Asia's other Maoist threat (April 24, 2006)

By Swapan Dasgupta
JASHPURNAGAR, INDIA--For two hot summer months, observant police in this tiny, remote town in the north of the country spotted a trickle of young boys from neighboring states disappearing into the surrounding forest. In almost every case, they reemerged a few months later, clutching a wad of banknotes, amounting to a fortune in local terms.
These youngsters--police estimate at least 250 passed through the area last May and June--were the latest recruits to a Maoist rebel movement that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently branded the biggest threat to India’s internal security. “There can be no political compromise with terror,” he told an April 14 meeting convened to discuss the crisis, after a string of audacious attacks by the insurgents in several states.
But the prime minister’s rhetoric is undercut by his government’s actions. Namely, Mr. Singh and his Congress Party have a track record of trying to cut covert deals with the Maoists. The sops allowed the rebels time to rearm and regroup, contributing to the recent upsurge in violence.
The sheer numbers give cause to worry. According to the Delhi-based Institute of Conflict Studies, 247 people--including 83 insurgents--have died in Maoist-inspired violence in the first quarter of this year. That includes a March 13 hijacking of a train in the northern state of Jharkhand and a March 24 jail break, when Maoists freed one of their top leaders from jail in the state of Orissa. That followed yet another audacious jail break last November, when 500 armed Maoists stormed a prison in the state of Bihar, freeing top rebel leaders and murdering political opponents incarcerated there.
Left-wing extremism is nothing new in South Asia. The Indian state of West Bengal endured a Maoist insurgency from 1967 to 1972. Sri Lanka experienced similar insurrections in 1971 and 1988. In all these cases, the governments declared war and used counter-insurgency strategies that included arresting all rebel leaders and actively recruiting agents to turn in their former comrades.
But in India, the threat has been approached with a softer touch--and is now bordering on a severe uprising. India’s Ministry of Home Affairs estimates that there are now nearly 9,300 hard-core Maoist cadres, well-armed and trained in how to use explosives, active in 165 districts in 14 of the country’s states. To put this into perspective, that spans an area where 17% of India’s population lives. The Maoists, once romantically portrayed by their sympathizers as well-intentioned Robin Hoods, motivated by local poverty and oppressive landlords, are finally being recognized as a serious threat to the Indian state. With neighboring Nepal gripped by an insurgency that has seen Maoists rebels create “liberated zones” of parallel administrations covering last swathes of the mountainous kingdom, the fear is that their Indian counterparts are seeking to follow suit. That could, in the worst case scenario, create a “red corridor” running from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean.
Hence the belated alarm bells in New Delhi. But Mr. Singh’s administration is paying a price for its own short-sightedness. When the Congress Party-led government came to power in May 2004, it tried to enlist the Maoists for political purposes, rather than tackle the insurgency head-on. The government cynically calculated that Maoists the held the balance of power in nearly 10% of parliamentary constituencies--not because they enjoy popular support, but because they are powerful enough to intimidate the voters in those areas.
Naively, policy makers believed they could use the Maoists to undermine the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, which controls five of the seven states in which the insurgents are strongest. The Home Minister in New Delhi repeatedly turned down requests from BJP-controlled states for firm military action against the rebels. For instance, a request from the BJP-controlled state of Chhatisgarh for airborne operations against the insurgents was rejected on the ground that the Maoists were “our boys” who deserved to be sweet-talked, rather than outgunned. In Andhra Pradesh, the Congress regional government even negotiated a 10-month ceasefire with the Maoists.
Not surprisingly, the Maoists took advantage of these mixed signals and dithering in New Delhi to regroup and rearm. In September 2004, they united their various splinter groups under the umbrella body of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). In Andhra Pradesh alone, they raised an estimated 500-600 million rupees ($11-13 million) during the 10-month ceasefire, from June 2004 to April 2005. The local police estimated the Maoists recruited 300-500 additional guerrillas during this period. Official complicity in allowing the rebels to regroup was graphically demonstrated in February 2005, when the regional government ordered Andhra Pradesh police to call off an anti-insurgency operation, allowing a top Maoist leader called Ramakrishna to escape. When the militants finished refinancing their cause, they simply declared the ceasefire over, blaming alleged police killings of their supporters.
It’s good that the Singh administration finally seems to have woken up to the threat. The first priority should be to give India’s states the tools they have long been demanding to tackle the insurgency. That means funds to modernize their police forces, buy helicopters to send rapid deployment forces into otherwise inaccessible areas, and the resources to establish elaborate intelligence networks.
Even more importantly, Mr. Singh needs to build on his recent remarks to a special meeting of chief ministers from all Indian states. In that meeting, he vowed to “wipe out” the Maoist threat, calling for more effective policing as part of an aggressive new strategy to tackle the violence.
Encouragingly, some states have already taken a tough stance. In West Bengal, the state’s Communist-led government advocates using the same, warlike counter insurgency tactics that worked in the 1980s. (At a recent election rally, the Communist chief minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeva Bhattacharya, warned the Maoists that the state police would “finish them off.”) The BJP has shown it is not soft on terrorists either, with a controversial program of resettling villagers in guarded camps in the remote Bastar region, so depriving local Maoists of sustenance and support.
Nepal’s experience demonstrates that any half-hearted and inept handling of the Maoist threat can prove counter-productive. In India, the stakes are even higher. Quietly but systematically, the Maoists are targeting India’s claim to be the latest global economic success story. Domestic industries, particularly the mining sector, are already being hard hit by the taxes the Maoists impose in the areas they control. Although only one foreign investor has been targeted so far--the destruction of a Coca Cola bottling plant in Andhra Pradesh in 2001--the Maoist leadership has been ominously warning multinationals to stay away.
“Give us five years,” one Maoist leader recently predicted, “We will make sure you spend sleepless nights.”
Mr. Dasgupta is a Delhi-based columnist and former managing editor of India Today.

(Published in Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2006)

Byword for disruption (April 21, 2006)

History is just not on the Communists' side

By Swapan Dasgupta

This is the strangest Assembly election ever experienced in West Bengal. The Election Commission guidelines have drained this festival of democracy of colour and the usual carnival atmosphere. The evocative graffiti which used to be the most cost-effective medium of political communications have disappeared—outlawed by the application of a little-known law dating back to the time the Congress was last in control of Writer’s Buildings. Gone are the buntings, the huge cut-outs of competing symbols and even posters are scarce. If it wasn’t for the modest processions through the back streets, the odd padayatra by candidates and the occasional public meetings, you wouldn’t have guessed that West Bengal is in the throes of an election. The cacophony of street politics has been replaced by relatively sober duels in the print and electronic media. At the same time, voter turnout is unimpaired.

Maybe the restrictions were overdue. For the past 100 years the stereotype of the fractious, argumentative and over-politicised Bengali has been etched into the national consciousness. Whereas Bengalis debunked Rudyard Kipling’s banderlog caricature as colonialist disdain of enlightenment, the rest of India often equated loquaciousness with dementia. From the “revolutionary terrorism” during the Raj and Naxalite adventurism in the 1970s to the unending spate of bandhs since 1966, Bengal has become a byword for disruption. The Communist movement must hog most of the credit for protesting too much but, to be fair, the Congress and its offshoots haven’t lagged behind entirely. Being dysfunctional has become the Bengali consensus.

