How CPM lost the game

An enraged Prakash Karat declares war on Congress...

... But he has only himself to blame
Ardhendu Bhushan Bardhan, I am sure, can’t stop telling himself that he had it right a year ago but his comrades, especially those in the CPI(M), would not listen to him. A quick recall of the events that followed the Prime Minister’s threat to call the Left’s bluff — “if they want to withdraw support, so be it” — conveyed to AK Gopalan Bhavan and Ajoy Bhavan through The Telegraph, would show this is no exaggeration, although people tend to scoff at the CPI of which Mr AB Bardhan is the general secretary. Rumours were rife — as they usually are in Lutyens’ Delhi even when there’s nothing much happening and the silly season has set in — that the Prime Minister was in high dudgeon (not for the first time) and had threatened to resign (also not for the first time) if he was not allowed to have his way with the India-US civilian nuclear cooperation agreement. The coordination committee that had been set up to win over the Communists had failed to break the logjam; Mr Prakash Karat was unbending in his opposition to the nuclear deal. And then came the Prime Minister’s interview to The Telegraph, asking the Left to go take a walk — they could either take it or lump it.
The Left got into a huddle, Mr Bardhan told mediapersons that the Congress-Left marriage of convenience had reached a dead end and “divorce is imminent”. The Congress as well as its allies in the UPA went into a tizzy. Many of those who are now vociferously proclaiming their support for the nuclear deal — and in the process talking a whole lot of gibberish while trying to regurgitate the mumbo-jumbo fed to them by babus eager to stack up American IOUs — had on that occasion turned on the Prime Minister, rudely snubbing him and his obsession with the nuclear deal. Finding himself isolated, the Prime Minister had rapidly retreated from his position and meekly declared his intention to learn to “live with disappointments”.
Mr Bardhan was not impressed. He was unrestrained in his assessment that any further discussion on the nuclear deal would be nothing more than a dialogue of the deaf. Given the CPI’s past association with the Congress — it had stood by Mrs Indira Gandhi and was no stranger to the party’s guiles — Mr Bardhan could sense that the parting of ways was inevitable; that it was only a matter of time before the ‘strategic’ alliance collapsed under the weight of inner contradictions. But he was ignored by Mr Karat while Mr Sitaram Yechury, who is trying to fashion his politics after that of Mr Harkishen Singh Surjeet (which, just in case his friends don’t get it, is no compliment) convinced his comrades that he would succeed in brokering a deal over the nuclear deal and everybody would live happily ever after. With Mr Pranab Mukherjee as the interlocutor, he couldn’t go wrong.
Last week’s events prove three points. First, Mr Karat may be a brilliant strategist in the classical Marxist mould but he is a poor tactician. The Congress, which is not burdened by ideology and hence not hostage to linear thinking, has checkmated the Left and finessed Mr Karat. Second, Mr Yechury may have begun to look like a political fixer (in Lutyens’ Delhi this is not a pejorative term), he has a long way to go before he can play the role of Mr Surjeet. He has been shown up for what he is: A callow politician who over-reached his abilities. Sanctimonious and smug, he is tireless in pouring scorn and spitting bile at others, especially the BJP, while disingenuously justifying every deed and each move of his party. Mr Yechury’s self-righteousness now lies in tatters; hopefully he will take a break from his preachy politics of denunciation. Third, the CPI(M) must start listening to its leftists allies, including the RSP, rather than ignoring them. If only Mr Karat had paid heed to Mr Bardhan’s views and taken his assessment seriously, then it would not have found itself dumped so unceremoniously by the Congress 11 months later. Adding insult to injury, the Samajwadi Party, which the CPI(M) thought was a fraternal party, has come forward to bail out the Congress. Bourgeois politics has won the day, but the battle has not yet been lost.
It is not often that one sees the unflappable and usually smiling Mr Karat in a rage. But the day after the Government authorised the circulation of the draft of the India-IAEA safeguards agreement among the members of the nuclear watchdog body’s Board of Governors, he was incandescent with rage. “We will make it politically impossible for the Government to implement the deal,” he thundered. Whether or not the Left is able to achieve this objective remains to be seen, but it can surely make the situation tricky for the Congress if it were to decide, and stick to its decision, not to prop up another Congress-led Government at the Centre in the name of ‘protecting democracy’ and ‘defeating communalism’. No, I am not suggesting that the Left should join hands with the BJP or the NDA; even the slightest hint of such a development, absurd and impossible as it may be, would hurt both of them politically. These are two poles that can never meet, not even in the ‘national interest’. Past efforts to uneasily cohabit have proved to be disastrous, notwithstanding elaborate breakfast meetings at Mr VP Singh’s residence. This is not about ‘political untouchability’ but political incompatibility.
Not many years ago, the CPI(M) believed that “the Congress party has degenerated both politically and organisationally. It is a party in decline, as it has pursued when in power, economic policies which militate against the people; it is a party riddled with corruption... The Congress is no more a party which can govern at the Centre or provide the country with a new agenda”. In the past decade, the Congress has not transformed itself into something which is different from what it was described as in the Left’s Election Manifesto of 1998, drafted and published by the CPI(M). Mr Karat’s recent experience only serves to reaffirm this point.
So, let him — and the CPI(M) as well as its allies — swear that never again shall the Left join hands with the Congress for the sheer pleasure of exercising power without responsibility. Then only can Mr Karat seek to make it politically difficult, if not impossible, for the Congress to cut corners with India’s interest. If there is no such resolve, then we can only assume that once his anger has dissipated, Mr Karat will allow a rerun of events as Mr Bardhan watches from the margins. The deja vu won’t be his alone.

