By Badri Raina | ZNet, July 13, 2008
I may not be accused of ever having written a good word about L.K.Advani, the leader and now projected prime ministerial candidate of the Hindu-rightwing Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP).
Now is the time to make amends.
In an elaborate interview given to the redoubtable N.Ram of the Hindu (12 July. '08)—easily the most literate of India's premier English Dailies—Advani has rightly pointed out that, in contrast to the current UPA regime, the NDA under Vajpayees' premiership desisted from pushing such agendas that did not form a part of the manifestos of any constituent party of the NDA coalition.
The nuclear explosion at Pokhran, for example, was undertaken by that regime because the BJP's wish to ‘go nuclear' had first been vetted and endorsed by its partners in the NDA.
Contrarily, Hindutva-related items such as building that Ram Temple at Ayodhya at the site of the demolished Babri mosque, enforcing a Common Civil Code on all Indian citizens (in substance, imposing Hindu social laws on India's Muslims), and deleting Article 370 from the Constitution (thereby ending the ‘Special Status' of the Jammu & Kashmir State—a covenant on which the accession of the state to India was established in the first place) were scrupulously left out of the NDA's programme of governance.
Notwithstanding the political effort of the BJP to keep such issues alive and ready-at-hand, mainly through propaganda and pogrom, it must be conceded that the NDA regime made no attempt formally to implement communal agendas that were unacceptable to its participants in government.
II
Now.
Contrary to my inability through the years to favour anything at all that L.K.Advani (and his party) have stood for or done, in or out of government, I have on more than one occasion spoken up for the President of the Indian National Congress, Sonia Gandhi, both when her locus standii—culturally and politically—has been under crude racist and xenophobic attack, and later in praise of her selfless concern and dignity on behalf of the nation and its deprived masses.
Alas, in the context of the Indo-US civil nuclear deal, and the parting of ways with the Left parties without whose support—as she has acknowledged just yesterday in a meeting of the UPA coalition— the present government could not have been constituted in the first place, I charge her with having allowed herself and the party to be sulk-twisted into a course of action that formed no part of the Common Minimum Programme drawn up with the Left, that one feels goes against her best reading of where the welfare of the Republic resides, and that is likely to affect a disastrous paradigm shift in India's sense of herself and of her equations with the rest of the world.
And all that by a prime minister who has yet to be elected to the House of the People, the Lok Sabha. (See my ‘Deal or Democracy', Znet, 27 October, 2007 for a detailed comment on these issues.)
It should be recalled that the nuclear deal arrived at between the Indian Prime Minister and the American President (July 18, 2005) happened just one unseemly month after a report in the USA Today (June 19, 2005) which read as follows:
"More than 26 years after a near melt-down at the Three Miles Island
nuclear power plant, the Senate is considering an energy bill that includes
financial incentives for construction of nuclear plants. It's the latest sign
of the industry's quiet rehabilitation." (See J. Sriraman, ‘A Raw Deal for
India', Truthout, 9 July, 2008).
The USA Today further noted that "the Nuclear Energy Institute's political action committee had contributed $76,376 to (Congressional) candidates so far" the bulk to Republicans but also to Democrats like Tom Carper of Delaware, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.
Sriraman notes that the "Energy Policy Act of 2005 included an array of incentives, amounting to billions of dollars, designed to promote nuclear power."
Nuclear "experts" contended that business with India and China would usher in a "domestic renaissance in nuclear power." These experts also argued that nuclear cooperation with India would promote India's "strategic power" as a counterbalance to China—something that Indian experts remain skeptical about.
Is it any wonder then that the Bush administration should so assiduously push the Indo-US nuclear deal, knowing that its corporates (who have not built a reactor at home in 35 years) stand to make a killing they haven't made in half a century. Or that sundry nuclear corporate CEOs should be camping in India for more than a year now, and, in coordination with the American embassy in Delhi, be arm-twisting Indian policy-makers to get on with it.
Secondly, the deal bears the promise of inveigling India into the non-proliferation regime, even as the stipulations on the non-use of plutonium issuing from imported uranium puts paid to, or effectually retard, India's thorium technology.
And most importantly, the macro-contexts of the deal further promise—as explicitly provided for in the enabling Hyde Act—to draw India into a lasting "congruence" with American foreign policy interests worldwide.
Continued . . .
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