In My View

US: Deceit, deception and doubletalk on Iran

Finally, New Delhi seems to have found the plot. Not a plot of land that most in Delhi strive for and goons build upon, but a plot of the story. It has told official Washington to take the long road, while it takes the high road. Ministry of External Affair’s statement on Tuesday that it does not want any “guidance” from the US on its conduct of bilateral relations with Iran was its sharpest reaction, after years of wheedling in front of the ‘almighty’ ever since the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government exploded a few nuclear bombs in 1998 in a fit of pique.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president would be stopping over in New Delhi on the way back from Sri Lanka this week. And the American homilies were a precursor to this visit.

This visit is coming at a time when Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia leader in Iraq has warned the governing leadership in that country with severe attacks on its forces if they did not stop attacking his Mahdi army members. In Palestine, Jimmy Carter, the former American president has met the Hamas leaders in Gaza to extract assurances that they would accept Israel’s existence on their borders. And a fortnight ago, Ahmadinejad had declared that Iran has brought in line a few thousands more of gas centrifuges to process Uranium for their civilian nuclear programme.

President Ahmadinejad is coming to India at a time when his nominees have tasted defeat in local bodies elections, ostensibly because his government is losing support on the streets of Iran on account of a lack of economic progress. Power seems to be slipping out of his hands and the gainers are the moderate, pragmatists like Hashemi Rafsanjani.

On the back of such high decibel campaigns against the Iranian nuclear programme, the latter has become an issue of prime prestige for Ahmadinejad’s government. Most importantly, the Iranian president is visiting India in the same of month – April – when his country celebrates the ‘Nuclear Day.’ The 8 April date was when Iran had produced its first batches of low enriched Uranium (LEU) for its nuclear programme two years ago.

The Iranian government has sought to tie it with the sense of nationhood of the people by deciding to distribute to each poor Iranian $50 on that day. Some say that the money also signifies the government’s sensitivity to the popular critique that the nuclear showpieces are really very expensive and have little value for delivering goods to the common people.

There are also reports in non-Western news sources that the common sight in Teheran of ayatollahs in flowing robes is slowly vanishing, being replaced by those who are keener on the economy and security. In that transition, the Iranian Republican Guards, who are a unique organisation in that they are a State by themselves, are emerging as the new lightning rod for politics, business and security. One should keep in mind, Ahmadinejad is their man.

The USA wants India to ignore all this and follow its lead in ostracising Iran and keep it isolated till Washington gets a handle on it. Only a week ago a British newspaper had revealed that the USA was engaged in “Track two” engagement with Iran. The British newspaper had quoted the US undersecretary of state, Thomas Pickering, saying that the country had been in conversation with Iran for “five years,” despite all the vituperation in public.

The USA is also hedging its bets on an Iranian version of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi magnate who and his ilk led the US into a war with Saddam Hussein’s regime. This is a group called Mujahid-e-Khalq. They were declared a ‘terrorist outfit’ by the British government in 2001. But there are reports that the British courts might lift that tag, and make it free to be coddled by the Western agencies for subversion in Iran.

For India, the National Security Adviser, Mr MK Narayan’s rather self-conscious pronouncement that New Delhi did not want to indulge in “conflict diplomacy” might well define the parameters of the relationship. It reflects correctly on the current abilities of India in terms of interventions on Iran. On the other hand, India would need to decide how much ground it could yield to China on the issue, but still maintain its relevance in a neighbourhood that is proximate.

In that circumstance, it would be important what New Delhi does, now that Murli Deora, the petroleum minister, has seen the light of day on the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline. By the time Ahmadinejad arrives in the Capital, he would have returned from Pakistan after holding talks on the pipeline. And he would have known whether China has already ousted India from the deal.

