| SECOND OPINION |
| Do N-deal with China 19 Jun 2008, 2302 hrs IST, Jug Suraiya |
By now the so-called Indo-US nuclear deal has become a shaggy dog story: a prolonged bad joke that goes on and on with no end or punchline in sight. It is obvious to any but to the most wilfully rosy-eyed that the deal -- enormously advantageous as it is for India, in terms of international status and access to nuclear material and strategic dual-use technology -- is not going to happen. The Indian Left, particularly the CPM, will not let it happen, on threat of withdrawing support to the Congress-led UPA government. And the Congress, clinging on to office with all the desperation of a man dangling over a bottomless abyss by his fingernails, is too frightened to call the CPM's bluff. (Does the CPM really want elections right now, caught up as it is with the Gorkhaland agitation and the backlash of the Nandigram/Singur fiasco? For that matter, is the BJP -- the CPM's strange ally in opposing the nuclear deal -- any readier to face the electorate, what with its internal dissensions and its hard line/soft line waffling over the whole Hindutva package, beginning with the mandir ?)
In any event, the Congress is too tenacious of office to chance its arm. So it seems that the nuclear deal is doomed to fizzle out like a damp squib. Or is it? With the BJP increasingly nuancing its opposition to the deal considering that closer Indo-US ties are broadly favoured by its urban middle-class constituency, the main stumbling block is the CPM. However, the CPM's visceral opposition to the Indo-US nuclear deal is not because of the nuclear component but because of the US component: nuclear power (for peace or otherwise) is now fine; it's the US that is the great bogeyman.
The Indian communists, who had earlier decried Pokhran I and II, are now so gung-ho about the country's nuclear programme that one of their objections to the nuclear deal with the US is that it might compromise India's autonomy to conduct Pokhran III, IV, V, VI and VII. No, the comrades are now all for nukes. But they can't be nukes which are in any way ritually contaminated by American association.
But there is another supply of nuclear know-how and hardware much nearer to India geographically and much closer to the CPM ideologically: China. Indeed, while New Delhi is dithering over the deal with the US, Beijing is reportedly eager to home-deliver nuclear capabilities of various sorts (it's called proliferation) to an already nuclear-enabled Islamabad, as it had done earlier to Pyongyang. In fact, it was largely through Chinese help that Pakistan cut its nuclear teeth as a response to India's Pokhran I.
What the CPM should now do is to talk Beijing into doing a nuclear kutti with Islamabad and establishing nuclear links with New Delhi instead. The CPM's cuddliness with Beijing is well known and Comrade Karat and Co should not find it beyond their powers of blandishment to inveigle the Middle Kingdom into becoming India's nuclear sugar daddy. Of course, if New Delhi were to fall into Beijing's nuclear embrace, the rest of the international community might well make its displeasure felt by imposing trade and other embargoes. So what? The CPM has made it quite clear, with regard to Tibet and other issues, that the whole world were well lost if only China were gained.
But how to gain China? To begin with, the CPM should unilaterally concede to all Beijing's demands regarding Arunachal Pradesh, a portion of Sikkim, and other parts of India which China claims for itself. To further sweeten the deal for China, the Marxists might also consider ceding the would-be Gorkhaland to Beijing, thereby getting shot of an awkward domestic problem created by people whom Bengal's transport minister has described as 'foreigners'.
In fact, in order to demonstrate its patriotic credentials the CPM might be tempted to cede itself to Beijing, hammer, sickle and all. Such a move would, once and for all, demonstrate the CPM's patriotic credentials. To China, of course. Who else? For unlike in India where we let them hang around, in China they simply hang their traitors.
secondopinion@timesgroup.com
In any event, the Congress is too tenacious of office to chance its arm. So it seems that the nuclear deal is doomed to fizzle out like a damp squib. Or is it? With the BJP increasingly nuancing its opposition to the deal considering that closer Indo-US ties are broadly favoured by its urban middle-class constituency, the main stumbling block is the CPM. However, the CPM's visceral opposition to the Indo-US nuclear deal is not because of the nuclear component but because of the US component: nuclear power (for peace or otherwise) is now fine; it's the US that is the great bogeyman.
The Indian communists, who had earlier decried Pokhran I and II, are now so gung-ho about the country's nuclear programme that one of their objections to the nuclear deal with the US is that it might compromise India's autonomy to conduct Pokhran III, IV, V, VI and VII. No, the comrades are now all for nukes. But they can't be nukes which are in any way ritually contaminated by American association.
But there is another supply of nuclear know-how and hardware much nearer to India geographically and much closer to the CPM ideologically: China. Indeed, while New Delhi is dithering over the deal with the US, Beijing is reportedly eager to home-deliver nuclear capabilities of various sorts (it's called proliferation) to an already nuclear-enabled Islamabad, as it had done earlier to Pyongyang. In fact, it was largely through Chinese help that Pakistan cut its nuclear teeth as a response to India's Pokhran I.