Coffee Break / Sunday Pioneer / July 14, 2008

(c) CMYK Printech Ltd

Muslim rage against America

This isn’t about India’s interest!
Strolling along a flagstoned Byzantine lane in the Arab quarter of the walled city of Jerusalem near the Temple Mount — the Al Aqsa mosque is an imposition of later vintage — I spotted a bowl containing pieces of exquisite coral in the window of a Bedouin jewellery shop. The man behind the counter was obviously an Arab, one of the many who live and work in Israel and are far better off than the Palestinians in Gaza Strip and West Bank, although they are loath to admit it. I greeted the man in halting street Arabic and inquired about the coral. A smile broke out on his face and he asked, “Indian?”
In Egypt, the question would have been, “Indian or Pakistani?” Since Pakistanis do not visit Israel, the second option did not arise. I answered in the affirmative and tried to steer the conversation to the price of the coral, but he would not have any of it. He issued rapid-fire instructions to his assistant, asking him to get mint tea, which arrived within minutes. Meanwhile, he launched into a harangue on how India had dumped Muslims both at home and abroad to “befriend the Zionists and the Americans”.
For evidence he cited the India-US civilian nuclear cooperation agreement and Israel’s supply of military hardware to India. His knowledge of the twists and turns of the nuclear deal, the rejection of it by India’s Muslims and the Left’s ideological opposition to New Delhi forging a strategic relationship with Washington, DC, was truly amazing.
Asked about the source of his information, he said, “Arab newspapers from Misr (Egypt) and Saudi Arabia”. Apparently, local Arab sheets published in the Palestinian Authority areas had been reproducing commentary and opinion articles from newspapers published from Cairo and Riyadh. As for Indian Muslims feeling agitated about India moving closer to the US, the Internet, he said, was an excellent source of information.
The shaai was good, but the coral was far too expensive for me — I had a feeling he had raised the price after sensing my unease over his diatribe and at times abusive references to how “Hindus are conspiring with Jews and Christians against Muslims”. So we parted company after the customary round of kissing; I promised I would return for the coral, perhaps he knew I wouldn’t.
But the halt at this Arab jewellery shop was not entirely wasted: It had provided me with an insight into the ‘ummah web’ — how Muslims separated by borders, land and sea remain connected, feeding on each other’s anger and fuelling each other’s rage with the help of conspiracy theories and imagined grievances. Much of the rage is directed at the West; most of the anger is aimed at the US. As for the Zionists, if the ummah had its way, insha’allah, Israel would cease to exist.
Months later, at an international conference on radical Islam, in which most of the participants were Muslim scholars and theologians, this perception of the ummah’s worldview was strengthened as participants stopped short of chanting “Death to America!” while caustically rebuking both the Congress and the BJP for taking India closer to the US and Israel. A participant from India, by no means a fanatic mullah with hennaed beard and skullcap, asserted that if the Government went ahead with formalising the nuclear deal with the US, it would be as good as “ignoring the sentiments of 150 million Muslims at home” and “enraging Muslims abroad”.
