Goodbye, and good riddance

I am sure you have heard this before: In Chinese, the term for “crisis” is a compound of “opportunity” and “danger”. The United Progressive Alliance government is in the midst of a crisis and it is not surprising that it confronts both danger and opportunity. What the former is has been spelt out ad nauseum by Communist Party of India (Marxist) General Secretary Prakash Karat, most recently after the Politburo meeting on Sunday — take one more step on the Indo-US nuclear deal and we will blow your government out of the water.
Not many have thought of the opportunity that the threat provides for the Congress party to take the much needed and long delayed step of redefining its politics and policies to align itself with today's realities — both economic and political. In other words, regaining its identity as India's pre-eminent political party, based on its programmes and principles, derived from its own history, instead of having to be in the awkward situation of being the dog which is wagged by the tail.


Ever since Jawaharlal Nehru passed away, the party has struggled for its soul. It has been assailed by the temptations of the Left and of the Right, and never quite regained its equipoise. There was a brief moment when, under Rajiv Gandhi the party began to move in that direction. The young prime minister adopted a pragmatic, forward looking approach that would have brought liberalisation a decade before it came. But he was brought down by a combination of scandals and bad karma.
Pandit Nehru had no problem with the Communists. His own history and understanding of the party went back to its very founding. He had witnessed the efforts of the Communists to penetrate the Congress and take over its agenda under the guise of the Congress Socialist Party faction within the party. He had seen how Communists had consolidated themselves in India by supporting the British during World War II, opposing the Quit India Movement and expanding their base at the expense of the Congress whose leaders were in jail.

Leaders

So, after Independence, his approach was to pick and choose what he wanted. He adapted central planning to Indian circumstances — a private sector developing on the foundations of a centrally planned infrastructure. Where the Communists would have wanted alignment, his foreign policy, stubbornly sought non-alignment. It remained independent in spite of the West's co-option of Pakistan as a military ally. Panditji did not hesitate to fight the Communists as he did militarily in Telengana, and through democratic means in Kerala in 1957.
The problem was Indira Gandhi. In a bid to distance herself from the Congress old guard, she hocked the soul of the party to the Communists, of the CPI variety. They encouraged her to go back on solemn assurances to the former royalty and deny them privy purses, nationalise banks and other businesses. They were the most vociferous supporters of the Emergency that took away the common liberties of the people and took the opportunity to place party members and fellow travelers in various government bodies and educational institutions.
Indira paid back the debt by standing on the wrong side of history and refusing to openly condemn the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. But thereafter she considered the debt paid and moved back to the political centre by beginning a process of rapprochement with the United States. The present confused attitude of the Congress party towards the Communists has come after the prime ministership of P.V. Narasimha Rao, who was a seasoned politician and knew what Communist politics was all about from Andhra Pradesh. Sonia Gandhi, on the other hand, has had little ground experience in the politics of the country. As a person who values loyalty, what she remembered, when the Indo-US nuclear crisis first began to loom last August, was that the Communists had unreservedly backed her on the most important issue of her political life — the BJP's attempt to raise the issue of her foreign origin. In refusing to precipitate the break last October, she has made what could be a major political blunder.
She does not realise that loyalty and ideological consistency are highly over-rated virtues in Indian politics. What really matters is opportunism. Take the Communists — they have not hesitated to ally themselves to fundamentalists like Abdul Naseer Mahdani to break the Indian Union Muslim League’s hold in north Kerala. Such opportunism has a old history in Leninist parties. World War II was a war of imperialist redivision till June 22, 1941, thereafter it became the People’s war.

Opportunists

Or, consider the DMK. It was part of the national coalition with the BJP for six long years. Yet two weeks ago we heard Mr. Karunanidhi declaiming on the importance of the UPA to stand with the Left so as to defend secularism. What the present situation then offers is a chance for the Congress to dump allies like the DMK and “friends” like the Communists.
The DMK should be shed because, in baldly opportunistic terms, Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK is almost certainly likely to sweep the coming elections. There are no ideological differences between the two, so the choice is simple — try and hook the winner.
Dumping the Left is important for the long-term future of the party. With the Left’s stranglehold, the Congress will be on permanent life-support. If it must flourish, it needs to catch up with what was wrought in 1991. There is need to achieve complete privatisation of the public sector, trade liberalisation and financial deregulation and reform of labour laws. Politically, India needs to get involved in the new and evolving Asian security architecture that connects democratic Japan, Australia, Asean and the United States.

Opponents

The Communists’ stand on the nuclear deal reflects less of its Luddite tendencies and more of its refusal to recognise the geopolitical realities of the post-Soviet world. The old CPI is of little consequence. Mr. Bardhan bellowing “bhar mein jayey stock market” (the hell with the stock market) sums up his world which denies reality for the sake of alleged ideological purity. All it does is to make for good bytes on TV, but it signifies little otherwise. The CPI(M)’s vigour comes from a general secretary who should have been in command of the party in 1980. In 2008, he is an anachronism. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of the Chinese economy, orthodox Marxism-Leninism has lost whatever rationale it had. It is not surprising that the CPI(M) has lost whatever vitality it had. Its programme refuses to account for the enormous changes that have taken place in the world and within India. This leads to its mulish stand on fighting US imperialism at a time when the US is finally declining, or to, Canute-like, resist economic reform that will make India a better market-based economy.
The Congress party's reassertion of its own political identity will set the basis for its clash with the BJP. Given its broad-based social and economic programmes and its secular politics, the field is stacked in the Congress’ favour, no matter what the result of the next election is. But to achieve its destiny, the party needs to transform this crisis into a historic opportunity. To this end, to use another Chinese saying, it must seize this hour, this day.
This article first appeared in Mail Today July 2, 2008

A Country Betrayed by its Leaders

Their actions on the nuclear deal and oil prices undermine the future of the nation

WHEN I turned on the TV to listen to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s address to the nation on Wednesday evening, there was a brief flicker of expectation —perhaps he would actually use the occasion to say that the government had decided to go ahead with the Indo- US nuclear deal, damn the consequences. After all prime ministers don’t address the nation on trivial matters like raising oil prices. That was an administrative decision, which if commonsense had prevailed, should actually have been a commercial one. I didn’t expect that the PM would have to do something as dramatic as addressing the nation merely to justify a price hike of a commodity over which the government has been procrastinating for the past ten months. Alas, that was what it was all about. He did tell us how the international situation had warranted the price hike and did note that the present policy was not a“permanent solution” to the problem. But after a token reference to the need for conservation, and an exhortation to develop alternate energy sources, he was silent.
Mr. Singh’s address was par for the course for his prime ministership —uninspiring, dull and close to the political script of the pusillanimous Congress party that requires total appeasement of the Left allies of the UPA. This column is not about the nuclear deal. Though, for the record, the window is getting smaller and smaller and will probably close in September. What this is about is the larger failure of the political system to measure up to the needs of the country and its people.
Perhaps the best example is the oil price hike itself. Every party under the sun has gone out of its way to criticise it, even the BJP, whose record on dealing with the subject when in government as the leader of the NDA is not particularly edifying. None of them came out with arealistic and intellectually honest alternative to raising the prices of petroleum products. This is not surprising. After all, they are all fiddling while India’s energy prospects go from being bad to worse.
The country’s energy needs are not something that we have infinite time to resolve. The needs are here and now and not being met. Yes, we have our nuclear plan based on thorium, but it kicks in thirty years or so from now and that too if technical challenges don’t intervene. Reports that Indian nuclear power plants are running out of fuel have not been concocted by the Manmohan Singh government to build a political climate to favour the deal. The first official reference to the problem was available in the mid- term appraisal of the 10th Five Year Plan which was prepared in the early 2000s, well before the UPA came to power.

Demographic Dividend

There is an argument that nuclear power alone will not achieve much. True, it has to be seen as part of a package of measures. France, after all, has managed in the last thirty years after the first oil shock to ensure that 79 per cent of its electricity is produced by nuclear energy, Japan manages 30. Think where they would have been today without nuclear power. The current nuclear renaissance is moving in a similar direction. Fourth generation reactors and newer technologies based on thorium are on the cards. But these will only be available if India is part of the world nuclear order, as defined by the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the IAEA.
India’s window of opportunity is finite and can be defined with considerable clarity. It lies between now and 2030, because of something called the demographic dividend. As Prof Kaushik Basu has explained, the dependency ratio of our population, the number of people of working age as against those who are dependent, is set to decline in the next three decades and then start climbing again. In the year 2004 India had a population of 1,080 million, of whom 670 million people were in the age group of 15 to 64 years, which is considered as the “working age population.” The rest of the population —the very young and the old, some 400 million —were seen as the dependent population. So the dependency ratio, or the proportion of working age population to the dependent population worked out to 0.6.
Given our current trends this ratio will decline even further in the coming decades. In 2020, the average age of an Indian will be 29 years, compared to 37 for China and 48 for Japan; and, by 2030, India's dependency ratio should be just over 0.4. The advantage of a young working age population is obvious — they earn, consume and save. Higher savings rates make for greater investments into the economy. But this is only the theory. We need the practice. It is no good having a young working age population if it is not well educated, or if it does not have jobs.
So, the advantages of the demographic dividend are dependent on the kind of physical infrastructure we can provide for them —better universities, hospitals, roads, railways, factories, and so on. India needs a massive effort to shift avast number of people —we are talking of hundreds of millions —from the agriculture to the manufacturing and services sector. At the heart of this effort lies not only the availability of energy, but our ability to use it efficiently. The train to that future is leaving right now. We will not get another chance to board it again in this century.