The state has paid an unacceptably high price for passing off perversity as common sense. A hundred years ago, Calcutta was the most happening place in India. It was the second city of the largest empire since Roman times. It was the hub of education, cosmopolitan culture, trade and a fledgling industry. It was the citadel of gracious living—a phenomenon by no means confined to the white man. Above all, it was the epitome of modern India.

In just a century Kolkata has not only lost its pre-eminence within India, it has been relegated to the status of a provincial backwater. In just three generations, a truncated Bengal has squandered away its profound historical advantages and lost out to Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Today, it lags behind resurgent India in everything except crowds in cricket matches, lost mandays and voter turnout. West Bengal is a state that has been crippled by the politics it professes.

When the history of West Bengal’s decline in the 20th century is written, it is certain to place the Communist movement in the dock. Communism in Bengal has always been more than just a formidable election-winning machinery; it is a mindset centred on self-destruction, envy and a reckless disregard of all the laws of economics. Behind the veneer of bhadralok civility, Bengal’s middle-class Communist leadership has snuffed life out of a people’s creative enterprise.

It has happened not because Communists are inherently evil. Many of the Left leaders are deeply compassionate individuals with a genuine commitment to improve the lives of the poor. They also have high ethical standards—a reason why the index of corruption in West Bengal has not reached the dizzying heights of, say, Delhi and southern India.

The root of the problem is the Communist obsession with control. Starting from the personal lives of their cadres, the CPI(M) aspired to control everything—the distribution of land, cropping patterns, the selection of teachers, and the appointments, transfers and postings of government employees. Even areas which traditionally came under the purview of civil society, like the composition of voluntary associations, and, occasionally, business decisions were sought to be brought under the umbrella of party control.

In its 29-year rule, the Left Front boasts of having empowered those who were previously on the margins of society. At one level this may be true but a strange corollary of this empowerment of the “toiling masses” is its emotional subordination to the party. Thus, when the party makes it a prestige issue to ensure 85 to 90 per cent polling in districts such as West Midnapore, Bankura and Purulia—areas where the CPI(M) majority is weighed rather than counted—the faithful fall in line and do their bit for the Local Committee. If empowerment, however, also involves the freedom of individual choice and the right to be contrarian, the CPI(M) will have none of it. The element of control may be loose in urban and suburban West Bengal but in the villages, communities have become frighteningly regimented and dependant on the party for both survival and growth. The space for individual initiative has shrunk.

This is not a situation which can endure indefinitely, and certainly not with the spread of literacy and market economics. On the surface, the CPI(M) strongholds appear completely impregnable. According to the opinion and exit polls, the Left Front is set to replicate its earlier victories on May 11—and that too without falling back on emotional motivation. Despite the stringent measures the EC has taken to prevent electoral malpractices, the opposition parties are just not in a position to take advantage of the wholesome environment. Going by the opposition’s own estimates, Left Front candidates will have a walkover in nearly 184 of the state’s 294 Assembly constituencies. In three decades, the Left Front has crafted a system of one-party dominance.

Yet, ironically, it is this spectacular exercise of intrusive politics that carries the seeds of popular liberation. To many, Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya is like a breath of fresh air. In the course of five years, he has begun the process of dismantling Jyoti Basu’s crippling legacy. Almost every single tenet of CPI(M) orthodoxy, from the espousal of militant trade unionism to the disavowal of English, has been turned on its head. Bhattacharya talks the language of Manmohan Singh in economics and shares Narendra Modi’s impatience with lax national security. He almost seems like a scientist in a flat-earth society.

That the Chief Minister has transcended the CPI(M) orthodoxy is undeniable. The question is: why has the CPI(M) given him the license for heresy? The answer may lie in the party’s own recognition that it is impossible to keep West Bengal as a protected enclave much longer. The winds of change sweeping across India are whipping up fierce expectations, particularly a desire to catch up with the developed world. The CPI(M) may be only too aware that it can neither put a lid on dreams of a better life nor micro-manage communities with disposable incomes. In short, unless the party changes its tune and adapts to a market environment, it risks eventual obsolescence. Ironically, this is also a problem that the RSS faces.

Bhattacharya has anticipated the process and not left it to the opposition to exploit a creeping anti-incumbency. In good Communist tradition, he has assumed the mantle of the reformer and painted Mamata Banerjee as a hysterical populist who has internalised the very cussedness the CPI(M) leadership is anxious to discard. What makes this election unique is that we are seeing the CPI(M) for the first time hesitantly admitting that it has been 29 years of miscalculations and wasted opportunities.

Some three decades after China embraced the market and Communists in Western Europe discovered Euro-communism, Bhattacharya is trying to make the CPI(M) come to terms with the charms of liberal capitalism. If he succeeds, it will be good for Bengal. For the CPI(M), however, the future is less rosy. History is not just on its side.

(Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, April 21, 2006)

The politics of sacrifice (April 7, 2006)

Why Sonia Gandhi can get away from her grandstanding

By Swapan Dasgupta

The office-of-profit controversy which originated in a family spat involving the Gandhis and the Bachchans took an unexpected turn with Sonia Gandhi resigning from both the Lok Sabha and the National Advisory Council. To the more impressionable, this act of “sacrifice” was politically astute and would ultimately prove beneficial to both Sonia and the Congress. To the cynical, Sonia’s resignation was a desperate attempt to turn adversity into advantage. It will, they say, at best be a seven-day wonder.

Since the arguments on both sides of the sacrificial divide have been played ad nauseam in the media, it would be needlessly self-indulgent to replay them in this column. In any case, as Mao Zedong is reported to have said about the French Revolution, it is still too early to assess the impact of the Congress President’s well-scripted melodrama. We must await the judgment of history to unfold in due course.

The soap opera surrounding the real meaning of the abstruse Article 102 (1) (a) of the Indian Constitution has, however, quite unwittingly, thrown up a quirky philosophical issue. Can the political institutions and culture of independent India be assessed on its own terms? Alternatively, isn’t it more relevant to view the political conventions of contemporary India in terms of a seamless continuity from the Raj?

The questions arise because the origins of this hoary disqualification clause don’t lie in the Constituent Assembly proceedings. Indeed, the founding fathers hardly spent any time deliberating this bar to parliamentary membership. They merely grafted—and, quite rightly—a tradition that had evolved over the centuries in Britain to the Indian statutes. In doing so, the likes of Jawaharlal Nehru and B.R. Ambedkar tacitly accepted the terms of British constitutional history in India.

Till the late-1970s the acknowledgment of this heritage was quite explicit with the Union Public Service Commission offering an optional paper on British Constitutional History for its competitive examinations. It was only after India was bitten by the radical, post-colonial bug that the myth of political exceptionalism was internalised—leading to profound distortions in public life. Some of the ignorance witnessed during the media deliberations of a proposed amendment to the law—the demand, for example, by some puerile Leftists that the purview of “profit” be extended to private enterprise and the professions—stems from the trendy disdain for anything predating 1947.

