SPECIAL ARTICLE

Go, because you must

RAVINDRA KUMAR

 

India is a funny country. Everyone says Sonia Gandhi wields all power; that she is like the executive chairperson of a company of which Dr Manmohan Singh is managing director. As chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance, she is said to decide policy for the government, essentially we presume as an extension of her own will and intellect but after taking on board, and in that order, the views of her kitchen cabinet and affiliate parties.

It would seem to us that a civilian nuclear deal would be a matter of policy, especially for a country that successfully resisted for several decades all efforts to be brought within the umbrella of restraint of the developed world.

 
But it is Dr Manmohan Singh who is identified as the architect of the nuclear deal with the United States, not Mrs. Gandhi. How did this happen? Did Dr Singh act on his own? If so, Mrs Gandhi should sack him, because, puns aside, the Congress cannot be seen to be two-faced. If not, how is he the architect of the deal? Mustn't it have been Mrs Gandhi, especially when we know she is not coy about accepting accolades for initiatives of relatively lesser import such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme?

The prime mover

If, therefore, as logic and common sense would suggest, it is Mrs Gandhi who is the prime mover of the nuclear deal, where is the question of saving Dr Singh's face at Tokyo, Washington or anywhere else? He must only have followed instructions.
Ergo, the convoluted political exercise that has brought the Congress to a stage where its cadres have been asked to prepare for an election must be aimed at saving Mrs Gandhi's face. But, as Mr Prakash Karat is said to have commented somewhere, saving an individual's face ought, as a general proposition, to be of lesser import than preserving a nation's integrity. We will return to this proposition in a bit.

If Mrs Gandhi were indeed the architect of the nuclear deal, as she must have been, why would she not admit her support openly and confidently? One obvious reason must be reluctance to be seen as being too friendly with the Americans; Dr Singh, a natural-born Indian, is having enough problems trying to live down whispered suggestions of being an American stooge. Imagine how much more untenable this Pizza Hut position would be for the Italian-born Mrs Gandhi.

But plausible, often barely plausible, deniability is a Nehru-Gandhi family tradition. Just as Krishna Menon took the fall for the Chinese debacle, or Zail Singh for creating Bhindranwale, or the Bhagats and Sajjan Kumars for the Sikh riots, without the faintest suggestion or hint that Nehru, Indira or Rajiv might, respectively, have been directly culpable, so too must Dr Singh prepare to be sacrificed if the nuclear deal goes bad. That is a matter of political style ~ identify the fall guy even before you enunciate the proposition.

We need though spare no tears for Dr Singh, certainly not on the ground that he seems a nice chap. He has clearly been a misfit as Prime Minister, and has achieved the highest political position in the country with the weakest political credentials ever. And sometimes a price has to be paid for getting more than what one deserves.

Now, let's discuss the other interesting twist in this battle of political wits, the position adopted by Left parties. To their credit, and as acknowledged by this newspaper, they have been consistent in their opposition to the deal. More important, they seem to have had sufficient ammunition to back up their case.

It is now well accepted that the contribution of nuclear power to India's energy needs, should the deal go through, will be small, if not negligible. It is also reasonably clear that signing on will compromise at least some of our freedoms, and make us amenable to American pressure, and that therefore the benefits of joining the international nuclear regime would come with a price.
Mr Karat has said the integrity of the nation is at stake, and that such integrity ought to be more important than saving an individual's face. His colleagues in the Left and he have bravely stuck to their guns despite not-so-veiled suggestions that they are acting at the behest of Communist China, which, the argument goes, does not want India to reach a position of energy security or regional superpower status.

But they have gone along with the Congress' charade. Instead of pulling the rug firmly and decisively when the first moves were made towards reaching agreement with the United States, they have waited until virtually the last moment, the fifth year of the current Parliament or in human terms, the eighth month of pregnancy before deciding that the baby must be aborted.
Surely, it cannot be the Left's case that they saw government's support for the deal as the extension of one man's will, or as a policy conundrum needing resolution within the Congress. Surely, they must have been aware that Dr Singh could not act unless it was at the behest of, or with the stated consent of the UPA chairperson. Yet, they played along, painted Dr. Singh as the villain of the piece ~ continue to do so, in fact ~ and claimed they were addressing their case in opposition to Mrs Gandhi.

And why were they so irresponsible? Because, according to them, they were trying all along to avoid an election that might benefit the Bharatiya Janata Party. Using the same powerful logic he used to explain why national integrity ought to be paramount, Mr Karat must now tell us how having a right-wing fundamentalist party in power as the head of an alternate coalition (no one, not even the Left, can believe the BJP would win a majority on its own) is more damaging than a sacrifice of national integrity and a loss of national face.

Between the two of them, aided and assisted by the Sharad Pawars, Lalu Yadavs and other such self-seekers, the Congress and the Left have diverted our time and energies with this nonsensical charade. For that, if nothing else, this government deserves to fall.

Instead of the centralized venality of earlier regimes, the UPA has allowed individual satraps to milk the nation in their own ways. If the NCP has denuded agriculture and compromised food security, besides bankrupting the national airline, the RJD has regaled us with flim-flam to suggest that a railway running as tardily and as unsafely as ever before is now doing so profitably.

Distracting sideshow

Within the Congress itself, individual Ministers have each feathered small nests of their own, whether it is Priya Ranjan Das Munshi playing games with media policy ~ more foreign hands here, but that story must await another day ~ or Oscar Fernandes fooling around with labour policy.

We are reeling under the pressure of inflation and shortages. We are miserable at the rise in interest rates. We are shocked at the fall of stock values. The rich have grown richer, and the poor poorer but we are, most of us, distracted by a sideshow whose rules we don't understand but whose outcome ~ the fall of a government ~ for some morbid reason interests us. This government deserves to fall, if only to put an end to this senseless assault on our attention.

The saddest part of the four years and more of UPA rule is that it hasn't thrown up a single genuine hero, not in political life, government or opposition, and not elsewhere. And not even from amongst us ~ we, the so-called people! Trapped between "American stooges" and "Chinese stooges", we have become stooges of our own lethargy. This government must fall, if only to give us another chance. We owe politicians nothing, but we owe ourselves at least that.

 

(The writer is Editor, The Statesman)