Opposition

There is nothing in the policies and politics of today which tells us that our politicians understand this truth. What does the CPI( M)’ s Prakash Karat have against the nuclear deal? Something to do with an abstract notion called “US imperialism”, perhaps. The Left is not even addressing the issue on hand —how to get nuclear fuel to power our domestic programme and acquire technology and financing to establish nuclear power plants in quick order to boost energy availability in the country. The specious critique of the Hyde Act, the faux concern for fuel security, are all aimed at scuttling the deal because of an unscrupulous political calculation.
L. K. Advani’s response is even more difficult to comprehend. On one hand he says that the BJP does not “basically” oppose the nuclear agreement. His suggestion that the US insert a provision in the 123 Agreement saying that the Hyde Act will not affect India is an insult to intelligence. Does he really expect that the US executive will agree to a changed wording that will negate the validity of a legislation of the US Congress?

Responsibility

Perhaps we are being too harsh on Advani. The person who is steering the agreement is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and he has behaved in a peculiar way with Mr Advani. Instead of engaging the Leader of the Opposition to get his support, he has avoided dealing with him, and gratuitously insulted him by appealing to Atal Bihari Vajpayee to make the BJP see reason on the issue.
When history looks back at our present distempers, it cannot but point out the culpability of small men found wanting when confronted with the big problems of the country. In north Indian historical consciousness, two characters stand out for their chicanery —Jaichand and Mir Jafar. Since the nation state did not exist during their time, they cannot really be condemned as traitors, as they have been in popular imagination. They were merely run of the mill men involved in petty politics, unable or unwilling to see the larger picture. I wonder how the leaders of today whose politics are undermining the nation will be portrayed by future generations.
The article was published in Mail Today June 6, 2008

The time is ripe for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to travel to Pakistan

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has achieved a lot in his four years as prime minister. The country has witnessed an average growth rate of 8.6 per cent, probably the highest in its post-independence history, his government has passed several landmark legislations—the Right to Information Act, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and the Forest Rights Act. He has negotiated a path-breaking international agreement that will end the technology and nuclear materials embargo on India. There has been no incidence of mass violence, such as that in Gujarat in 2002 during the rule of the NDA. Neither has there been any major security lapse like the Kargil incursion during its watch. With the massive loan waiver and pay commission handout, the UPA government at first signaled that it was set for general elections, but now is seems that they are likely to take place on schedule in 2009.
So, the PM has one full year in office remaining. What should he do? The legislative impulse has run dry, so he can dole out more sops, but with inflation around, that would be a Sisyphean labour. He can brood about the Indo-US nuclear deal and how the Left has blocked his efforts to further liberalise the economy. Or he can travel to Pakistan.
A visit by an Indian Prime Minister has been overdue by at least two years. This is a most opportune moment for such a visit. There is parliamentary majority, if not consensus at home, to ensure that any forward movement with Pakistan will not get gridlocked, as in the case of the nuclear deal. That the new elected government in Pakistan, too, is ready to do business with India from the point where President Pervez Musharraf left off, points to a significant measure of consensus there as well.
There is a new government and a new mood in Islamabad. It comes at the end of an intense phase of political turmoil, one in which India did not figure as a villain. The process has weakened the baleful influence of the Pakistan army in relation to India and shifted the equilibrium against fundamentalist forces in the country. Because of this, the government does not feel it necessary to tailor their political suit to the army's cloth. Time and again, civilian leaders felt compelled to adopt postures at the behest of the army, or with a view of keeping on the right side of the generals. The situation has now changed to the point where the civilians feel compelled to maintain a healthy distance from the army.

Sir Creek

But what really makes for a compelling case for a prime ministerial visit now is the remarkable fact that though Pakistan was wracked by intense political turmoil in the past year, the India-Pakistan peace process— begun in January 2004—maintained its momentum. Through last year the fourth round of the composite dialogue continued apace. There were important gains on the Sir Creek issue, forward movement in opening up air services between the two countries as well as cross-border movement of people and trade.Through traffic at Wagah has increased trade volumes enormously.In May, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee will go to Pakistan to wrap up the fourth round of dialogue and set the stage for the fifth.
The two sides now need a fresh impetus to resolve their larger problems. Such a push can only be accomplished at a summit level meeting. There are two issues that can reach closure almost immediately— Siachen and Sir Creek.
The tenth round of talks on Sir Creek were held in Islamabad in May 2007. They were based on a joint survey of the area that took place earlier that year. During the ninth round, in December 2006, Pakistan had already agreed to settle the maritime boundary using the internationally accepted “equidistance method”.
These are major developments, since it means that the two countries are now dealing with a common set of data which could make it easier to determine a mutually acceptable baseline point—the last point where the land boundary ends and the maritime boundary begins. This, in turn, will be the key to working out a mutually acceptable maritime boundary, the lack of which leads to hundreds of fishermen of either side being arrested by the authorities on both sides. But the issue has gained salience because there are expectations that the sea bed contains gas and oil reserves which neither side can exploit till the boundary is fixed. There is another reason why Sir Creek needs quick settlement. The UN Convention on Law of the Seas deadline ends in 2009, and if the two countries cannot submit a joint document certifying their maritime boundary, they will not get the opportunity to extend this boundary from the current 370 to 650 kms under a UN plan.

Siachen

Agreements in 1989 and 1992 would have created a zone of disengagement in the Siachen region. But the process has been stuck because Pakistan does not want to authenticate the positions their forces occupy. Afraid of a Kargil-like move where Pakistanis disputed the Line of Control in Kashmir— even though its coordinates were jointly determined by surveyors of both sides— India has been balking. The Pakistanis can be persuaded to accept the Sir Creek model and accept a joint survey to authenticate the positions of the two sides. The Pakistanis were not willing to authenticate the positions earlier because contrary to their claims, their army held no positions on the glacier. With the architect of Kargil in the dog-house, India can move to settle the Siachen issue without fear of Pakistan reneging.

Kashmir

On the Mother of all Issues—Kashmir—too, there has been movement, albeit more subtle.The recent visit and meetings of Mehbooba Mufti and Omar Abdullah with the new Pakistani leadership indicates how times have changed. Equally significant have been the remarks of PPP leader Asif Zardari that the issue could perhaps be placed on the back burner. Kashmir no longer sells well in domestic Pakistani politics.
Yet, this should not lull India into any sense of complacency. New Delhi needs to continue a serious and substantive engagement with Pakistan and the Kashmiri parties to resolve the problem once and for all. Though the UPA government has done a lot in this area, much more needs to be done to reach a closure on this debilitating issue. Unfortunately, when negotiations with Islamabad slowed down in 2007, New Delhi perceptibly slackened its efforts towards a settlement with the Kashmiri parties. This was needless and short-sighted.
The bottom line today is that the India-Pakistan situation offers a tailor-made opportunity for a breakthrough. One that will not be based on some quick calculation of electoral gain or any personal "place in the history books" syndrome, but solid and patient diplomacy going back four years and an earnest desire for peace on both sides of the border.

This article was first published in Mail Today April 10, 2008

What will it take to make Indian mouse into a tiger?

Prabhu Chawla's revelation (in Mail Today March 31, 2008) that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) played a role in canceling the Dalai Lama's scheduled meeting with the Vice-President Mr. Hamid Ansari tells us a lot about India’s foreign policy. Beyond the issues of non-alignment, independence and its new orientation is the reality that it is unusually timid.
I am reminded of the Russian poet Evegeni Yevtushenko's 1960s work “Monologue of a Polar Fox On An Alaskan Fur Farm”. The poem is an allegory on the subject of freedom in the erstwhile Soviet Union. A blue fox being bred for its fur in an Alaskan farm finds its cage door open. It leaves the cage for a while, revels in his new found freedom, dreams of the future life outside, and then he returns into the cage because as the poet notes, “A child of captivity is too weak for freedom.”
India is like that poor blue fox. For 60 years it has been in a cage, not always of its own making. And now when the door has opened, it is unable to cope, and finds greater comfort in remaining in its prison, rather than risking the joys and uncertainties of freedom.