Yet, it is impossible to assess the fuss over what constitutes an office of profit without reference to the long tussle between Crown and Parliament in Britain. Going by Erskine May’s Parliamentary Practice, the desire to keep Crown-appointed public servants out of Parliament arose prior to the English Civil War as part of the “continuous effort to gain recognition for the Privileges of the House.” It was also linked to the ability of MPs to be physically present in the House of Commons for a reasonable duration and led to the disqualification of judges and Church of England clergy. After the Restoration, the terms of battle changed to preventing the King from subverting the independence of Parliament with selective disbursement of sinecures and pensions. Since the government of the day was appointed by Royal Prerogative, it was in the interests of the Crown and the Government to secure parliamentary support through both persuasion and inducement.

Although the Succession to the Crown Act, 1705, created the statutory parameters for upholding the independence of Parliament from the executive, the problem persisted till the reign of George IV. Even as late as 1770, Edmund Burke could invoke the fear of a Court-inspired conspiracy to undermine parliamentary democracy: “The power of the Crown, almost dead and rotten as Prerogative, has grown up anew, with much more strength, and far less odium, under the name of Influence.”

The laws governing disqualification for holding any office of profit both “under” and “from” the Crown had to undergo further modifications after 1740. As “mob” pressure, the development of the party system and the principle of popular government progressively whittled down the Royal Prerogative, it became impossible to maintain a rigid separation between the executive and the legislature. Whereas the House of Commons had earlier been virtually united in its opposition to the unchecked role of the Crown, the Treasury benches increasingly came to be drawn from the Commons itself. This naturally meant that certain offices of profit from the Crown had to be exempt from the disqualification laws.

In 1957, all the different laws on the subject were brought together and simplified in the House of Commons Disqualification Act. The Act specified by name all those offices whose holders were not entitled to sit in the Commons. The Act, however, empowered Parliament to declare, if necessary, that a particular disqualification be disregarded.

Since all Indian legislation on the subject is drawn from Westminster, it is important to understand that the office-of-profit disqualification was aimed primarily at preventing the subversion of legislators by the executive. Since it is the job of Parliament to scrutinise the executive, all those non-ministers who are beholden to the state for exceptional perks and privileges—these could include lavish conveyance facilities, secretarial staff and first class travel arrangements—can be said to have been compromised. Although the party system and the ubiquitous three-line whip rule out complete independence of mind, the office-of-profit disqualification is aimed at preventing indiscriminate distribution of lollipops to MPs at government expense.

It hardly bears reiteration that this is precisely what an over-generous regime of exemptions would do. The parliamentarians of the 18th century were particularly agitated by “secret” pensions paid by the Crown to select colleagues. In an India where there is a ceiling on the number of MPs who can be appointed ministers, membership of the so-called development boards and autonomous corporations—some even carry “Cabinet status” for determining the size of privileges—is precisely the type of backdoor corrupt practice that Article 102 (1) (a) sought to prevent.

Finally, by restricting the offices of profit a MP can hold, the law sought to uphold the principle of accountability to Parliament. A Ministership is an office of profit under the state but it is exempt from the disqualification clause because the holder of the office is ultimately answerable to Parliament. The National Advisory Council had a seminal role in the UPA Government’s policies and priorities. It was funded totally by the government through the Prime Minister’s Office and its chairperson enjoyed the service conditions of a Cabinet minister.

The Government erred in not including the NAC from the exempted list. Yet, it was more than a technical oversight. In allowing Sonia to formally influence the Government and at the same time not being answerable to Parliament for that advice, the Cabinet was guilty of bypassing and undermining Parliament itself. There would have been nothing irregular in Sonia being the head of the Government-funded NAC if she had been sworn in as a minister and performed her role as a member of the executive, with full accountability to Parliament. Instead, she wanted the best of both world—the privileges that come with being a member of the Cabinet and the pretence that she had let her “inner voice” dictate her sacrifice of the highest political office.

Sonia’s was just the type of duplicity and unwholesome politics that conservatives like Burke and reformers like John Wilkes fought against. These champions of democracy could mount a credible attack on the attempts to corrupt Parliament because no one could point an accusing finger at them. Sonia can get away with her grandstanding because the Government, the loyal opposition and the real opposition want to blend feigned morality with special perks and extraordinary privileges.

(Published in The Telegraph, April 7, 2006)

Price of honour (March 24, 2006)

The suffix MP has been on sale for the past fifty years

By Swapan Dasgupta

The life of David Lloyd George, the amiable rogue who rose to be Prime Minister of Britain, if we are to believe the impish wisdom of his admirer A.J.P. Taylor, was an unending quest for the hyphen—that formidable icon of British snobbery. Born to a Welsh family with the surname George, this great Liberal statesman who steered Britain into victory in the Great War of 1914-18, insisted on being addressed as Mr Lloyd George. In 1945, after he was made an Earl, Lloyd George slipped in the hyphen and breathed his last as Earl Lloyd-George. It meant, as Taylor put it with characteristic bluntness, that “after 80 years of struggling to be Lloyd George, he was in fact entitled to do so.”

For the past fortnight, the ghost of Lloyd George has hovered over the palace and wine bars of Westminster thanks to the aspirations of other successful men with perceived social disabilities. A storm has erupted in Britain following revelations that of the dozen benefactors who had together “loaned” the Labour Party nearly £14 million, four had subsequently been nominated for membership of the House of Lords. These included one Dr Chai Patel who runs a successful healthcare business, and Sir Gulam Noon, whose contribution to Britain’s curry revolution is seminal. Patel’s nomination was objected to by the independent body that vets nominations to the House of Lords while Sir Gulam has withdrawn his candidature after the controversy erupted.

The whole matter has now been referred to Scotland Yard following allegations that a senior Labour peer close to Prime Minister Tony Blair was running a “cash for peerage” racket. More important, this operation is alleged to have run foul of something called the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act of 1925. The Act, which few people knew was in the statute books, makes it illegal to either accept or offer gifts or “other valuable consideration” for procuring “the grant of a dignity or title of honour.”

The only victim of the 1925 Act was one J. Maundy Gregory, the son of a clergyman and owner of the Ambassador Club. Gregory was arrested and convicted in 1933 on the charge of soliciting £10,000 from E.W. Billyard-Leake for the procurement of a knighthood. Billyard-Leake, a retired naval officer with a DSO, was too well connected to need the assistance of a tout and promptly reported the matter to the police. Gregory pleaded guilty, was sentenced to a term of imprisonment in Wormwood Scrubs and was never heard of again.

The British establishment is good at keeping secrets and not snitching on each other. Consequently, the impression conveyed to the public was that Gregory was just a freelance, street-smart rascal who overplayed his hand and got his well-deserved comeuppance. The reality was grimmer. There was consternation in the gentleman’s clubs that “desperation and financial stringency” would prompt Gregory to be needlessly over-communicative. An operation was mounted by some Tory grandees to cut a deal with the disgraced tout before his trial. According to an account by Lord Davidson, chairman of the Conservative Party from 1926 to 1930, “someone” whispered into Gregory’s ear that “he couldn’t avoid a term of imprisonment, but that if he kept silent we would bring pressure to bear on the authorities to let him live in France after his sentence had been served.” Upon release, Gregory was whisked away to France, settled in a house and paid a quarterly pension until his death.

At a time when the dangers from Bolshevism were real, the British establishment just couldn’t afford “Gregory’s peers” being outed. Their consternation must have equalled the alarm of “Skullion’s scholars” in Tom Sharpe’s satirical farce Porterhouse Blue. The response was equally ridiculous, but effective. Just as Skullion the College Porter was made Master to keep the traditions and privileges of Porterhouse intact, one Sir Julien Cahn was elevated to a baronetcy in 1934 for paying £30,000 to Gregory as hush money.

