituting widows, is the picture that has been unfailingly presented to the world and west for over a century. Not by foreigners, but by Indians themselves since Independence. The neo Catherine Mayos are ever sniffing around the Indian gutters to make films and write books to tell the west and India that India means gutter. Contrast with Bill Clinton's own country. One-third of the pregnant girls in America are school-going children. But no American would define the American identity as unwed, child mothers.

Before independence, the missionaries started advertising India's poverty abroad during the colonial period to raise funds for their religious conversion work. After independence, the success of their work inspired many voluntary organisations to copy their success to secure aid for their work. This trend became the obsession of these organisations, which successfully made business out of the advertised poverty and hunger in India.

The Indian government too did not lag behind. It also confirmed the image of India as a poverty-stricken and hunger-ridden country. Just to secure aid for a few millions.

With the result, poverty and hunger ceased to be India's problems, and became her image, even her identity.

This is what Kalu Ram has challenged. But only very few know that Kalu Ram is right in challenging the entire opinion-making intellect of India. India was never poor, nor is it.

If India is poor, it is in leadership. Not just political, Even its intellectual leadership is only as good. It is poor not in its resources, human and material, but in properly augmenting it.

Just take one asset in which the masses of India and generally the women of India, have put faith—gold. Every economist would advise that it is a wasteful and idle asset and no one should invest in gold.

But the Indian mind defied this advice and bought gold. The government virtually declared gold as an illegal asset and handed over the entire gold trade to smugglers who emerged as monopoly gold suppliers.

Yet the Indians continued to buy gold. Even Lord Balaji was forced to buy smuggled gold to mint the Balaji coin for His devotees.

Not many in our country know that Indians have accumulated a gold stock of nearly 3 lakh tons. The value of this is about 3,000 billion US dollars.

This may not make sense unless it is related to the wealth of America itself. The value of the gold stock in India alone is equal to one-third the market capitalisation of corporate America! Again it is equal to one-half of the GDP of America! The gold in unornamented form is estimated at 20,000 tons, which, is equal to 200 billion dollars, or Rs 9.5 lakh crore! The entire gold is in black form, because only smugglers supplied gold to the people for 50 years.

Unless the black gold is brought out into circulation, this vital asset will continue to be our liability. Imagine the government gives tax immunity to all gold deposited into banks.

The estimate is that we will raise gold deposits of at least 5,000 to 10,000 tons, that is equal to 50 to 100 billion US dollars.

This will stabilise our foreign exchange front, help India control the world gold market and prices, bring down the interest rates and put into circulation a giant asset that moves around stealthily, like a thief, even now.

This is how we have reduced one of our most valuable assets into a liability.

Kalu Ram knows nothing about this.

But he is sure that we are not a poor nation. Will this open the eyes of Indians in the way it opened Bill Clinton's and made him promise to correct his fellow Americans about India? That is Indians are worth trading and doing business with, and not the charity of Americans.

Kalu Ram has in effect told Bill Clinton that Americans can invest in India, while those who projected India as a poor country had convinced themselves that India deserves aid from the Americans.

Surprisingly, only a few newspapers had carried this report. Newspapers, which wasted hundreds of tons of newsprint to support Deepa Mehta and Shabana Azmi's constitutional right to project the Indian widows as prostitutes, did not even print the Kalu Ram-Clinton dialogue.