Jawaharlal

It is no use blaming the communists for this predicament. The larger Indian intelligentsia, political formations like the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party must take responsibility for the state of affairs. As for the Left, its attitude is not remarkable. Through their history, they have set one standard for themselves, and another for the others. Their foreign connections, including funding, is seen by them as being part of socialist internationalism; similar activities of others are attributable to machinations of imperialism. China's policies — be they expressed in Mao's homicidal sweeps like the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution — are regrettable “errors” of a great man, while the mild pragmatism of our Congress party in seeking to maintain good ties with the United States is a sell-out to, what else, imperialism.
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's idea of non-alignment was to create space in the power blocs that emerged in the wake of the Cold War. But it came with a price, for example on Kashmir. Beginning 1953, after a war and many tortuous sessions with the United Nations mediators, India and Pakistan came close to resolving the Kashmir issue through bilateral talks. The protagonists were Pandit Nehru and the Indian government and the Pakistani governments, headed first by Khwaja Nazimuddin, and then by Muhammad Ali Bogra. Despite Sheikh Abdullah’s arrest in June of 1953, talks between the two countries were undertaken, with Nehru indicating his acquiescence, probably for the last time, for a plebiscite to decide the issue. But, the US decision in February 1954 to begin large-scale arms aid to Pakistan put paid to this.
But notwithstanding the paranoia of the Left, India was never important enough for the US to directly involve itself in our affairs. When Pakistan was ready to do their bidding, why would they have wasted their time on an argumentative and self-important basket-case that this country was till the 1990s?
Speaking to a TV channel last week, CPI(M) elder Jyoti Basu charged the United Progressive Alliance government with being far more pro-US than Jawaharlal or Indira were. Nehru may have been critical of America, but faced with a challenge across the Himalayas in 1962, the country he turned to was the US. The letter Nehru wrote to John F. Kennedy asking for a military alliance with the US in mid-November 1962 is still classified, but its summary prepared by S. Gopal reveals that for the father of non-alignment, the concept was both strategic and flexible.
For 20 years after she swept the elections of 1971 Indira Gandhi's world view dominated that of India. Both in her domestic and foreign policies, she followed a highly personalised style, one that tended to privilege personal over the national interest. So instead of depending on institutions like Parliament, Cabinet and Ministries, she worked her policies through chosen advisors. Little wonder, then, that the decision to conduct India's first nuclear test in Pokhran in May of 1974 was not based on any detailed assessment of why it was to be undertaken and what the government expected to do after the event.

Indira

What the Left finds so attractive about Indira Gandhi, reviled by many of them in her lifetime, is a selective reading of her foreign policy — her decision to hold back formal condemnation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, her friendship with Cuba and Palestine, and her anti-American posturing. It ignores the fact that India's policy of détente, and then entente, with the United States was initiated by Indira Gandhi — the first during the Emergency itself and the second beginning with her second coming in 1980. Everything that has happened since — the economic liberalisation, the defence cooperation with the United States and indeed the Indo-US nuclear deal, have their origins in decisions taken between 1980 and1984.
The consequences of these policies have been far reaching. We already know what economic liberalisation has wrought, notwithstanding some carping criticism of “neo liberalism”. It has brought closer relations with the United States, which in turn has paid enormous dividends in terms of lubricating India’s political relations with a slew of countries ranging from Europe, the ASEAN and Japan.
This has had a noticeable impact in India’s relations with China. In Bush's first term, and till 2005, at least, the Chinese wooed India eagerly. The breakthrough decision to provide a political input on border negotiations in 2003, and the Agreement on Guiding Principles and Political Parameters, signed in April 2005, were part of this trend. They feared that the US was bent on “encircling” them by creating an alliance of democracies — Japan, Australia, India, Russia and the new Central Asian republics. But once they found that the Left had effectively stymied the Indo-US entente, the tone and tenor of their relations with India changed. When Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani visited Arunachal in 2003 we did not hear any protests from Beijing. But when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited the state in February 2008 the Chinese issued a formal protest.
What the Left has achieved is much more than torpedoing the Indo-US nuclear deal. Its stranglehold on the government has prevented any meaningful reform of the public sector, which includes the stultifying bureaucracy. It has succeeded in delaying India's steady incorporation into the higher tier of the comity of nations. The process began in the NDA period when India was invited to participate in a Group of Eight meeting in Evian and was followed by moves to accommodate New Delhi into the United Nations Security Council. The nuclear deal was a major detail that needed to be taken care of. The leading countries of the world could not have had India in the UNSC or the G-8, even while it remained a pariah in terms of nuclear and high-tech trade.

Choice

Our cage door did not open because the Americans pressed some lever. It did so for two reasons. First, after 1991 the Indian business class has discovered that outside the open cage door were not threats, but vast opportunities. The second was that India surprised the world by bucking against the US-led efforts to freeze its nuclear status as a “have not”. The Pokhran II tests of 1998 cut through the self-imposed prison constructed by our own rhetoric of disarmament.
Today those who push the so-called “independent” foreign policy for India, are actually seeking to persuade us that the prison never existed. They want to neutralise India by creating an association in the mind of the people with the now obsolete concept of non-alignment. The Left’s ambition runs deeper towards signing the country up with the alliance of autocracies — Russia, Iran, China, Venezuela and Cuba.
India is being offered a choice today. Hitherto, Indian policies were often determined by the actions of others. Today, New Delhi’s views and policies make a difference. India’s growing economic and military power, combined with the soft power that only a flourishing democracy and an open society can exercise, provide it with the wherewithal to become a truly global player. But while the US can offer us one option of faring forward into the new world, there is also the other— of going back into the cage.
The article was first published in Mail Today April 2, 2008

"Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall"

Can the UPA be put together again ?


Once upon a time, six months ago to be exact, there was a government that was moving full steam ahead. The economy was flourishing, the allies quiescent, and the Opposition dead beat. The ruling party had managed to get its nominee appointed President of the Republic — a sign of its commanding position — the Sensex had breached the 15,000 mark in the space of just half a year, and India’s traditional bugbear, Pakistan, was in the midst of a deep political crisis brought on by the sacking of the Chief Justice of its Supreme Court and the Lal Masjid affair.
Then suddenly the ground started slipping. And in the space of the next six months, Humpty Dumpty was pushed off his perch, ironically by his own friends, and has come apart. Now the proverbial King’s men are exerting mightily to put him together again to fight the next general elections, but somehow the glue does not seem to stick.

War

It is not as though the warning signals were not there. The defeat in the UP assembly elections in May came despite an enormous amount of effort by the crown prince Rahul Gandhi. But the rapidity with which the whole picture changed in August and September was staggering. It began with the revolt of the CPI(M). For two years since the Indo-US nuclear deal had been announced in July 2005, the party had gone along with the government probably in the belief that the deal would not really come through. Then at the end of July it became clear that the impossible had been achieved, that the country had managed to get a generous 123 Agreement with the US. Suddenly the Left attitude changed and CPI(M) General Secretary Prakash Karat launched a major campaign to derail not just the deal, but question the entire foreign policy track of the United Progressive Alliance.
Buoyed by its success till then, the Congress was initially inclined to fight and tell the Left where to get off. In early October, Sonia Gandhi declared that those attacking the deal were “enemies of development”. There was talk of a possible general election. And then came the craven U-turn: Sonia said her reference was specific to Haryana and Manmohan Singh declared that if the deal did not come through it would not be the end of life. The Congress’ enthusiasm to fight the Left came a cropper when close allies like M. Karunanidhi and Lalu Prasad Yadav said that they were not for elections and could even break with the UPA on the issue.
Coincidentally just as the UPA relationship was hitting the nadir, the Sangh Parivar got out of its trough. Confronted with the possibility of general elections, the RSS and BJP sorted out their differences in quick time and formally anointed L.K. Advani as the leader of the party. This came with the important electoral victory of the party in Gujarat, and then Himachal. There has been a great deal of hand-wringing and analysis over the BJP’s success and the Congress’ defeat.

Casualties

But not many have considered asking as to why the average voter in Gujarat and Himachal, even if they were no votaries of Hindutva, would have voted for the Congress. First, the advocates of anti-communal politics had muddled their message by associating with a range of BJP rebels, some who were no less communal than Narendra Modi. Second, the sight of the great anti-communal warriors fighting each other to death on the specious issue of “American imperialism”, would not have been the most reassuring for a voter.
Having humiliated the Congress, the Left could hardly expect it to look tall and fight the BJP in Gujarat. Purely coincidentally, these developments came at the very time that the Left got the worst drubbing of its recent political life on the Nandigram issue where, among others, it confronted the Jamiat-ul-ulema-e-Hind, the powerful organisation of Muslim clerics.
So here we are at the beginning of 2008, surveying the ruins of a once proud alliance and wondering whether it can be put together again. With elections just a year or so away, the Congress and its allies, which includes the Left, must ask the question: Just what have they achieved in the past three years? On what basis should the people vote for them the next time around?
True, the UPA has given us a stable government whose record is not marred by a Gujarat-type pogrom; its competent handling of foreign relations has enhanced India’s standing in the world. But economic growth has come on its own, or at least, without any significant government intervention, and despite the best efforts of the Left to sabotage it. Let’s not tarry on the still cooking nuclear deal. What about the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme? According to a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, it is not working. The government has hardly shown itself as an exceptional protector of the country, or a fighter against communal violence.
This is not to say that the condition of the other parties is any better. The coming year will see a bonfire of the vanities of other political formations as well. The BJP may send out its new poster-boy Narendra Modi to sup with Jayalalitha in Tamil Nadu, but it remains to be seen whether he gets the same kind of reception with Chandrababu Naidu or Nitish Kumar. Nandigram has yet to play itself out, not so much in terms of Mamta Banerji’s antics, but the alienation of the Muslim community from the Left.
Both the Congress and the BJP have been out of the Uttar Pradesh playing field and they don’t know how to get back on. The Congress’ chosen method is throwing sops that elude the targets and land up in the pockets of middle-men; as for the BJP, it is whistling in the dark hoping that Sethusamudram will do for them what the Ram Mandir did not. Turning up the communal temperature by using terrorism as the issue remains its most visible option.