In his diary, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald recorded his conversation with Tory leader Stanley Baldwin: “He said that Maundy Gregory… would stir up such a filthy sewer as would poison public life; …that all parties were involved; …that people like Winston Churchill, Austen Chamberlain, Birkenhead were involved; that Gregory had been used by Lloyd George and Bonar Law; that the subscription lists for the rebuilding of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, were involved… The dunghill had to be cleared away without delay and £30,000 was required to do it. So I had to give the honour.” MacDonald resisted for six months and then did what had to be done for King and country.

As someone who was a product of the Labour movement, MacDonald’s squeamishness was understandable. However his predecessors were not pricked by pangs of conscience in misusing their political prerogative—even if it meant coming into conflict with Buckingham Palace. Lloyd George was the most shameless offender. In his four years as prime minister, Lloyd George rewarded the world of finance and industry with 26 peerages, 130 baronetcies and 481 knighthoods. This was in addition to the 50 newspaper proprietors and editors who were similarly honoured.

Lloyd George’s brazenness was grounded in earthy common sense. A few years after he ceased to be prime minister, he defended the “cash for honours” to a Conservative fund-raiser: “You and I know perfectly well it is a far cleaner method of filling the Party chest than the methods used in the United States or the Socialist Party… Here a man gives £40,000 to the Party and gets a baronetcy. If he comes to the Leader of the Party and says I subscribe largely to Party funds, you must do this or that, we can tell him to go to the devil.”

The point is significant: unless there is a completely harmless lure for political contributions, you are likely to be confronted with moneybags wanting to influence policy with donations. Lloyd George thought he had evolved the most pragmatic over-the-counter system of political funding—he wasn’t too choosy about who paid as long as they paid—but it was one which offended both old money and high morality.

Baldwin, the personification of stodgy Conservatism, for example, thought Lloyd George to be “a real corrupter of public life” and one who had “no moral sense at all”. On his part, after his bitter experiences with Lloyd George’s dubious recommendations, King George V is said to have remarked that if he were among the new rich, the last thing he would do would be to run after a peerage. “It was not”, wrote his biographer Kenneth Rose, that the King had lost faith in a hierarchical society; but that 25 years as the supposed Fountain of Honour had left him disillusioned by the wiles and extortion practised in his name.”

Ultimately, Lloyd George’s excesses forced the appointment of the Dunedin Commission and a law against the sale of honours. Yet, 80 years later, the problems associated with reciprocity in political funding persists. “I have lots of views on the important issues that affect our society” claimed Chai Patel who, alas, will not get a chance to adorn the red upholstered benches of the Lords. It’s a claim that is constantly echoed by those queuing before the party offices before a Rajya Sabha election, the proverbial suitcase discreetly visible. In Britain, you can buy a prefix if you are clever and socially adept. In India, the suffix MP has been on sale for over 50 years. It must be a colonial hangover.

(Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, March 24, 2006)

New logic for new India (March 10, 2006)

There was no condescension in Bush's offer of friendship

By Swapan Dasgupta

Even after he fell from grace and spent his last years in disgrace, there was one country where President Richard Nixon was always welcome. For all its other angularities, China never forgot its indebtedness to the man who in 1971 began the process of extricating the Middle Kingdom from its post-Communist isolation.

It is still too early to say whether or not President George W. Bush will enjoy such a lofty status in India during his retirement years. Yet, when future historians chart the course of Indian foreign policy in this century, they will have to acknowledge President Bush’s unique contribution to overturning the entrenched assumptions of the Cold War. It is not merely that the controversial US President made a special effort to reach out to India. He was the first world leader of consequence who understood the enormous importance of democratic India in the 21st century world order.

In the natural course, the Indo-US understanding on nuclear energy would not have happened. Both countries had too many non-negotiable and conflicting positions. The March 2 separation agreement, which must now await the Congress’ ratification to be institutionalised and internationally acceptable, would not have happened if President Bush hadn’t taken the political decision to accommodate Indian sensitivities. The US President went out of his way to create a special place for India in the five-member nuclear high table.

Thanks to the Congress Party’s peculiar dependence on the Communists and the Muslim vote, this particular facet of the US President’s two-day visit to India has neither been adequately publicised nor appreciated. A nervous Manmohan Singh Government lacks the necessary self-confidence to flaunt India’s global coming of age as a political and diplomatic success. When it comes to the US, there is just too much historical baggage that the Congress Party has to carry. But why blame the Congress alone? The BJP, which should have shared the credit for a process that culminated in the July 18 and March 2 agreements, has been excessively circumspect—although it has raised a few important points for the Government to clarify. Consequently, it has been left to the media and corporate India to celebrate a historic step forward.

India, it would seem, is still mentally unprepared to cope with its new global status. Jawaharlal Nehru and the other eminent Nehruvians such as V.K. Krishna Menon may have been passionately interested in international affairs. Unfortunately, that interest was tempered by what can be best described as a monumental chip on the shoulder. Nehru, who was culturally steeped in Anglo-Saxon mores, was over-anxious to show that his heart went out to all the colonised peoples. Likewise, Menon never got out of the propagandist role he assumed as head of the India League in Britain. In attempting to be a “quality” in world affairs—Menon’s description—India ended up as a preachy, sanctimonious bore. Except with the Mountbattens and the liberal set in Hampstead, the British and American establishments tended to be more at ease with Field Marshal Ayub Khan and Sir John Kotelawala than with earnest Indians who shopped in London but pretended that Moscow was paradise. Despite her fierce espousal of national interests, Indira Gandhi carried this arrogant pretence to macabre heights.

It is not merely the leadership that indulged in this inverted snobbery. Feigned indignation directed at the West became a national philosophy and led to disastrous policy choices. Every failure stemming from sloth and incompetence was laid at the door of the colonial legacy. Excellence and entrepreneurship was shunned and mediocrity was celebrated in the name of self-sufficiency and Third Worldism. The economists and historians were, predictably, the worst culprits. “It has been well said”, wrote Jagadish Bhagwati, one of the early refugees from India’s socialist conformism, “that any elementary mistake in economics can be turned into a profound truth by ingenuously making the right assumptions to deduce what you want… India suffered the tyranny of anticipated consequences from the wrong premise.”

The problem hasn’t ceased with the onset of market economics and the acquisition of nuclear weapons. Some years ago, Sir V.S. Naipaul faced unwarranted hostility from the champions of political correctness by questioning the relevance of categories like decolonisation five decades after the Union Jack was finally lowered. Not that this blunt home truth has forced a re-examination of intellectual assumptions. Last month, the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, a body created by the Nehruvians to shower state patronage on its chosen artistes, held a seminar to link Indian literature to other Third World experiences. At a time when Indian writers are seeking western markets for the Indian idiom and experience, the sheer absurdity of attempting contrived links with oppressed voices in Egypt and Sierra Leone was too apparent.

Like the elusive New World Information Order whose virtues are still proclaimed by the relics of an earlier era, “official” India hasn’t fully come to terms with the brash, self-confident India of this century. The energy and entrepreneurial dynamism of India which Bush detected quite early on has yet to sink into many critical areas of decision-making.