What the CPM should now do is to talk Beijing into doing a nuclear kutti with Islamabad and establishing nuclear links with New Delhi instead. The CPM's cuddliness with Beijing is well known and Comrade Karat and Co should not find it beyond their powers of blandishment to inveigle the Middle Kingdom into becoming India's nuclear sugar daddy. Of course, if New Delhi were to fall into Beijing's nuclear embrace, the rest of the international community might well make its displeasure felt by imposing trade and other embargoes. So what? The CPM has made it quite clear, with regard to Tibet and other issues, that the whole world were well lost if only China were gained.
But how to gain China? To begin with, the CPM should unilaterally concede to all Beijing's demands regarding Arunachal Pradesh, a portion of Sikkim, and other parts of India which China claims for itself. To further sweeten the deal for China, the Marxists might also consider ceding the would-be Gorkhaland to Beijing, thereby getting shot of an awkward domestic problem created by people whom Bengal's transport minister has described as 'foreigners'.
In fact, in order to demonstrate its patriotic credentials the CPM might be tempted to cede itself to Beijing, hammer, sickle and all. Such a move would, once and for all, demonstrate the CPM's patriotic credentials. To China, of course. Who else? For unlike in India where we let them hang around, in China they simply hang their traitors.
secondopinion@timesgroup.com
| SECOND OPINION | ||||||||||||||||||
| US as Obama-nation 20 Jun 2008, 2300 hrs IST, Jug Suraiya | ||||||||||||||||||
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| Thanks to its many misadventures -- most recently and notably in Afghanistan and Iraq -- the US has been labelled as an 'abomination' by its critics, many of whom are American citizens. However, with the first African-American wiping his shoes on the doormat preparatory to stepping into the White House (unless pipped at the post by John McCain) people in the US are already talking about the neo-con 'abomination' transforming itself into a neo-confident 'Obama-nation'. If Barack Obama does win the presidential race it will indeed be remarkable, not just for an individual but for an entire society which bills itself as the world's foremost democracy. The seemingly irresistible rise of Obama does appear to portend a sea change in not just the American political system -- with its complicated array of caucuses, delegates and superdelegates -- but perhaps more importantly in the social dynamics of the country. Black men need not be just great basketball players or golfers, a la Tiger Woods; they can now aspire to be presidential hopefuls. (And all of this without resorting to the blunt instrument of reservations and quotas, as anti-reservationists in India have been quick to point out.) An amazing expansion of social horizons, considering that segregated schooling in the southern states, and segregated housing in Washington, DC and elsewhere, under the so-called 'Jim Crow' laws, are well within living memory. But do the twin triumphs of Obama (win or lose the election, his having got this far is itself a victory) and his Obama-nation distract from an equally significant failure, or shortcoming, of American politics and society: the defeat of Hillary Clinton, not as a politician who happens to be a woman, but as a woman who dares to be a politician -- and a presidential candidate at that? Several commentators have suggested that what cost Hillary the Democratic Party nomination was not so much her political agenda, or the fact of Bill lurking in the background, but her attempt to 'feminise' her candidacy by resorting to such supposedly 'feminine' stratagems as tearful emotionalism. It would appear that while the American dream can today envisage an 'Uncle Tom's Cabin to White House' scenario, it cannot yet encompass the thought of a woman in the Oval Office, as distinct from the ovulating office. Black American men may have demonstrably broken the shackles of a history of slavery; American women, white or black, are still subject to the invisible chains of gender discrimination. The apocalyptic 'Fire next time' of militant black power prophesied by James Baldwin has been turned into a victory torch, but the metaphor of the zombie-like 'Stepford Wives' devised by novelist Ira Levin in 1972 continues to haunt America: women relegated to the robotic roles of child-bearing and housekeeping. As of 2008, women have much less than an equitable 50-50 say in the political (and therefore social and economic as well) life of the American community: women occupy 16.3 per cent of the seats in the US Congress; 16 per cent in the Senate; 16.3 per cent in the House of Representatives. The Danish, Swedish and Norwegian parliaments respectively accommodate 38 per cent, 45.3 per cent and 36.4 per cent women members. (India's Lok Sabha has an abysmal 9 per cent, what with the 33 per cent Women's Reservation Bill remaining embroiled in chauvinist obfuscation and continuing to be a target of political sabotage.) If Obama's triumph is seen as the triumph of not just a race but of an equitably multiracial society, can Hillary's defeat correlatively be seen as a thumbs-down not just for her gender but for an inequitably uni-sexist polity? Worth a thought. So even as we all raise a toast to the advent of the Obama-nation, perhaps we should also remember that the 'abomination' being thus transformed can also be spelt as 'Oba-man-ation'. A woman president? God forbid. It would result in terminal const-her-nation. secondopinion@timesgroup.com
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