There is nothing startlingly new about such aggressive assertion of ‘Muslim sentiments’, which are invariably pegged to imagined grievances and inflamed by perceived notions of Christians and Jews — and, in India’s case, Hindus — conspiring against the ummah. From Indonesia to Turkey, via the sand castles of Islamic states in between, the targets of Muslim ire are the same; the intensity of rage ebbs and flows depending on events as they happen and as they are seen to happen.
So, cartoons that allegedly lampoon Mohammed published in a Dutch newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, of which nobody had ever heard before, become the cause of angry street protests and threats of murder and mayhem one day; on another, jaundiced reports of torture at Guantanamo Bay, whose details pale in comparison to the horrors inflicted by the Taliban, result in violent outrage. At Friday sermons, the two disparate issues are slyly merged into one: Islam is under assault; the ummah is endangered; and, America is to blame.
It would be erroneous to trace the Muslim rage that we see to post-9/11 American policy and the war on terror being waged by President George W Bush. It is true that Muslims view the Taliban’s loss of power, which Mullah Omar and his band of Deobandi fanatics wielded ruthlessly and which saw the sickening debasement of women and girls, as a blow against the ummah and their faith. It is equally true that Muslims grieve over the fall and death of Saddam Hussein, who turned to god after decades of Ba’athist atrocities that included mass slaughter and terrible torture.
Yet, Muslim displeasure with America is not merely on account of the discontinuation of the shocking spectacle of shari’ah being enforced in its purest, most pristine form in Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein getting his just desserts. It predates 9/11. Mr Zafarul-Islam Khan, editor of Milli Gazette, published from Delhi, traces the “roots of Muslim anger at the US and West to long before the illegal and unjust current imperialist crusade in Afghanistan under the guise of fighting terrorism”.
The ‘roots’, according to him, lie in “normalisation of relations with Israel”, “US role in condoning Serbian aggression in Bosnia” and “economic attrition of the Muslim world resources”. The list of imagined grievances is too long to be reproduced here, but it does highlight two points: First, Muslim concerns — for instance, in India — transcend local realities and are essentially pan-Islamic issues that agitate the entire ummah; second, even if there were no India-US nuclear deal, India’s Muslims, as also their co-religionists elsewhere, would have been equally angry with America and Mr Bush; they would have still gathered in frighteningly huge numbers in Delhi and rioted in Lucknow to protest against his visit to India.
Seen in this context, CPI(M) Polit Bureau member MK Pandhe was merely stating the fact when he warned the Samajwadi Party of a Muslim backlash if it supported the nuclear deal and joined forces with the Congress to push it through. The Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind’s protest against the CPI(M)’s “attempt to communalise the issue” and the claim by other Muslim organisations, especially the Jamaat-e-Islami, that Muslims are opposed to the nuclear deal because they believe it is “not in the national interest”, need not be taken seriously.
Unless we must believe that the Arab shopkeeper in old Jerusalem who chided me for New Delhi’s increasing proximity to Washington, DC and Tel Aviv shares the ‘concern’ of Indian Muslims for India’s national interest. If this is absurd, as surely it is, so is the Jamaatis’ concern for India’s national interest, which, thankfully, has not yet been supplanted by the ummah’s interest.

(The Pioneer, leading article, Edit Page, June 28, 200g)

(c) CMYK Printech Ltd.

