In My View

Acts of Desperation

One can only watch with amazement the levels of desperation the Indian elite are exuding for being permanently allied to their ‘land of promises,’ the USA. The other week Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh was ready to sacrifice his government for keeping up his covenant with the US president, George W Bush – a sentiment that was clearly in variance with his party colleagues. This week the Left allies of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) are being vilified for supposedly committing a cardinal ‘sin’ – loving thy neighbour i.e. Pakistan and China.

Even the level of rhetoric from the side of the US cohorts have touched new depths. One can easily sample one of those at the personal blog of a senior colleague with the Hindu newspaper, Siddharth Varadarajan. Commenting on his piece, Deal breather, not deal breaker, posted on the blog, India’s venerable author, commentator and a former senior intelligence officer, B Raman wrote these immortal lines, “After joining the IB (Intelligence Bureau) in 1967, I went on a visit to Kolkata. Those were the days of the Cultural Revolution in China. The Marxists were not yet in power in West Bengal, but were very active. As I was travelling in a taxi from the Dum Dum airport to downtown, I saw the following slogan painted by the Marxists on the walls everywhere: "China's Chairman is our Chairman."”

Reading these lines, as a Kolkatan one realized why the Indian State needed to deploy the Indian Army to quell the rebellion of a handful of youth in West Bengal, going in the name of the CPI (ML), colloquially termed Naxalites. This was exemplified by the abysmal intelligence the State had about the country, signified by Raman’s statement that the ‘Marxists’ had annointed China’s chairman as their own.

Because in this extant case, he must have been referring to the CPI (M) and the CPI for their opposition to the nuclear deal. And that rather churlish slogan was a product of the fevered imagination of the CPI (ML), under the leadership of Charu Mazumdar. For the CPI, Mao was an anathema at that time. And even the CPI (M), which had split the party on one of the reasons reflecting the Sino-Soviet split in international communism had treated the slogan with the disdain it deserved.

But enough of edifying desperate rants with factual comments. Let us focus on the issue at hand – the necessity for India to embrace the USA. One of India’s prime systems analysts and commentator Dr G Balachandran argued in the Indian Express, of course with a lot of equivocations of the, “On the one hand…On the other,” that by concluding this treaty, the Manmohan Singh government has not bartered away India’s strategic nuclear programme. Well, Bala has got it wrong this time atleast.

For power is not just about having the option to exercise options, it is more about having an intent to act. India’s elitist class, softened up over decades, first, on public largesse and private patronage, and now, reaping the benefits of the thrust towards flagrant marketisation, have lost the will to resist. Indian history has recorded that civilizations have been decimated because overweaning enervation, be it the Indus Valley (the ruins of which bear testimony of a War, as some historians believe) or the Mauryas or even the Guptas. Of course, on almost all occasions there was the fifth column. But the main reason had been the inability of the courtiers of a feudalist system to rise up to an intellectual challenge posed to them.

If one has to take Balachandran seriously, then one will have to acknowledge that India from now on would have to survive on the generosity of one American regime to another. For most of India’s continuing peaceful nuclear programme would have to depend on US presidential waivers if India takes steps to scientifically validate its nuclear weapons arsenal.

In one part of his contrite analysis, Balachandran has rather expansively written that no Indian analyst believes the country needs more testing nuclear weapons. But despite being evidently well connected to the Indian strategic science establishment, Balachandran has not assured his readers – by extention his countrymen – that India has the scientific ability to undertake cyber simulations for validating designs of bombs, warheads and other paraphernalia. Or whether India has the ability to make sub-critical tests, even if it is allowed under the various US legislations that would now come into play after this treaty.

Finally, a word about the charge that Indian Left parties were opposing the Indo-US treaty on grounds of helping China and Pakistan. The people who make these comments obviously need a lesson in history of the Chinese Bomb. When in the 1950s, Mao Zhe Dong decided that China needed a nuclear arsenal of its own, it was at the teeth of opposition from a then Soviet Union. In fact, Mao had taken the decision of an independent nuclear weapons programme because the latter had been dragging its feet in transferring technology and material to China.

So he had told his countrymen that they were alone in this nuclearised world and needed to develop reactors in each of their backyards. Of course, that was hyperbolic, much in the way of his call to make steel in every backyard. But it had helped in raising a mass upsurge of national power. One wonders whether the late Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had remembered that about its ally when he had urged upon his countrymen that they should rather eat grass than not have nuclear weapons.

Does any of the Indian elite leadership now has the ability to give out such a call to their countrymen?

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhum, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in. He is presently in Hawai’i, the USA at the East West Centre as a Student Fellow of the Asia Pacific Leadership Programme of the Centre.