It is this incomprehension of the New India that is behind the paranoia over interacting with the wider world. The rediscovery of market-oriented economics and deregulation is only 15 years old but even within this brief period India has experienced one scare after another. The hesitant introduction of rule-based international trade under the aegis of the WTO was met by the fear of the takeover of the Indian economy by multinationals. Cable television triggered fears that the hapless villager in Azamgarh would be exposed to Baywatch and fall prey to an insidious cultural imperialism.

On almost every count these fears have turned out to be misplaced. Indian ingenuity and cultural comfort with itself have led to India dictating the rules of the market. Cricket is a case in point. When socialism prevailed in India, it was the English and the Australians who controlled the game. Today, no major cricketing decision can be taken without factoring Indian interests. In the 1970s, Yorkshireman Fred Trueman taunted Indian cricket as a matter of routine. He never toured India with any MCC side. Today, Geoff Boycott, the other Yorkshire cricketing legend, has to sing for his supper on Indian TV. His accent is regarded by Indians as quaint, just as Peter Sellers’ Indian act drew sniggers in Britain 30 years ago.

The lessons of the past decade are too significant to be brushed aside by insular Comrades and uninformed cultural chauvinists. Whenever an economically liberated India has confronted the world, it has always succeeded in turning the balance of power in its own favour. There was not a hint of condescension in President Bush’s offer of friendship and neither did he undertake the finger-wagging drill of a big brother—unlike in Pakistan. He wasn’t showering India with aid and freebees. He was imploring India to assume its rightful role in global capitalism and enrich itself. His offer lay in facilitating the removal of a irritants created by an earlier generation. Never mind all the lofty talk of democracy—which, like the Americans, Indians take for granted—Bush was speaking the language of a Texan out to cut a mutually beneficial deal.

Nehru, like the protestors who revelled in hateful anger, wouldn’t have comprehended Bush’s logic. That’s because he hated business, entrepreneurship and profit. He epitomised India’s Dark Ages. The country has moved on. And the young generation, unlike the Midnight’s Children, don’t even need to look back in anger at the 50 wasted years. They have nothing to lose but their subordination; they have a world to win.

(Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, March 10, 2006)

Calcutta: An Exile's View (February 2006)

By Swapan Dasgupta


One of my earliest recollections of Calcutta dates back to 1961—the year the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited the city.

One afternoon, my mother told me and my twin sisters that we were going for an outing to “see the Queen.” To a six-year-old that sounded exciting. To see a real Queen—I was familiar with her picture thanks to a relative’s stamp collection—truly tickled my imagination. We got into our grandfather’s enormous sky-blue Studebaker and drove to the house of one of my mother’s many relatives on, what I think was, Central Avenue. We were taken to a large portico overlooking the grand street. It was house-full there. The children were allowed the luxury of sitting on the ground and peering through the balustrade. It was the best view of the street.

I still recall the large crowds on both sides of the impressive avenue. Then, a motorcycle with a siren driven by what we called a “police sergeant” drove by. The crowd began cheering and, in a flash, there was a white lady in an open black limousine waving to the crowds. She was standing and wore white gloves. Besides her, but sitting, was an elderly gentlemen with spectacles and a generous smile. I was later told he was Bidhan Roy, the Chief Minister of West Bengal.

Although the motorcade was not really speeding, it was all over in a flash. We returned home all excited and told everyone in the large house on Ballygunge Place, where the joint family lived, that we had seen the Queen.

I don’t remember the reactions but I am fairly certain that my childish jubilation was greeted with sneers. There was always a cultural divide between my mother and the rest of the family. It was not merely that my mother was a West Bengal “Ghoti” and from a landed background, whereas my father traced his roots to Jessore district and was thus a “Bangal”. The conflict was more political—my parents spanned two extremes of the Bengali political culture.

Take my paternal grandfather, a large man who doted on me. He was always dressed in starched, white khadi. Except on one occasion when I saw him in a western-style suit and had a good laugh, he was always in a dhoti. Yet, and this is the paradox, his food habits were incredibly western—soup, roasts and Irish stew—and he travelled in one of his two enormous Studebaker cars. He was quirky and unique. He founded and ran a thriving industry and was fanatically committed to swadeshi entrepreneurship. He hated the British and had great admiration for everything American—he was one of the earliest graduates of Stanford University. Naturally, he was uncompromisingly anti-Communist, believing that every Indian Communist should be deported to China.

My maternal grandfather—who died before I was born—was one of Calcutta’s most successful lawyers. Extremely westernised and very Bengali at the same time, he was an unabashed Raj loyalist. He used to travel to London almost each year in connection with cases before the Privy Council. In his last years, he moved to Delhi to work with the Law Member of the Viceroy’s Council. My mother lamented that he died in 1942, just after he was made a CBE. “Another few years and he would definitely have got a knighthood,” she always said.

My inheritance spanned both Calcuttas. There was a Calcutta that oozed Empire and the proverbial “Black Town” which was quintessentially Bengali. Yes, there was also a Marwari Calcutta which had a culture and dynamism of own but which was unfamiliar to both wings of my family.

A glance through the Queen’s itinerary of 1961 shows that Independence didn’t put an end to what Lord Curzon once accurately described as “a European city set down upon Asiatic soil.” First, there was a garden party hosted on the lawns of Raj Bhavan—the full version of what Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire should have looked like—attended by some 4,500 handpicked guests. Next morning, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh attended a service in St Paul’s Cathedral, with a string quartet from the Oxford Mission in Behala adding to the musical efforts of the choir. They then dropped in to Victoria Memorial—Curzon’s most enduring monument to the Raj—and visited the Horticultural Gardens in Alipore. Finally, she gave away the prizes at the races from the special enclosure of the Royal Calcutta Turf Club.

As she drove down the Red Road and viewed the impressive bronzes of the stalwarts of the Empire, shook hands with the mercantile rajahs of Clive Street and read The Statesman ( still British-owned and edited by an Englishman) with her chhota hazri, the Queen must have delighted in the seamless transformation of Empire into Commonwealth.

At every place the Queen visited, she was warmly received. The British expatriates—there used to be a sizable number those days—and the Bengali gentry put their best foot forward to receive the second reigning British monarch to have visited Calcutta. The “seditious” Bengali who was the dread of every Viceroy from Curzon to Wavell was nowhere to be seen. Either British officialdom had got it completely wrong—remember, even Curzon opposed the transfer of the Capital in 1911 to a city that he called the “graveyard of empires”—or Calcutta had undergone a genuine change of heart.

It was neither. Calcutta was always a British city dominated by Bengalis. Its ruling culture was British (not English, because Scots dominated the business life) and physically, the Raj defined the city’s landmarks. In 1966—the last year of Old Calcutta—Desmond Doig, one of those oddballs who stayed on, published a series of 39 impressions of Calcutta for The Statesman. Only five of his sketches—the cluster of Shiv temples on Diamond Harbour Road, the Chitpur Road dominated by Nakhoda Masjid, the Jain temple, the “bastard baroque fantasy” called Jhagra Kothi on Armenian Street and Raja Nabakrishna Deb’s palace—can be said to skirt the colonial encounter. Otherwise, everything, from the imposing portico of La Martiniere (my alma mater) to the Eden Gardens created to commemorate the annexation of Burma and the Gowalior Monument on Strand Road honouring a long-forgotten campaign of 1843 reeks of a history that began from the time Job Charnock set up a trading post for the East India Company.