Ten years after explosion of national pride

A decade after May 11, 1998
Ten years ago this Sunday, India stealthily conducted three nuclear tests at Pokhran, sending shockwaves around the world. The 'Powerful Five' and Janus-faced moralists like Canada and Australia were aghast and almost disbelieving -- not so much because India had decided to demonstrate its nuclear capability, which it had kept under wraps for years, but because of its audacious disregard for consequences, especially economic sanctions. The US had an additional reason to feel hugely upset: For all its 'eyes' in the sky and 'ears' on the ground, it had been taken by utter and total surprise.
Unlike PV Narasimha Rao, who almost dared the world but stopped short of conducting the crucial tests that would enable India to cross the Rubicon and emerge as a nuclear power, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee was both crafty and determined. We will never really know whether an accidental discovery by the Americans of preparations for conducting tests at Pokhran resulted in sufficient pressure being applied on Rao for him to call them off. But we do know that Mr Vajpayee instructed, and ensured, that no such discovery occurred between his giving the green signal for Operation Shakti and Buddha 'smiling' on May 11, 1998.
That demonstration of India's shakti was no doubt essentially the achievement of our scientists and technologists who toiled ceaselessly to put together, with indigenous know-how, nuclear devices of calibrated yields, including a hydrogen bomb, despite the barriers that had been raised after Mrs Indira Gandhi taunted the world with her 'peaceful' explosion of May 18, 1974, erasing forever the image of India as a nation with a begging bowl, perpetuated in no small measure by a mocking America since the days of PL 480 aid. Unlike Pakistan, we neither received nuclear technology nor burgled it from unsuspecting countries.
Hence, when the tests were conducted in May 1998, they were seen as an assertion of self-esteem and self-pride, a declaration of national resolve -- thrice over on May 11 and twice over on May 13. The front page of this newspaper captured the mood of the nation by running the story on the tests under a banner headline, 'India explodes H-Bomb', accompanied by a triumphant signed editorial, 'Explosion of self-esteem', by its editor, Mr Chandan Mitra.
Yet, it would be nothing short of cussedness to deny Mr Vajpayee the credit for daring to tread where his predecessors had feared to venture. Since Mrs Gandhi's decision to conduct the first test in 1974, all other Prime Ministers, including Rajiv Gandhi, had chosen to indulge in peacenik mumbo-jumbo about universal disarmament, hoping to join the ranks of disingenuous non-proliferationists like former US President Jimmy Carter. Mr Vajpayee chose to be different and, as subsequent events were to prove, initiated a tectonic shift in India's foreign policy and strategic posture.
Yes, it marked a break with the past, which had become so pitifully meaningless ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Empire. But it also marked the beginning of India's foray into a brave new world heralded by the advent of the 21st century two years later. In his own way, Mr Vajpayee foresaw the potential of India entering the 21st century as a nuclear power and acted accordingly. It helped that the BJP had never been squeamish when it came to the nuclear question.
The fallout of Pokhran II was felt on two fronts. Pakistan, enraged that it had been upstaged, conducted five nuclear tests on May 28 and a sixth test on May 30. That was Islamabad's assurance to Pakistanis that it could still steal a march over New Delhi. Almost simultaneously, donor countries turned off their taps and came down heavily with economic sanctions, apart from imposing harsh restrictions on technology transfer or whatever little of it was happening.