Choice

Almost all political formations, barring Mayawati, want elections to take place at their assigned time in the first half of 2009. But that may not be possible. After its political mugging by the Left, the UPA does not look like it has the stamina to carry on for another year. If it does try, it could make the situation worse for itself. So, patchwork solutions are being attempted. In the coming weeks the Congress and the Left will try to pretend that their no-holds-barred battle never happened. Pranab Mukherjee’s declaration that the Congress would itself not like to proceed with a deal minus the Left’s support could be the beginning of an effort to revive the coalition. The effort would be to forget the August-December 2007 period.
There are straws in the wind to suggest that the Congress will again surprise the Left with a draft IAEA safeguards agreement that meets their somewhat extravagant demands. The Left will have the opportunity to reconsider. In the meantime, Mr. Karat may speak of the new Third Front and the Congress may dream of a modified UPA with Mulayam Singh, but time is not on their side.
As they confront the next general election, the future course of our political parties will be shaped by habit and vanities, rather than any deterministic unfolding of events. Choices exercised now could still make a difference, but just about.
This article was published in Mail Today January 16, 2008

The Chinese are not ten feet tall

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s first visit to China comes amidst a welter of scare stories about Chinese “incursions” into Indian territory and how its rapidly developing infrastructure in Tibet poses a threat to India. But there is another, more astonishing side which scarcely makes it to the headlines: Sino-Indian trade that totaled $5 billion in 2003, has touched $34 billion (January-November 2007).
This could not have come without the development of another relationship, not across the inhospitable Himalayan border, but the seas, between Indian and Chinese enterprises, entrepreneurs and managers. Since the 2003 visit of Prime Minister Vajpayee to Beijing, the bandwidth of Sino-Indian relations has broadened and, to change metaphors, while it is possible to see them as a glass half empty, it would be more correct to view it as one half full.

Border

Blaming the Chinese for doing something we have fallen behind on — building roads and investing in communications and other services in the difficult mountain regions — is, to say the least, perverse. India has had similar plans on the books since the mid-1960s, but most are decades behind in implementation. The Chinese rightly saw their Tibet railway as a prestige project and completed it ahead of schedule; India’s Kashmir rail project, is probably a decade from completion.
As for the incursions, the issue is more complex. Indo Tibetan Border Police chief V.K. Joshi said in October that the Chinese had made some 140 incursions into Indian territory all across the Indo-Tibet border, but none were serious. “Their perception of the Line of [Actual] Control could be different from ours...,” was his simple and straightforward explanation. The 4056-km India-Tibet border is not an international border in the legal sense. It is a Line of Actual Control which is itself not clearly defined, unlike, say, the Line of Control with Pakistan in Jammu & Kashmir. Its ambiguity is best brought out by the Chinese formulation that in the east it “approximates the illegal McMahon Line” but it is not the line, as defined by the 1914 treaty. There are also important differences in the Sikkim-Bhutan-India trijunction.
In the west the situation has been much more fluid. The Chinese themselves have presented various versions of the LAC. One was affirmed as the “correct” line in December 1959, there was another put forward in 1960, and finally there were the positions that the Chinese occupied during the October-November 1962 border war; at each stage occupying more and more of territory that India claimed as its own.
The border is important. As long as it is not settled, it can be used to quickly ratchet up tension. There is a certain symmetry in Indian and Chinese claims which could aid its settlement. The Chinese hold what they claim in the western sector, India holds what it claims in the eastern sector. Both contest what the other side holds — New Delhi says China’s control of Aksai Chin is illegal and Beijing disputes India’s control of what is now Arunachal Pradesh. A dispassionate look at history will show that both established control over the disputed territories they hold in the 1950s. Major R ‘Bob’ Khating took control of Tawang, the most significant town in the North East Frontier Agency, in February 1951; the Chinese, too, began building their road and consolidating their hold over Aksai Chin in this period.
The 2005 agreement on political parameters and guiding principles for the India-China boundary question has outlined the only basis on which the two countries can resolve their dispute — on a largely “as is where is” basis. Yet, movement is painfully slow. There was a time in 2003 when there were expectations that there would be quick movement. That was the time when the Vajpayee government expected it would be voted back to power. Since then, though there is agreement on the principles, there has been no significant movement. The reason seems to be that the Chinese are not sure whether this is the moment to settle.

Power

So, they have raised the issue of the Tawang tract. In May 2007 Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi told his Indian counterpart Pranab Mukherjee at a meeting in Hamburg that the presence of settled populations in regions under dispute would not affect China’s claims on those regions. Yang’s statement appears to undermine the crucial Article VII of the guiding principles that says: “In reaching a boundary settlement, the two sides shall safeguard settled populations in border areas.”
Relations between India and China would have been complex even if there had been no border dispute. But to see the Chinese as being aggressive, or hell-bent on domination, is to court enmity, a luxury that India cannot afford. Both countries have known strengths and weaknesses vis-à-vis each other. If China has the advantage of easier lines of communication on the Tibetan plateau, the region is also thousands of kilometres away from its core territory, as compared to a couple of hundred on the Indian side. The Chinese have never quite gained the loyalty of the Tibetans and worry about the impact of the Dalai Lama and the exiles in India. But India also knows that it suffers from a strategic disadvantage since the Indian heartland is so close to Chinese air and missile power in Tibet.
But this military talk is itself archaic. In 1962, the hapless Indian brigade ordered to capture Thag La had no idea what lay behind the ridge. Today Lhasa is open to Indian tourists and richer pilgrims en route to Mansarover. The Nathu La route has been opened up and traders travel all the way to Lhasa. In addition electronic and photo reconnaissance provides India a detailed picture of the PLA deployments. A Chinese surprise attack is simply out of the question. Indian military strength is substantial and it possesses the means of nuclear reprisal.

Change

So the Chinese “threat” has migrated to Pakistan, Burma, Bangladesh and various Indian neighbours. But, here, too, there is a tendency to overstate Chinese strengths and understate its weaknesses. A look at the map will reveal that almost all of Beijing’s oil supplies have to pass through India’s territorial waters, a jugular if ever there was one. Geography ensures that China can never be a threat to India in the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean region, in the same measure that India cannot really threaten China in the South China Sea. So there is no real basis of confrontation at the maritime level either. Actually, given their internal demands, what both need and seek is stability, not just regional, but global.
China has in the past, and continues at present, to play an irresponsible role in aiding Pakistan’s nuclear and missile programme and its actions have harmed Indian security immeasurably. But the same could be said of our history with our new friend, the US. History, in any case, should not determine future policy. It can provide a perspective, but should not hold a veto.
Anyway, in the Sino-Indian context, a great deal of what the future holds will be determined in Beijing, rather than in New Delhi. The very dynamism of its economy is bringing it to the point where it cannot postpone political reform for much longer. Such a development could have a wide-ranging impact on China’s internal relations with regions like Tibet and Xinjiang, as well as its neighbours like India. Our task is to stay the course and offer China a relationship of friendship and cooperation, without being deferential or defensive on any issue.
The article was published in Mail Today January 9, 2008

The Congress has lost the fire in its belly

According to Michael Ignatieff, Harvard professor and now Canadian politician, “In politics, learning from failure matters as much as exploiting success.” What lessons does the Congress need to learn from its defeat in the Gujarat state assembly elections, and what does the BJP need to do to exploit its success ? Obviously the most important thing for the former is to deconstruct its election campaign and see where it went wrong.
Learning from your errors is always a good thing, but easier said than done. There is little unanimity in determining what the Congress’ mistakes were. Was it the lack of an identified chief ministerial candidate, or was it in playing footsie with BJP rebels, including the likes of Goverdhan Zadaphia, whose record in dealing with the 2002 massacres as state Home Minister was shameful, and possibly criminal. Could it have been the “maut ke saudagar” taunt, or the flip-flop thereafter that showed the Congress to be weak-kneed in front of Modi’s fighting retort ? Or was it the inability of the party to put forward boldly a coherent ideological programme, emphasizing its secularist beliefs and aam admi (common man) approach ?