Since 1967, there has been a systematic attempt to reinvent Calcutta. It began with the wave of industrial strikes and bouts of labour hooliganism encouraged by the first Communist-dominated United Front Government. The gherao movement triggered a process of terminal industrial decline. The already beleaguered jute and engineering sectors started wilting. The British expatriates quietly packed their bags, sent their household goods to the auction houses on Russell Street and left by the last international flights from Dum Dum. The Marwaris didn’t do anything so dramatic. They stopped all reinvestment in West Bengal and quietly shifted focus to other states. Alipore and Ballygunge are dotted with well-maintained but deserted palaces of the Marwari stalwarts who began life in Calcutta but have moved on since.

The process of cultural remodelling began with the removal of the British bronzes from the heart of Calcutta in 1969. The imposing bronzes of Canning, Mayo, Havelock, Curzon, et al were lifted ceremoniously by crane and carted off to a dump in Barrackpore where they have subsequently been vandalised. More widespread vandalism was prevented because Victoria Memorial came under the Centre’s jurisdiction. Therefore, mercifully, the Old Queen still survives the desecration of the Second City of Empire.

The change wasn’t confined to removing British symbols and changing Dalhousie Square to BBD Bagh. The denial of history led to the most rampant and mindless destruction of the city’s most beautiful buildings. Urban renewal is unavoidable and necessary but when aesthetics is completely submerged by crass commerce, the results can be debilitating. The façade of the Bengal Club was torn down and replaced by a high-rise of incredible ugliness. It was the same story all along Camac Street, Theatre Road, Middleton Row and all of Ballygunge and Alipore. Nor were the casualties only the buildings that housed the boxwallahs. The houses of the old landed Bengali gentry, the foremost casualties of Partition, were the next to go all along Lansdowne Road, Gurusaday Road and Burdwan Road. The architecture of gracious living was wilfully killed by the perversity of post-colonialism.

In this age of incipient globalisation and emerging consumerism, it is painful to suggest that Calcutta was there first. From the gracious department stores Hall and Anderson, Whiteway & Laidlaw and the Army and Navy Stores to individual specialist shops in New Market and Lindsay Street, Calcutta thrived on the foundations of a free market. Till the late Sixties, Park Street and Chowringhee boasted the most vibrant night life. For those with class it was the Firpo’s, Prince’s, Blue Fox and the bar at the Great Eastern. For the flamboyant and the young there was the Golden Slipper and the Sarky Bar. And, of course, there were the clubs—the Bengal Club (once for Europeans only) which was an extension of the committee room of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce; the “old money” Calcutta Club; and the weekend Tollygunge Club.

Till the early Sixties, there were sufficient expatriates in Calcutta to keep some sporting clubs exclusively European—the Calcutta Rowing Club, the Calcutta Swimming Club and the Calcutta Cricket and Football Club with its manicured grounds in Ballygunge. In 1969, one Ram Chatterjee, a colourful politician representing the Forward Bloc (Marxist) was appointed Minister for Sports. He mobilised a hundred or so adivasis, marched into the Calcutta Swimming Club premises, undressed and jumped into the pool. It was hailed as the end of the colour bar in Calcutta. It probably was. By then, however, there weren’t enough whites to sustain the establishment.

To the outlander, it seemed that sahib Calcutta was in permanent conflict with the Black Town. Under the Raj, racism was pretty widespread and the single factor which fuelled the bhadralok demand for swaraj. Yet, as Nirad Chaudhury has forcefully argued in his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, the relationship between Empire and the Bengali middle class was extremely complex.

First, the Anglo-Bengali encounter was the longest and most sustained in India. Despite the nationalist myth around Siraj-ud-Doulah, it can never be forgotten that Clive’s victory in Plassey was plotted and financed by the Bengali merchants of Calcutta. When the victorious Clive returned to Calcutta, there were celebrations and the victor of Plassey was hosted by Bengali financiers like Raja Nabakrishna Deb.

Secondly, the intellectual appeal of the European enlightenment was strongest among the Bengali Hindus because they had been only nominally influenced by the culture of the Mughal court. They took to European culture enthusiastically, sans Christianity, and easily absorbed it into their Bengali identity. The dress code in Calcutta Club, for example, is revealing: during the winter months, admission to the main dining room can be ensured only with either a jacket and tie or national dress. At the Calcutta Club however—unless the rules have been changed of late—national dress means dhoti-kurta and not pyjama-kurta. The pyjama, Bengal’s most colourful exponent of the dhoti, Aveek Sarkar, once informed a stupefied Congress maharaja, “is something you wear between the bedroom and bathroom.”

Sustained exposure to westernisation has not compromised the self-identity of Bengalis as Bengalis. Indeed, the colonial education system promoted this synergetic autonomy. Most Bengali graduates of an earlier generation who mostly studied in government schools in district towns were fluent in English, Bengali and Sanskrit. They knew their Shakespeare, Milton and Byron but they were equally at ease with the Hindu epics, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Nirad Chaudhury was the product of such a culture. In his last years in Oxford, he wore tweed when walking to town. Inside the house it was invariably the dhoti. My anglicised grandfather maintained two separate kitchens and dining room—one was only for European food. Yet, beef was strictly taboo, except in Brahmo Samaj households. Maybe this explains the high incidence of Brahmo Communists.

The flowering of Calcutta was centred on the Bengali success in detaching the idea of Britain from the reality of British rule. Not everyone could comprehend the nuances of this emulation-opposition. Working in The Statesman of the 1930s, Malcolm Muggeridge was aghast that his westernised Indian friends were strong supporters of the Congress. He thought they were humbug. “Our parts in history”, he wrote in his Chronicles of Wasted Time, “are allotted, not chosen; and their belonged to the Raj, which they hated, rather than to Swaraj, whose coming to pass they sought.”

Muggeridge misread his Bengali friends. C.R. Das, J.M. Sengupta and Tulsi Goswami—to cite some examples—were neither toadies nor hypocrites. They lived up to their convictions and it did not conflict with their lifestyles. There was a certain broadmindedness, for example, which allowed Congress heavyweights like Sengupta and Goswami to enjoy a quiet drink at the Calcutta Club with the likes of Sir P.C. Mitter, the Raja of Santosh and Sir Rajen Mookerjee. In the social interaction of Bengalis, the Congress-Loyalist divide was notional. How else would my parents have got married?

It was this Bengali harmony which epitomised Calcutta and made it such a vibrant and cosmopolitan city. Since 1967, there has been a steady breakdown of the social code. There has been an onrush of insularity, provincialism and bad taste. Where gentlemanly conduct was the norm, there has been the intrusion of both the parvenu and the outlander. To some extent this social upheaval was unavoidable but, unlike Delhi, it coincided with a prolonged period of economic stagnation and, of course, socialist deprivation. Calcutta was a city built on global trade; it was crippled by the closed economy that followed Indira Gandhi’s populist turn in 1969.