India rode through the storm and survived the vicious response. We continue to be a stable and responsible state, unlike Pakistan whose nuclear arsenal has become a cause for worry across the world as an unstable state implodes on itself, notwithstanding an elected Government taking over from the illegitimate regime of Gen Pervez Musharraf.
Our strategic engagement with the US to fashion a new over-arching security paradigm and the attempt to redefine our relationship with other countries, including Russia and China, both aggressively pursued by Mr Vajpayee, stands in sharp contrast to the co-option of Pakistan by the post-9/11 US-led Western alliance, not as an equal but as a client state. When the US refers to Pakistan as a "staunch ally" what it means is beggars can't be choosers.
But a decade after that stunningly awesome display of India's determination to secure its rightful place in the comity of nations, of announcing its arrival in a world where the voice of the powerful is heard over the clamour of those whose survival depends on the munificence of the 'Powerful Five', and 34 years after Mrs Gandhi posed for photographers at Pokhran, we appear to be losing the gains that accrued from Mr Vajpayee's decision to go nuclear.
Just how much we have compromised on our self-esteem, our self-pride, can be gauged from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's desperation to strike a flawed deal with the US for civil nuclear cooperation. It is reflected in the hesitation that has replaced confidence while dealing with foreign policy, most noticeably in our relations with China. It is exemplified by our reluctance to take Pokhran II to its logical conclusion by putting in place a credible minimum deterrent that is alive to changing geo-political realities and not a stagnant doctrine with an irrelevant posture.
The decline is as perceptible on the domestic front where non-governance has become the mantra of survival and as Ministers indulge their own perverse whims and fancies, a weak Prime Minister watches from the margins. It's nice to think of India as a nuclear power but that idea of India does not square up to facts that should embarrass us. Nor does it make sense to sell national honour for a nuclear agreement with America when basic issues remain untouched by either policy or programme.
It would be foolish to believe that the image of a resurgent India, that captivated the world after May 11, 1998, still obtains. The Prime Minister and his cronies in the media believe that India's deliverance depends on the 123 Agreement, that nuclear power -- as opposed to nuclear power - will take us to new heights of prosperity and a new level of strategic clout. What they forget is that in this wondrous land of ours, 67 million children below the age of five live without basic healthcare, more than a million children die every year before they complete a month of their wretched lives, and millions of adults and children still go to bed hungry even as the middle class struggles to cope with runaway prices and a tottering economy.
Mr Vajpayee had a vision for India to emerge as a powerful nation, prosperous at home, equal to others abroad. The most memorable highlight of his years as Prime Minister will no doubt remain the decision to empower India by going nuclear on May 11, 1998. But we would be unfair to his legacy if we failed to recall the beginning he had made in empowering Indians by improving their lot. That legacy has been squandered by Mr Manmohan Singh; it's not surprising that his Government should choose to shun the 10th anniversary of Pokhran II.