Secularism
But then we are assailed with even more questions. Does the party have the capacity to admit its mistakes? Only if it does, can it correct them. As of now, the Congress is hamstrung by a culture that declares that the leader—whether it was Jawaharlal Nehru in relation to China in 1962, Indira Gandhi and the Emergency in 1975, or Narasimha Rao and Babri Masjid in 1992— is never wrong. Neither, for that matter, is the heir-apparent. Both Sonia and Rahul Gandhi have been beneficiaries of this phenomenon in the past couple of years to the detriment of the party.
The Congress is now confronting a revitalised BJP which is determined to press on with its Hindutva project. Despite its victory in 2004 general elections, the Congress has not displayed any special strategy, or leadership to deal with it. As Gujarat revealed, all that the party did was to try and exploit the BJP’s inner divisions and make a fleeting reference to the 2002 events. Beyond that there was neither intention and nor effort.
Given the Indian tendency towards self-flagellation in defeat-- and boast in times of victory—there is a tendency to overstate the lessons of a single state assembly election. Understand that even before Modi came to the scene, the BJP was the dominant party in the state having won the elections of 1995 and 1998 by a near two-thirds majority, now the Congress has added eleven seats and the BJP lost ten. Even though it has wrested more seats to compensate, its losses of sitting seats have been significant. What Modi has done is what the Left has done in West Bengal—become the vessel for the pride of the citizens of the state. Yet the bald fact is that the Congress was defeated in an election it could have won, and one that took place at a critical time in relation to the dynamics of the UPA government at the Centre.
This must be seen as a defeat of secularists and not secularism, of their ability to deliver their message, not the message itself. Any strategy for an umbrella-party like the Congress which has an all-India, all community spread, must be based on a determined enunciation of secular politics. Secularism is a good intellectual notion, worth pursuing and indeed endorsed by our Constitution. But trying to master the political grammar of secularism in semi-literate country like India is more complex as Rajiv Gandhi, himself no doubt a secular person, realized.
Two decisions by his government in 1986—the opening of the locks of the Babri Masjid and “balancing” it with the Muslim Women’s Act to counter the Shah Bano judgment were both seen by the Congress as their version of secularism which emphasizes equal respect for all religions. But this peculiar definition of secularism has brought disaster for the party. Perhaps the ideal needs to move back to what it was in Jawaharlal’s time—strictly separating state and religion.

Leaders
What the party needed to do in Gujarat was to understand the reality of a state that was, rather than what it should be. Given the fact that the Congress has allowed its secular ideology to erode over the past decades, it could not have pushed a hard secular line overnight. But it needed to make the line itself clear in the first place. The way to take on the BJP was not by trying to outflank it on Hindutva, or make adjustments for it, but to categorically contest that vision and bear with the consequences.
In the coming months, the Congress will have to make many decisions. Whatever some American dons suggest, decision-making is not a science, even of the social variety. Experience does help, but as TS Eliot pointed out, “it imposes a pattern and falsifies.” It pushes you into well-trodden and sterile paths, and prevents you from looking at “out of the box” solutions. So, there is no substitute, really for leadership which is a compound of instinct, experience, intellectual integrity, courage and ruthlessness.
Effectiveness requires all these to be present in the compound. The Congress does not lack experience, but it does have difficulties with the other elements of leadership. Part of the problem is diarchy and part the nature of the party. Manmohan Singh is Prime Minister, while the real leader of the legislature party is its leader, éminence grise and principal campaigner, Sonia Gandhi. No one is clear as to how decisions are taken, in the party but we all know that the process is labyrinthine.
In Singh and Sonia Gandhi, we have prudent and good leaders. But people, whether in India, or elsewhere, also want leaders with vision and daring. They are ready to overlook mistakes, provided the leader is seen to have made them with seeming conviction. In any case as Mao and Indira have shown, bashing on regardless of your mistakes, too, has been the hallmark of great leaders.
The problem, however, is also in the nature of the Congress. If the BJP has a retrograde social and political message, it has a sophisticated management style, one that encourages merit, naturally within certain bounds. While the Congress is a party with a progressive political orientation, but its organizational approach is at present feudal, if not tribal.

Ruthless
The Congress cannot easily change its nature. It is no longer the party of Jawaharlal, but of Indira who changed its DNA irrevocably. It is a family proprietary company and like such firms in the business sector in India and around the world, it continues to have a unique relevance.The problem for the proprietors is that security compels them to remain somewhat isolated and so it requires uncommon instinct to understand issues and take decisions, which in turn need a base of expert ideation and solid conviction to be efficacious. But the firm has yet to get the right mix in combining proprietary concerns with furthering corporate interests. The result is a perception that its top management does not have the kind of autonomy that is desired, and perhaps also not the right mix of executives. Keeping family retainers like Arjun Singh and Shivraj Patil in key appointments, for example, betrays a certain lack of ruthlessness.People have called Sonia many things, but never ruthless. But that missing attribute seems to be the key factor in the Congress’ present make up. This quality runs through the government many of whose principal officers and numerous advisers are sinecure holders rather than shop-floor performers and street-fighters. Three years after the party assumed power, it has taken the lost election in Gujarat to tell us how much things have remained the same, even when they were supposed change.
This article appeared in Mail Today December 26, 2007

There is a knock on your door, Mr Gandhi

There was a report recently of a chance meeting between Rahul Gandhi and L.K. Advani. As the story goes, the gracious Congress leader walked up to the octogenarian BJP chief at the VIP lounge of the Delhi airport and was given a brief tutorial on why mainstream parties should see each other as “political adversaries and not enemies,” implying that they must function on a common political paradigm.
Advani is right. Across South Asia we can see what is happening when moderate and mainstream forces get locked in a no-holds-barred war with each other — the extreme ends of the political spectrum, whether held by chauvinist and caste-based parties, or by those with a revolutionary programme, begin expanding inwards. In Nepal, the never-ending feuds of the palace and the mainstream parties have allowed the Maoists to emerge as a major political force. In Bangladesh, the war of the Begums has led to military rule, anarchy and the growth of Islamic fundamentalism. The story is the same in Pakistan where the corrupt and inept Benazir Bhutto’s battle with the incompetent and corrupt Nawaz Sharif weakened the civil establishment and allowed the army to re-enter the political structure.
Advani’s prescience is part of his Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality. He is the man who has passionately argued that good governance needs to become the main agenda for the political class in the country. But as Mr Hyde, he has, through his Ram Mandir agitation, been the person responsible for the creation of post-independence India’s most dangerous political divide, that between Hindus and Muslims.

Secularism

It is all right for Mr. Advani to speak of mainstream parties having a common vision of what the country is all about and where it is going. But surely he knows that at present they do not share such a view. The basic values of the country, which are enshrined in the Constitution of the republic are sovereignty, socialism, democracy, and secularism. It is not enough to invoke the neologism pseudo-secularism to escape from the fact that secularism, even of the Indian variety, is a necessary condition of our nationhood. While there is agreement in most mainstream parties over the first three requirements (never mind what Indian socialism means), the BJP sharply differs on the last named. Despite its failure in UP, the party is unable to get rid of its anti-Muslim phobia. In such circumstances, any BJP political project will remain divisive. It has already led to the emergence of a shadowy pan-Indian terrorist network which feeds off the fears of sections of the Muslim population which has been battered by repeated violence directed against their community. Accentuating it, as the RSS wants the BJP to do, by putting the ideology of Hindutva to the fore, is to add fuel to that fire.

What does Rahul stand for?

We already know a great deal about Advani’s politics and policies; but we know little of what Rahul Gandhi stands for. The political clock has begun ticking for the next elections and it is almost certain that they will take place in the coming year. If the party wins, it may persist with Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister, but the good doctor is running out of steam. Rahul’s call to assume his family responsibility is likely to come sooner, rather than later.
The advantage of being Rahul, just as it was Sanjay and Rajiv Gandhi before him, is that he can sharply change the party’s perspective in a manner that no other leader can. Rajiv, for example, set the stage for liberalisation by decisively breaking from his mother and grandfather’s world view. He did so because he was simply unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the world of non-alignment and faux-socialism.
The new young Gandhi scion is 37, older than his uncle Sanjay who began running the country through the Emergency at the age of 29, faced persecution at the age of 31 when the Janata Party came to power, and won a general election thereafter. What we see in Rahul is that gleam-in-the-eye suggesting that the Big Idea is about to burst forth. It hasn’t happened. Rahul as the party custodian of UP has been a failure, he has been an indifferent member of Parliament and his views as expressed through his speeches are nothing to write home about. He remains an earnest learner rather than a shaper of policies and programmes.
While Mr. Advani pontificates and Rahul hesitates, the country’s economy is growing at a frenetic pace, but its polity seems to be going under. You don’t have to talk about the swathes of territory in Naxalite control to make that point. All you have to do is to look at the political antics of Gowda père et fils, the incipient caste wars of Rajasthan, the craven Akali Dal allowing Bhindranwale’s portrait to be unveiled in the Golden Temple, to understand that India’s political system is not at all healthy. When the BJP is in power, the Congress opposes everything it does or proposes tooth and nail. The Congress is repaid in the same coin when the BJP is in the opposition. The opposition is meant to oppose. But on a rational basis. Currently it does so in a knee-jerk fashion that has prevented consensual policy from being articulated even where a consensus actually exists.
So we are left with governments, commissions, plans and projects. But nothing gets implemented the way it should. The main reason is that this requires a common direction and sense of purpose which is absent in the current polity. It is no secret that Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi have little or no time for the leader of the Opposition. Advani’s legitimate political barbs on “weak prime minister” and “Bofors” have miffed them to the point where there is virtually no working relationship between the country’s mainstream parties.
You do not have to support the BJP’s Hindutva politics to see that there is considerable advantage in a working relationship between the government and the leading opposition party. By knocking the BJP off the equation, the Congress has got itself into an uncomfortable embrace with the Left, to the detriment of its reform agenda and more recently, its initiative on the Indo-US nuclear deal. Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, on the other hand, had impeccable relations with Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the 1991-96 period and this went a long way in pushing through the first phase of reforms.