Communism finally killed Calcutta. Bengali Marxism started off as rebellious games played by boys (and some girls) from good families. As long as the Communist adventure was in the hands of the likes of Hiren Mukherjee, Indrajit Gupta, Snehangshu Acharya, Renu Chakravarty and Mohit Sen, it was more like a repeat of the Young Bengal movement. Tragically, the Bengali babu had not factored in the deep mofussil insularity, intellectual cretinism and the cultural envy that was built into the bloodstream of the CPI(M).

Apart from the shell and some outward forms of civility, the Calcutta I knew and grew up in no longer exists. The landscape has changed. The old landmarks are gone. The mindset is unappealing. This Kolkata is not my Calcutta.

(Published in Seminar, issue 559, 2006)

Of faith and distrust (January 13, 2006)

Non-proliferation faithfuls are worried about the Indo-U deal

By Swapan Dasgupta

The winter vacation on Capitol Hill is the moment for Senators and Congressmen to familiarise themselves with a world outside the Beltway and their constituencies. India being a flavour of the season, New Delhi has hosted a stream of visitors anxious to find out what is making this erstwhile exporter of communicable diseases—the parting comment of a former US Ambassador—suddenly tick. Senator John Kerry, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate in the 2004 US presidential election, was among the more prominent of the visitors. Last Wednesday evening, the US Ambassador hosted a small, interactive dinner with the Massachusetts Senator which was useful in providing insights into the likely obstacles in the path of the proposed Indo-US nuclear understanding.

Senator Kerry’s political credentials are impeccably liberal, not least because he represents a state that even voted for George McGovern and Walter Mondale. His opposition to President George W. Bush, apart from being ideological, is also instinctive. Kerry may not be a non-proliferation fanatic but he would certainly count the so-called ayatollahs of non-proliferation on Capitol Hill as among his natural allies. This probably explains why he came to Delhi with a dhobi list of questions and clarifications about the July 18 agreement.

The Senator’s contention was couched in the vocabulary of practical and pragmatic politics. The Indo-US nuclear deal, he argued, is a principle worth supporting but there are concerns of people who see non-proliferation as an article of faith. These concerns, he feels, must be met more than half way by India being accommodating on the details of the understanding. Only then will the agreement pass muster in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Although Kerry made it clear that he was not necessarily speaking for himself but merely alerting India to the concerns of his colleagues, it is apparent that the assumptions that guided the Bush Administration into sponsoring India’s membership of the nuclear high table aren’t universally shared in Washington DC. For President Bush and, more particularly, his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the July 18 agreement was only partially about nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. By attempting to remove the single impediment in the path of a robust bilateral understanding, the Bush Administration was facilitating a fundamental realignment in Asia. India, which, for historical reasons, had been outside the American radar, was being brought in as a serious strategic partner. Since the fallout of India’s 1998 nuclear tests made a full-throated relationship impossible, the Bush Administration sought to exempt India from the punitive drill associated with the closed membership of the nuclear high table. Rice, presumably, had India high on her mind when she wrote in The Washington Post last month that the US “must transcend doctrines and debates of the past and transform the volatile status quo that no longer serve our interests. What is needed is a realistic statecraft for a transformed world.”

In effect, Rice was suggesting that India should not be treated as a permanent pariah because it went nuclear in 1998, as opposed to 1968. The imperatives of “realistic statecraft” demanded that the democratic and civilisational worth of India, and its military and economic potential, be acknowledged and fitted into the larger strategic designs of the US.
It is a compelling argument that is also based on the recognition of India’s track record of not exporting its nuclear know-how for political and financial considerations. The same can hardly be said about either Russia or China.

Unfortunately for India, the Bush Administration’s pragmatic non-proliferation runs into idealistic opposition. For the sanctimonious Scandinavian countries and Japan, the roll back of nuclear weapons is an article of faith. By converting P-5 into P-6, the Bush Administration, the non-proliferation lobby fear, is redrawing the rules of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Democratic Party legislators on Capitol Hill aren’t necessarily as preachy as the Norwegians and Swedes but they too seem to want India to do more than just separate the civilian and military facilities. They want India to cap its production of fissile material. Robert James, the US Undersecretary of State for arms control and security, echoed these sentiments to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on November 2, 2005: “To ensure that the US and other potential suppliers can confidently supply to India and meet our obligations to the NPT, safeguards must be applied in perpetuity.”

The term “in perpetuity” is a euphemism for the defanging of India. No Indian Government can sell such a deal to its people.

The insistence on such harsh non-proliferation-linked terms is also based on the complete detachment of the July 18 understanding from the geo-politics of Asia. The gulf between the New Realists like Secretary of State Rice and the Old Idealists such as Kerry is most evident on the issue of China. Like most Clinton Democrats, Kerry perceives China as a society in healthy transition. He feels that the old Long March generation is fast yielding way to a new entrepreneurial leadership that is driven by business. To him, China does not have any expansionist or hegemonic designs, except, perhaps, in relation to Taiwan. Just before the formal interaction, Kerry stumped BJP general secretary Pramod Mahajan and me by suggesting that India could be provided a nuclear umbrella by all the P-5 countries. When I asked whether he included China he grudgingly admitted that maybe not.

The Senator’s innocence is revealing. Whereas there is a convergence between the stalwarts of the Bush Administration and India’s strategic community over the potential threat posed by China, this is not shared by the liberals on Capitol Hill. To many of them, legitimising India’s nuclear arsenal is akin to giving Iran the permission to assemble nuclear warheads to target Israel. To them, there is no qualitative difference between good boy approach of India and the nuclear supermarket run by Pakistan in A.Q. Khan’s heyday. They also seem to be influenced by China’s feverish lobbying against any Indo-US nuclear deal and its warning that if Washington can legitimise Delhi, Beijing can do the same with, say, Islamabad.

It is a menacing suggestion but, tragically, its threatening overtones have not been adequately discussed. Kerry may have returned to Boston much better informed about Indian strategic perceptions of China but it is unlikely the other sceptics on Capitol Hill will have the same exposure. China is perhaps the driving rationale behind the Bush Administration reaching out to India. The growing concern over China’s Middle Kingdom impulses is also the reason why a large section of the Indian political establishment wants to kiss and make up with the US. The China factor is the reason why the CPI(M) would rather bring down the UPA Government than permit the evolution of a Indo-US special relationship.

Yet, and in a bizarre way, there is no open discussion of the China factor. It is at best referred to in code—disparagingly as the strategic competitor and disingenuously as another strategic partner. There are few like former Ambassador Robert Blackwill who bluntly will admit that while the nuclear deal “is not about containing China… it’s about responding to the rise of Chinese power and seeking to develop relationships with India and Japan to better manage it.”

People like Kerry don’t see it that way. They may well try and push India to a point where signing the agreement would become dishonourable for India. Fortunately, there are others who look beyond technical nit-picking to the larger canvas of two of the largest democracies acting in concert. It is hoped that they will not let this opportunity pass.

(Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, January 13, 2006)

Not into the sunset (Dcember 2, 2005)

Neither India nor the BJP has heard the last of Uma Bharti

By Swapan Dasgupta

Sometime in 1993, I received a call from Uma Bharti to meet at her flat on Baba Kharak Singh Marg in Delhi. She wanted some help in getting out of yet another sticky situation, substantially of her own making. She had antagonised the top brass of the Madhya Pradesh unit of the BJP by accusing former chief minister Sunderlal Patwa of plotting to kill her. It was a wild charge and deserving of some disciplinary action.