Having said that, it would be amiss if it were not pointed out that India would still have to deal with an American administration that would seek to “obliterate” a nation of more than 70 million people, with thousands of years of civilisation were it to threaten an enclave of the West in West Asia. - a nation that holds to ransom a region that is hundred times bigger than itself, all because it has a Bomb in the Basement.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhumi, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in

In My View

Prayer on their mind

The longest serving ‘caretaker’ government of Bangladesh is seeking to propitiate the rain-gods. Unlike their counterparts in various capitals of the region, they are not hoping that the rains would fall to cool the rising thermometer in these early summer months. On the contrary, they are pleading in their minds that the skies do not open up in the next fortnight – especially with a hailstorm.

Reason: the Boro crops of the season are ripening on the fields, almost ready to be harvested in the next fortnight. Only those crops could save the day for Bangladesh’s temporary administrators. For the price of rice has skyrocketed across the country in the past months, with it suffering severe shortages. Rice in Dacca is selling between 45-60 Takas.

And every morning thousands of people in the capital city are queuing up at shops run by the Bangladesh Rifles for buying subsidised rice at 25 Takas. A hailstorm now could change the scenario for the government more quickly than a Sheikh Hasina or Begum Khaleda would.

This, in a country whose agriculture is almost totally centred on growing paddy, is perplexing.  But such is the nature of IMF-World Bank driven ‘free market’ theology that Bangladesh government did not procure enough food grains last monsoon; hence did not have enough in stock. It is being said that the rice mill owners of the country did not sell their stocks to the government as its procurement prices were low. And more ludicrously it is now being decided that a fixed ‘levy’ would be imposed upon the rice mill owners during this Boro season so that they are compelled to sell now. If this is not the case of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, what is?

Charges are being bandied about that hoarders are compounding the problem by not releasing their stocks in the market. Now, that too shows the naivete of an administration. Especially this from a government that claims to usher in Bangladesh a new style of nation-building, which would be a radical departure from the fractious and corrupt past of its previous political classes.

The rice mill owners, on the other hand, charge the government for not doing enough to increase agricultural yield that could solve the problem for the long term. They also say the traders are making hay as the shortage deepens.

In this milieu of charges and counter-charges the people of Bangladesh have little to live with. They do not even have a public distribution system by which they could access foodgrains for their survival. And they would not see the super-profits that would be made in the period for they have sold all they had produced much earlier to the rice mill owners at a rate that the mill owners fixed. All they can do now is to scramble to eke out a living.

But their anger would need venting. Unlike in the past, politically India is not being made a scapegoat of the situation. Many in Bangladesh believe, their current government lives by the rules of the USA and draw sustenance from the support of New Delhi. Yet, when the dam bursts, no one would be able to tell how the surging emotions would flow.

India would do well to take note of this developing situation in its East. The situation has only exacerbated due to the overall ban by New Delhi on non-Basmati rice export. It has closed the option of open market access by Bangladeshi traders. On top of that, as Bangladesh’s diplomats in Kolkata point out, when Pranab Mukherjee had visited the country in December last, there was talk of supplying Dacca with five lakh tonnes of rice. That was later whittled down to one lakh tonnes. Even the supply of that promised, and paltry amount, has not been done on an expedited basis. 

If New Delhi is counting its chickens even before the bilateral relationship between the two countries have hatched them, they would again be making the same myopic mistake of previous governments. Once the simmering anger of the people of Bangladesh finds India as its target, no subservience of any government would be able to contain the damage to neighbourly relations.

But how much can India do? Because India too has faced the brunt of the same neo-liberal policies that have addressed the politically safer demand side of the agricultural equation – because that made more quick money for the already wealthy – than the supply side. More than two decades of declining public investment in Indian agriculture is reaching the country to the throes of food deficiency.

For Bangladesh the situation is worse. Neither does it have the strong democratic institutions that could stop the country from pursuing a self-destructive economic path of unplanned and predatory capitalism. Nor does it have the economic muscle of an India – created over decades of planned growth and a vibrant public sector – to spend its way out of a crisis. At the end, one can safely say, the region would not emancipate itself politically like Latin America has done, till the whole Fund-Bank edifice collapses.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhumi, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in