Future

Manmohan Singh and L.K. Advani are, in a sense, already history. Their best achievement — the former’s stewardship of the economy in the 1990s and the latter’s building of today’s BJP — was in the last century. Both carry burdens of the past. Purely from the point of view of age, the challenge of shaping the new India rests in the hands of Rahul Gandhi, Mayawati, and a clutch of younger leaders of various parties. Their challenge is much more complex. The new generation of leaders cannot afford to function like squabbling village-level politicians. India’s globalised economy needs sophisticated management; the country’s better-educated and self-aware population needs more than platitudes — they need jobs, public health networks, educational facilities and a polity that services their aspirations.

These leaders must have a better plan for India’s future. After all, can we live in a country where the Gujarat-type pogrom can occur, or where 38 per cent of the people are illiterate, or where Dalits must be confined to a separate hostel in the country’s premier medical institute? Twentieth century policies, whether they are poverty alleviation strategies based on distribution, or social control tactics based on violence against minorities and Dalits, will not work now. There is need for a new pragmatic consensus, but before that there must be basic agreement on the values that shape this nation.
This article was printed in Mail Today December 20, 2007

Manmohan's illness as a factor in the recent political crisis

This article appeared in Mail Today (New Delhi)November 21, 2007

September-October 2007: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, former finance minister, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, economic bureaucrat and economist, confronted the worst moment of his career. The man whose personal integrity is a byword in India’s dirty politics and whose personal reputation helped crisis-hit India change directions in 1991, found himself battling with enemies from the right and left, as well as from within. An angry prime minister dared the Left to withdraw support on the issue of the Indo-US nuclear deal, and the doctrinaire anti-American CPI(M) General Secretary, Prakash Karat, took the opportunity to tug that rug under the government’s feet. After a show of determination, the government retreated in panic and froze the process. The spat and its outcome resulted in his reputation suffering the worst buffeting it had ever got in his otherwise sterling career.

Crisis

The Prime Minister’s behaviour pattern was uncharacteristic even though the provocation from the Left was great. His apogee was the August 6 interview to The Telegraph, “I told them to do whatever they want to do; if they want to withdraw support, so be it”. But then came the perigee on October 12 at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit when he said, “If the deal does not come through, it will be a disappointment. But sometimes in life you have to live with them. It is not the end of life”.
Many explanations have been put forward for the Prime Minister’s behaviour — pique, intolerance, arrogance and so on. Few have bothered to look at another factor which was no secret, but whose significance has been grossly underestimated.
The Prime Minister was being bothered by that nagging, sometimes dangerous, problem of age — an enlarged prostate gland. According to doctors, the PM had been suffering from benign prostatic condition for the past three years. Prostate surgery is usually an elective procedure. But if the PM had the surgery at the time he did, Saturday, September 15 — in the midst of a full-blown political crisis — it is clear that his condition was not good and that either he, or his doctors, felt there was some urgency. Undoubtedly his doctors would have told him that it was a minor procedure and that he would be fit as a fiddle in no time. Fortunately, the surgery went well and the growth was benign. But the recovery may not have been as smooth as he had been told it would be. One reason is, as appearances show, the Prime Minister is a somewhat fragile person. He is also old and he celebrated his 75th birthday while convalescing on September 26. The first indication that things were not going as per schedule was when the PM was not discharged on Monday, as planned, but a day later. The next indication came on September 28, when a terse note issued by the PMO said that the PM was still recovering and that his visit to Punjab and Himachal was cancelled. On Air Force Day — October 8, three weeks after the surgery, the Prime Minister was clearly not well. He sat out the entire reception on the sofa, while President Pratibha Patil and Ms Sonia Gandhi mixed with the assemblage. It is difficult to believe that the PM's frame of mind was not affected by his illness and surgery, minor though both were mooted to be.
Only in the last fifty years, when hair-trigger decision-making became an issue, has the subject been studied by social historians and what it reveals is not pleasant. According to one, Bert Park, notwithstanding what his physicians said, President Franklin Roosevelt was seriously ill between 1940-44 and it affected his performance as a war leader; he has also linked Hitler’s rise to the age-related dementia of British Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald and German Chancellor Paul von Hindenburg who, as one story goes, signed everything that his staff placed before him, including a packet of sandwiches. Even today it is not clear as to the degree to which Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s serious illness affected his political judgment and attitude in the crucial months of January-August 1947 .

History

Perhaps the most dramatic impact of illness on public affairs was the influenza pandemic of 1918 which killed more people than the Great War of 1914-1918. It ran its course through most of 1919, the first half of which took up the Paris Peace Conference that gave the world the terribly flawed Treaty of Versailles. Many negotiators were struck down by the flu, and nearly one-third died. President Woodrow Wilson’s chief of staff Colonel Edward House was struck down and as he noted in his diary in late February, “When I fell ill in January, I lost the thread of affairs and I am not sure that I have ever gotten fully back.” Wilson arrived in mid-March, at the final stages of the negotiations, and was struck down by the flu. The Treaty of Versailles has been called the worst treaty in the world, ever. It imposed punitive terms on Germany, leading to the rise of Hitler and World War II, it delayed the US’s entry into the world as a great power, and gave us the flawed League of Nations that did little to avert the catastrophe.
In India, things have not reached that stage, though we do not know how ill Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri was at the time of the Tashkent Conference, dying soon after. But you have to only recall a couple of instances of the Vajpayee prime ministership to realise that it is not that far-fetched. Vajpayee had a number of ongoing problems when he became PM — prostate, kidney, but after he took office, his most nagging ones were his arthritic knees.

Vajpayee

For almost a year before the surgery, on June 7, 2001, Vajpayee was down and out. People who met the septuagenarian leader him found him listless and inattentive and prone to long silences. Whether or not the long healing process was the cause, is difficult to say, but the surgery was followed by the disastrous Agra Summit with President Pervez Musharraf on July 14-16 and the threat, shortly thereafter, by Vajpayee to resign because of allegations that his kin may have been involved in a scam. Unfortunately, the surgery did not help him as much as he expected, and the then 74-year old leader took more than a year to regain his composure, having the indignity of being attacked for being “asleep at the wheel” in a Time magazine article in June 2002.
The problem with doctors attending prime ministers, and of PMs listening to doctors, is that they think that the aura of the office will somehow make recovery and convalescence different. You may get world-class medical treatment and care, but the human body does not know whether you are the PM or his driver. What matters are the laws of nature and your age.
In a country with a tradition of geriatric leadership, the issue of the impact of illness on decision-making should be a serious one. The idea that one man’s illness can change history may appear somewhat far-fetched. But it would be difficult to deny that when a leader as crucial as a president or a prime minister undergoes illness and recovery, his or her state of mind is not normal and can impair their judgment. To believe otherwise would be to believe they are not human, and that, of course, is not the case.

The worm is turning

To go by what the media says, the nuclear deal is still showing some signs of life. This is what The Hindu reported on a press conference held during German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to New Delhi:

Maintaining that the government remained committed to the civil nuclear deal with the United States, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday said, “We have not reached the end of the road” even if there was some delay in operationalising it.

I am not surprised. I never believed it was dead. It did suffer a terrible blow when the Left suddenly pulled the rug under it in August, and a worse one when party members and UPA allies stabbed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the back.The reason why I remain optimistic is not some special information, but my analysis of what underpins its robustness.

In my view, the Indo-US nuclear deal, occasioned perhaps, by US worries about China, is actually a a larger geopolitical shift that is taking place as a result of the end of the Cold War. This is about the new world order that Bush 41 spoke of in 1990. India's nuclear status has been a pill stuck in the collective throats of the international community for quite a while. Bush 41 tried first to handle this by pinning down India and Pakistan in a regional arrangement, but this did not work. After India’s nuclear tests, and especially after 9-11 the situation was such that the idea of equating India and Pakistan became laughable. Pakistan was on the verge of economic collapse, the A Q Khan network had been exposed, and was now seen as a “rogue” state that had to be controlled. So, the US emphasis shifted to co-opting India.

The nuclear deal is a means of doing that, and there is nothing dishonourable about this. India is getting an opportunity to join the world community, whose leading lights also constitute the Nuclear Suppliers Group. There is an unwritten consensus among them that the US will work out the terms of engagement, and the Indo-American 123 Agreement is precisely that.