US too pushy with nuclear deal

US too pushy with N-deal
Americans want Indians to believe they know what's good for this country and are pushing for an early closure of the nuclear deal. This is gunboat diplomacy in disguise: Coercive tactics couched as constant, mounting pressure. Should India get hustled?

Back in 1850, a Gibraltar-born British subject, David Pacifico, was 'harmed' in Athens. The British Foreign Office imperiously demanded that Pacifico be 'compensated', but King Otto chose not to oblige. Lord Palmerston, the British Foreign Secretary, was incandescent with rage and ordered the Royal Navy to blockade the Greek port of Piraeus. Many consider this to be the origin of latter day 'gunboat diplomacy', though others insist it began with the British sending a gunboat up the Yangtse river to quell the Chinese rebellion during the Opium War.
Over the centuries, powerful countries, taking a cue from Lord Palmerston (and/or whoever decided to despatch a gunboat up the Yangtse) have devised various coercive methods to force foreign Governments to toe their line, taking recourse to gunboat diplomacy. As a contemporary commentator has said, "Government's use of coercion is now a well-oiled machine" -- gears are shifted depending upon who is being coerced. After 9/11, the Bush Administration despatched Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to Islamabad with a simple message for Gen Pervez Musharraf: If Pakistan did not join the US war on terror, "we will bomb you back to the Stone Age".
But such crude coercive tactics cannot be used by the US against India in its effort to push through the civil nuclear cooperation agreement, which the Americans seem to want more than Indians do. If the absence of support for the deal in Parliament is any indication, only a section, and not all of, the Congress-led UPA Government wants the deal to come through; many among the votaries of the deal do not have the foggiest idea about what the Hyde Act is all about or the technical details of the 123 Agreement.
That, however, has not prevented the US Administration from 'stepping on the gas' and, at times gently and on other occasions bluntly, telling India to hurry along and close the deal because Washington believes it is good for this country. Gunboats have not been sent to the Bay of Bengal or the Arabian Sea, but an endless stream of deal-pushers have been jetting their way to New Delhi where awe-struck mediapersons are told -- and they dutifully report -- that great benefits lie in India signing on the dotted line. This is gunboat diplomacy by another name, a more sophisticated version of what Mr Armitage told Gen Musharraf.
This "we-know-what's-best-for-you" attitude has been on display right from the beginning when the US first offered the deal in July 2005 when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh left for Washington, DC, without any knowledge of the contents of the crucial portion of the final draft of the joint statement; he got to see it only on arrival.
Recall Mr Singh's statement in the Lok Sabha: "I hope I am not revealing a secret. I think when the final draft came to me from the US side, I made it quite clear to them that I will not sign on any document which did not have the support of the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. It held up our negotiations for about 12-15 hours." Mr Anil Kakodkar, the AEC chairperson, was not a member of Mr Singh's delegation; he was in Beijing when the Americans sprang the surprise. He was asked to take the first flight to Washington, DC, arriving on the eve of the signature ceremony.
Between then and 2007, there was little movement as the US discovered India was no pushover, that Parliament could not be ignored, and that not all Indians are convinced that it is a 'win-win' arrangement. With time running out for the Bush Administration, which is keen to showcase the nuclear deal as its 'foreign policy achievement' in the absence of any other visible successes abroad, the US began to mount pressure in the last quarter of 2007, insisting that India must begin negotiations with the IAEA.
Such was the urgency to get the deal moving, Mr Bush called up Mr Singh while the latter was in Africa. Even Mr Henry Kissinger, who ordered the Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal in 1971, was trotted out to sell the deal. The American pressure worked and India began negotiations with the IAEA, which are now believed to have reached near-conclusion.
That done, the US has now begun to put pressure for an early closure of the IAEA negotiations, so that it can seek India-specific exemptions from the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers' Group, which is scheduled to meet in Berlin in May. After that, the deal is only an up-or-down vote in the US Congress away, and Mr Bush could yet claim a foreign policy success heavily weighed in America's favour. Senator Joseph Biden has summed up the US's policy gains with his trenchant comment, "(The deal) will limit the size and sophistication of India's nuclear weapons programme." This is apart from commercial gains that will accrue to American firms.
Mr Biden has been economical with his words. The US has a two-fold strategic stake in the nuclear deal. First, it will make India more than just a strategic partner. Given the geopolitical realities of the 21st century, nations mindful of their national interest are pursuing multiple partnerships with different players in diverse settings. The deal seeks to prevent India from doing that; the US wants India to become a new Japan or Britain, a 'faithful ally' who will not look elsewhere but only up to America. Second, the deal is the means to prevent India from emerging as a full-fledged nuclear-weapons state and bringing it into the US-led non-proliferation regime -- America's central goal since Pokhran-II -- even if this strategically disadvantages New Delhi vis-à-vis Beijing.
Meanwhile, the UPA Government's not-so-strange inability to read the writing on the wall has prompted Minister for External Affairs Pranab Mukherjee to tell Parliament on March 3: "The Hyde Act is an enabling provision that is between the executive and the legislative organs of the US Government... India's rights and obligations regarding civil nuclear cooperation with the US arise only from the bilateral 123 Agreement that we have agreed upon with the US." Mr Richard Boucher, the US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs and the latest deal-seller to visit New Delhi, had a different, and more correct, take on this issue. He told newspersons on March 5: "The Hyde Act is a domestic legislation and the 123 Agreement is an international agreement. I think we can move forward with both in a consistent manner."
For a better understanding of Mr Boucher's comment, take a look at what US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee on February 14: "We will support nothing with India in the NSG that is in contradiction to the Hyde Act. It will have to be completely consistent with the obligations of the Hyde Act".