American benevolence has nothing to do with a sudden love for India and Indians, it is again, systemic. Indian economic weight is growing in handsome measure, its military power, though dissipated in internal policing, is not insubstantial. India is one of the most open societies in the world, fiercely democratic, naturally capitalistic, indeed a natural ally of the US, once the latter gets off its high horse and begins to understand the consequences of its misadventure in Iraq.

As for the nuclear deal politics, what we are seeing currently is intense effort to knock sense into the BJP’s head. Everyone, but everyone knows that the party is taking a completely opportunistic position on the deal—in other words, opposing it for the sake of doing so, rather than any principle. Brajesh Mishra’s comment is kind of non sequitur:

“If I were to get credible guarantees from the government about the integrity of what we (the NDA) had left behind three and a half years ago, what has been done in these three and a half years for them to prove that there are also enthusiastic about the nuclear weapons programme, then I would say, personally, to go forward with the deal because I am not so critical of the US for following this particular policy. I am critical of the government bending to the wishes of the US.”

The real pressure is coming from the BJP’s “natural allies”—its supporters and well-wishers in the corporate and business world who are unable to comprehend the party’s stand. No one knows what has driven that stand which reflects the views of the xenophobic right of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch. Apparently Mr. Arun Shourie is its key mentor within the party’s core committee that decides policy. Why he, or for that matter Mr. Yashwant Sinha are there is a bit of a mystery since neither have any political base.

The BJP now has the option of simply backtracking and supporting the deal “in the national interest” or negotiating an arrangement with the Congress that could see the Parliament pass a “sense of Parliament” resolution underlining India’s belief in an “independent” foreign policy. The problem, however, is that the Congress and BJP are not on talking terms—the PM literally does not talk to the leader of the opposition. It is in such circumstances, of course, that the extremes of the Left flourish.

Confronted with the possibility that it may be left holding the can, the Left has changed tune. CPI(M) Party chief Prakash Karat who virtually accused Manmohan Singh of being an American stooge says in The Telegraph that he respects his integrity.

New Delhi, Oct. 30: In his first public overture to Manmohan Singh since the bitter stand-off began in early August over the Indo-US nuclear deal, CPM general secretary Prakash Karat today underlined the Left’s “respect” for the Prime Minister and appreciated his “unquestioned integrity”.

Is that a climb-down? Or an effort to get on to the "statesmanship" horse, after unhorsing the PM? You decide.

Bitter October

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, say reports, is a bitter man. He feels particularly let down by allies, since he expected that the opposition would be unsparing towards the Indo-US nuclear deal anyway. There are two things he can do—swallow his bitterness like a kaliyug Shiva and stay in office, or spit it out and quit. Either way, there are implications for the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance. He may not be much of a political heavy-weight, but he is clearly indispensible for the Congress president who does not trust a Pranab Mukherji and is not likely to hand the government over to the lightweight and incompetent Shivraj Patil.

But the fact is that there is an irretrievable breakdown in the relations between the Prime Minister and the Left on one hand, and between the PM and his coalition allies who finally slipped the knife into his back earlier this month. There is, no doubt, an element of unhappiness with Ms Sonia Gandhi as well who went along with Lalu, Karunanidhi, Pawar and Co in the process, resulting in the current impasse. Worse, a day or so later on October 12, during the Hindustan Times conference, when asked as to who she depends on for political advice, named her son, daughter and son-in-law and did not even make a passing reference to her prime minister.

The Left played dirty by going along with the deal through 2005, 2006 and most of 2007 and pulled the rug under his feet after the enormous achievement of the Indian “123 Agreement” which is extremely favourable to us. His allies—Lalu, Karunanidhi and Pawar—not only went along with him, but were represented or actually part of the Union Cabinet that approved every step of the negotiations, and finally endorsed the “123 Agreement.” On July 25, a combined meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security and the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs okayed the 123. Incidentally, that very evening, Prakash Karat, Sitaram Yechury and CPI leader D. Raja were given a special presentation on the deal by officials at the Prime Minister’s residence. There are no reports of the Left having declared themselves dead-set against the deal at this stage. On August 19, according to The Hindu:

The key constituents of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) on Sunday night threw in their lot with coalition chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and expressed full confidence in their ability to address “all legitimate concerns” voiced by the Left parties.

The goings on of October 9/10 therefore were a surprise to Singh, though they should not have been. The allies may claim that it was one thing to give the endorsement above, quite another to have the cold water of an election thrown on their face. But the fact is that if they had held their nerve, they could have emerged winners, instead of the dispirited and confused bunch they appear now.

Now there are straws in the wind to suggest that the UPA is recovering some of the coherence it lost at that time. This is apparent from the outcome of the latest meeting of the UPA-Left committee on October 22. Prior to the meeting there were a lot of bombastic declarations demanding that the government announce the termination of the Indo-US nuclear deal, or leave it to the next US administration-- statements tantamount to a Congress party surrender. But the outcome of the meeting was anodyne, suggesting that it was the Left that backed off. The conclusion of Monday meeting declared that:

Issues currently before it [the committee] would be addressed in an appropriate manner and the operationalisation of the deal will take into account the Committee’s findings.

This is actually a restatement of the positions the committee has taken from the very outset and its reiteration indicates that the Congress is not budging and the Left could be up the creek without a paddle.

Reports in several papers now claim that the time frame of the nuclear deal will not be adhered to as regards India-specific safeguards negotiations with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) scheduled for October, negotiations with the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) slated for November and taking the deal to the U.S. Congress in January 2008.

Nicholas Burns seems to have repeated this view to a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Tuesday. According to Reuters, Burns is reported to have said that the US was approaching election time and that it was tough to pass legislation at such times. Adding,

We don't have an unlimited amount of time...We'd like to get this agreement to the United States Congress by the end of the year.

He is right, but the technical timeline—which means the time required to get the technicalities of the deal worked out—actually extends all the way to the end of 2008. However, as the months pass, there is an inevitable loss of momentum and the chances of it being taken up by the Congress recede. The steps needed now are for the approval of an India-specific safeguards agreement by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. Between you and me, this agreement is more-or-less ready and could be approved within a week of India’s request. While there is a formal 45-day process to summon the Board of Governors meeting, the IAEA chief Mohammed El Baradei is backing the deal and will provide a short cut.

There is an NSG meeting scheduled in November and it is possible that the US will get pre-approval from their colleagues based on the prospective IAEA safeguards agreement. The NSG approval will not be simple because the members want to connect it to the Fissile Material Cut Off and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. But a measure sandwiching the INFCIRC/ 66, the IAEA's basic standard agreement with some language on the FMCT and CTBT could pass.So the whole process can be telescoped into about a month. As for the US Congress, mid-2008 can be seen as the outside limit of prudent planning.

There has been some talk about how the Democratic party would look at the deal. The Hyde Act, that enabled the 123 Agreement to be arrived at was passed by an overwhelming vote of the US Congress. Observers expect that the non-proliferationists in the new putative Clinton Administration would make life difficult for India and Hillary has already signaled her views through an article in Foreign Affairs, saying she would push for the CTBT in 2009. However these observers do not realize that countries like the US do not make policy moves out of whim but considerable cogitation and analysis. What Bush II did was based on what Bush I had initiated. In addition, he built on the goodwill generated by Bill Clinton’s overtures to India. The Indo-US nuclear deal is part of Washington’s strategic grand design. India may be a cog in this, but an it is an increasingly important one.

So now we need to look at the political timeline here in India. Given the public postures, there is no chance that the Left will approve of the deal. So at some point the UPA must say they are going ahead, and when they do so, the Left will announce a withdrawal of support. The government need not fall immediately, but it will begin the clock ticking for the next elections. My guess would be that it could well be after the Gujarat elections whose results should be known by December 23. This times well with the end of the winter session of Parliament. So the technical and political timelines can be made to intersect in early January, leading to elections in May.

Almost every election in India is a paradigm shift and so will the next one be. The best the Indian people can hope for is the emergence of one, two or three fronts that have some ideological coherence and are coalitions with some dharma, not just opportunistic alliances that are used as stepping stones to political power.

And some more...

The advantage of a blog, even that of a journalist, is that you do not have to follow all the conventions of the profession. I would not put down the following in print because it is based on unconfirmed, or rather unconfirmable (sic) sourcing.
This explains that the Congress decision to abruptly back off from the Indo-US nuclear deal and the confrontation with the Left was because it feared a coup. Had the Left declared that it no longer supported the coalition, it would have gone into a minority status. At this point, had the Prime Minister called for the dissolution of Parliament, his voice may not have held the necessary authority. (For the balance of forces and the arithmetic in parliament look here.)
Especially, if it was not unanimous within the Council of Ministers. The RJD (Lalu), the NCP (Sharad Pawar) and the DMK could have said they did not agree with the Congress. Neither they, nor the bulk of the Congress party, are hot on the nuclear deal, especially if it forces them to face elections right now. The RJD and DMK would have lost the bulk of the seats they currently hold and so could many Congress MPs who may have been denied tickets. Bird in hand....
At this stage had someone, say Mr. Sharad Pawar, said he would form a government, the fat would have been on fire. He would have been backed by the BJP and broken the Congress, his long-term ambition and created a right-wing third front with the help of the DMK with the RJD and the Samajwadis supporting from outside. (For the DMK's perspective, see this.)

While the Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi were prepared to call the Left's bluff, they did not realise that their right flank was exposed. So, as soon as some inkling of this threat became apparent, they acted-- and in haste-- leaving the Left somewhat bewildered.
It is, of course, possible that if the Congress can keep the Left on board for a while and secure its right flank, they could execute their coup later this year, or in the middle of next year when a collapse of the government would lead to a general election, rather than a search for another government. What kind of a coalition dharma do you really expect in kaliyug ?

Mysterious goings on in New Delhi

What is happening with the Indo-US nuclear deal ? The prime minister and Sonia Gandhi’s statements on Friday have set the cat among the pigeons. Speaking at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit , the PM said: “If the deal does not come through, it will be a disappointment. But sometimes in life you have to live with them. It is not the end of life.” Sonia Gandhi, too said that the Congress would try to address the concerns of its allies and the party “The dharma of coalition is to work together, try and understand and accommodate each other’s view.”
In our view, this seeming flip-flop of the Congress party and the government can be understood if you believe, as I do, that there is now a deal within a deal. In other words, the Congress and the Left have struck a deal to back off from their confrontation and arrive at a workable compromise that will see the deal move on to its logical culmination, perhaps on a slightly delayed time line. This is no doubt the achievement of Pranab Mukherji, Lalu Yadav, Sitaram Yechury and Sharad Pawar. So the process will involve formal agreement in the Left-UPA committee that is supposed to look into the deal. You need to read between the lines to get the Left's true reaction. Note, Mr. Karat has not said anything.

There are several straws in the wind to suggest that. First, a CPI(M) politburo meeting scheduled for October 18 has been postponed. Second, speaking at an Indian Express function, Kapil Sibal says that the Left has accepted the primacy of the 123 Agreement over the Hyde Act. “The Left has now agreed to the position that where there is a conflict between the Hyde Act and the 123 agreement, the 123 agreement prevails. That position has been agreed to.”

Till now the Left has been arguing that they are not against the deal per se, but the Hyde Act that allegedly commits India to follow the US foreign policy agenda. That this was factually untrue mattered little because most of us believed that the Left’s positions were motivated by blind anti-Americanism rather than reason. Once reason comes into play, and there are grounds to believe that it has, the Left’s loses its sharp edge.

My guess-- and this is a guess-- is that we will now have a compromise formula, where the Left will endorse this point, and in return the government may go along with a Parliament statement or resolution that purports to defang the toothless Hyde Act.

In the meantime, behind the scenes negotiations are going on with the International Atomic Energy Agency for the India-specific safeguards which Dr. Mohammed El Baradei keeps on saying are not that much of a problem."We are ready. I don't think we would take very long. It would be weeks, not more than weeks." My own belief is that some behind-the-scenes negotiations have already taken place based on what diplomats cutely term "non-papers"-- working drafts which are not attributable to any government or institutions. So, there would be a show of formal consultation, but the agreement would be done in a matter of a week or so after India gives its go-ahead. As for the NSG, that as per agreement, is America’s baby, though we will have to put in effort as well, but behind the scenes.

It is too early to say that all's well that ends well. But there should be no doubts that relations between Prakash Karat, the CPI(M) General Secretary who forced the confrontation and the Prime Minister are irreparably damaged because of the note of bitterness that they brought into the issue. Usually in politics these things don't matter, but both are ideologues in their own way, and it does tend to matter.

More on the nuclear deal

The Prime Minister has confirmed what has been known internally by the government for a long time—that the country is short of natural uranium. The shortage is such that it will not only inhibit our nuclear power production, but actually has the potential of undermining our vaunted indigenous three stage programme. Speaking at the ceremony inaugurating the Tarapur 3 & 4 reactors on August 31, 2007, Dr. Manmohan Singh said:

“At the same time, our uranium resource base is limited. We have, therefore, consciously opted for a closed fuel cycle approach ever since the beginning of our nuclear power programme. We need to expeditiously develop fast reactor technologies and intensify efforts to locate additional uranium resources in the country. Government will extend its full support in this regard.

Even as we pursue our three-stage programme, it is necessary to look at augmenting our capabilities. We need to supplement our uranium supplies from elsewhere even as the DAE has taken a number of laudable steps to maximize output within the limited resources. We must take decisive steps to remove the uncertainties that result from shortfall in fuel supplies to avoid disruptions in our nuclear power production programme.”(emphases added)

This is the text of the statement read out by External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee after a meeting of leaders of the Congress and Left parties at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s residence on August 30, 2007:

In view of certain objections raised by the Left parties on the Indo-U.S. bilateral agreement on nuclear cooperation, it has been decided to constitute a committee to go into these issues.

1. The composition of the committee will be announced shortly.

2. The committee will look into certain aspects of the bilateral agreement; the implications of the Hyde Act on the 123 Agreement and self-reliance in the nuclear sector; the implications of the nuclear agreement on foreign policy and security cooperation.

3. The committee will examine these issues. The operationalisation of the deal will take into account the committee’s findings.

This is my take on the issue:

The text of the agreement reached by the Manmohan Singh government and the Left parties over the impasse on the Indo-US nuclear deal is clearly a face-saving device. You can see it as a glass half-empty, or, as I do, as one half full. It does appear to us to be an anodyne measure that will help the deal to overcome the hiccup created by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) General Secretary Prakash Karat’s hard-line rejection of the deal.

The committee that will be created through the agreement will look into “certain aspects” of the 123 Agreement, as well as “the implications of the Hyde Act on the 123 Agreement and self-reliance in the nuclear sector… and on foreign policy and security cooperation.” The committee will no doubt tread on ground already walked on by the government itself. Is it likely that the government would not have studied the implications of the Hyde act on the 123 agreement ? Indeed, the agreement has been shaped by the Hyde act and the debates in the US Congress that preceded the act. Because the process has been relatively open, India is aware of the potential pitfalls that the legislative process could have created. However, forewarned by the time the act came into being—having done the route through the Congressional committees, debates in the two houses of Congress and finally at the reconciliation stage— the Indian authorities were able to ensure that none of the so-called “killer” amendments were able to pass.
Whatever was left over was taken care of by the US president’s signing statement. Bush bluntly noted that “My approval of the Act does not constitute my adoption of the statements of policy [ as listed in the Hyde Act] as U.S. foreign policy.”
So all that stuff about India following the American agenda on Iran and elsewhere are simply not true. Perhaps more important is that under customary international law, an international agreement, such as the 123 Agreement, will always domestic legislation like the Hyde Act. You may ask: How did the US deny us fuel for Tarapur in the late 1970s ? Actually the US did not deny us the fuel outright; they refused to activate the consultative mechanisms. That is the reason why the current 123 Agreement specifies time-bound procedures. The ghost of Tarapur I haunts the agreement.

As for self-reliance in the nuclear sector, it would be easy to show the committee that the 123 Agreement will actually be a life-line of sorts for India’s domestic nuclear industry. As per the three-stage plan, our current stock of pressurized heavy water reactors must yield enough plutonium so as to fuel our fast breeder reactors which will produce more plutonium, as well as Uranium 233 from thorium. This Uranium 233 will then be used with thorium in a process that will regenerate U 233 which can then be used with more thorium to provide an endless supply of nuclear power.

There is such an acute shortage of natural uranium that India is not able to run its current reactors at full strength. In addition it does not have fuel to power the reactors it is building. So importing fuel is vital for the success of our indigenous programme. Access to imported technology also provides us an important hedge in case our fast breeder reactors do not perform to the levels they are required to.

The issue of the impact of the 123 Agreement on our foreign policy and security cooperation are somewhat more difficult to assess. If you want to believe that India, a country with a record for taking independent foreign policy issues, will be bought over to the American camp because of this one agreement, you probably also believe that the stars are God's daisy chain. India cooperates with a variety of countries on trade and technology issues, as well as security—Russia, France, UK, and even China. Why should the United States, the world's leading economic and military power be seen as some pariah ?

Fortunately, according to the text of the agreement between Mukherji and the Left parties, the operationalisation of the deal will merely “take into account” the committee’s findings and will clearly not be bound by them.

Another Chinese take on the subject:

“the agreement does boost India' s nuclear energy development. According to the agreement, both India and the United States will unfold nuclear energy cooperation in full swing and the United States will provide India with nuclear technology, installations and fuel, and help it establish a strategic reserve of nuclear energy. As a matter of fact, India is extremely short of energy. Electricity shortage has been a big problem that has plagued people' s normal life and sustainable economic development. The civilian nuclear power development will help India greatly ease the power shortage and provide guarantee to a steady economic development.”

Read the whole, if somewhat convoluted comment here People’s Daily Online August 30, 2007