After a few pleasantries and a quick round-up of Madhya Pradesh politics, I bluntly asked Uma why she was hell-bent on tormenting Patwa. Surely she should realise that you couldn’t get anywhere in the state by alienating a powerful group in the BJP that included Patwa, Kushabhau Thakre and the Rajmata of Gwalior? “I can’t help it”, retorted Uma, “it’s in my genes.”

It was the strangest answer I ever heard from a politician. The question is: has Uma ever really been a politician?

She somehow got out of that little spot of bother in 1993. She has also extricated herself from many other acts of indiscretion because, at the end of the day, the sombre notables of the BJP don’t know whether to take her seriously or treat her as the resident eccentric. Accustomed to a political style centred on anushashan (discipline), they just don’t know how to cope with a sanyasin who is both a tomboy and a natural charmer. One moment she threatens and curses, and before the day is out she plays the sweet, vulnerable girl who had momentarily let her emotions get the better of her rational judgment.

Uma is forever getting the benefit of doubt. That’s because everyone in the BJP know they are also dealing with a highly gifted individual, an indefatigable campaigner and an accomplished communicator. Words come naturally to Uma. A professional preacher since the age of six, she can still cast a spell on just about any audience. She can master a complicated subject effortlessly and communicate it to a rural audience through parables from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Whether she’s proclaiming the glory of Lord Ram or denouncing the Congress, Uma knows how to strike the right note.

She is also a charmer and plays mind games. During the 2003 Madhya Pradesh campaign, she entered into a fantastic partnership with Arun Jaitley to demolish the Congress. She would perennially tease Jaitley, and then go on to harass him to the point of exasperation. With Venkiah Naidu she was forever aggressive and even intimidating. With the party stalwarts such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani and Jaswant Singh, she would be remarkably coy and paint herself as a homely and slightly spoilt child. At the same time, she possesses a sort of village cunning that propels her into preying on people’s vulnerabilities and pandering to their pet hates.

With Uma, you have to be on your guard. Her behaviour can and does, at times, leave the party leadership fuming. Yet, there are few who bear permanent grudges – women, ironically, judge her more harshly than men. “Uma is mad”, is the common refrain and the precursor to acts of collective forgiveness. Everyone knows they were dealing with someone special and unique.

Uma’s impulsiveness has always been the problem. On reflection, she readily concedes that she has overshot the limits of endurance and rush to friends and charm them into lobbying for her rehabilitation. This, ironically, adds to her vulnerability. Her patrons lobby hard to restore her to favour but, in the process, they also identify her with her own little agendas. When Uma speaks, you can be sure she is speaking her mind; when she pens lengthy letters, which invariably find their way to the media, you can almost be sure she is being led by the nose. Three months ago, she lost the confidence of the RSS by denouncing some pracharaks by name in a letter. It was someone else’s agenda.

When Uma was thrust into Madhya Pradesh politics in early-2003, she went very grudgingly, wrongly believing the move to be part of an elaborate conspiracy to discredit her. Yet three months into touring the vast state she correctly gauged that the Congress could be defeated. She visited every constituency in the state and, backed by a formidable organisation of both the party and the RSS, won a landslide victory for the BJP.

Unfortunately, the rigours of governance proved too much for her. Restless and impulsive, she failed to delineate her priorities and frittered away her energies moving from one scheme to another. Worse, she surrounded herself with people who did her reputation and image no good. In a sense she was glad that the Hubli chargesheet extricated her from a job she was finding difficult to cope with. Agitation was her forte and she was glad to get to where the action was. At the same time, she wanted to be the real power behind the new chief minister. Neither Babulal Gaur nor the party, however, were willing to oblige.

It was around March this year that Uma got it into her head that she must reclaim the chief minister’s post. She set about carefully plotting her return. Never popular with the MLAs because of her whimsical and tempestuous ways, she set about wooing the top leadership of the party. She used every trick to get back into the good books of Vajpayee and Advani. Yet she made absolutely no headway with the so-called second generation. Nor, despite roping in a Mylapore brahmin close to the RSS chief K.S. Sudarshan, did she succeed in persuading the Sangh to give her another shy at the chief minister’s post.

Two years ago the opposition of the second generation and the RSS would not have weighed against support from Vajpayee and Advani. In November 2005, with the damaging Jinnah controversy behind it, the veterans no longer have the final say in the party. The power centre in the BJP has shifted and the second generation feels more comfortable with a safe pair of hands like Shivraj Singh Chauhan at the helm in Bhopal. Uma never had the support of a majority of MLAs; she was trying to hustle a diktat from the top. When that failed to materialise, she lost her composure, went totally berserk, levelled wild allegations against Naidu, Pramod Mahajan and Jaitley and forced the BJP to take the second disciplinary action against her in less than a year.

For the moment, Uma’s predicament is unenviable. She has literally shot herself in the foot and she invokes little sympathy within either the party or the wider movement. Her defiance, however, is unlikely to be unrelenting. Once the magnitude of her isolation sinks in, Uma is certain to use every trick in the book to inveigle her way back into the BJP. She is fiercely ambitious and talented and she is aware of the exceptional latitude allowed to her. She is certain to play on the party’s definite need for her at the national level, even if she realises that Madhya Pradesh is now completely out of bounds.

As she proceeds on a meaningless yatra, Uma looks like she is walking into the sunset. But don’t count on it. Uma Bharti has always demonstrated the ability to write her own rules, rather than be dictated by institutional discipline. She won’t be content just playing with her dogs or retreating into the caves of Badrinath. Neither India nor the BJP has heard the last of this prodigy from Tikamgarh.

(Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, December 2, 2005)

A bomb too many (November 18, 2005)

The attitide of the Indian Left to the Iran question is suspect

By Swapan Dasgupta

The diaries of former Soviet official I.A. Benediktov, deposited in the archives of the Cold War International Project of the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington DC, offer some interesting insights into the mentality of Indian Communists. Benediktov, who served as Moscow’s Ambassador to India in the early-1960s, documented his meeting with E.M.S. Namboodiripad in October 1962 after Pravda temporarily reversed its scepticism of Beijing’s stand in the Sino-Indian border dispute because it feared the Cuban missile crisis would trigger a global conflict between the Soviet Union and the US.

“We ask that you transmit this to the C(entral) C(ommittee) CPSU," Namboodiripad told the Soviet Ambassador, "that the publication of this article and the advice of the CPSU contained in this letter of the CC CPSU, truly will help our party get out of the extremely difficult position it is now in. Before this there were moments when we felt ourselves to be simply helpless, but now the party will be able to remedy this situation. We are grateful to the CC CPSU for this help; you cantransmit this personally from me and from Comrade B(hupesh) Gupta."
Namboodiripad then went on to argue that “The most typical mistake of many Communists ... is that they cannot clearly distinguish (between) patriotism and bourgeois nationalism.” In other words, this great Marxist theoretician, who is lauded by the CPI(M) and who serves as the inspiration to its present leadership, was categorical that in the event of a clash between Indian nationalism and the foreign policy objectives of a so-called socialist state, Indian Communists must necessarily bat for the latter.

S.A. Dange was, perhaps, a notable exception who more or less bamboozled the CPI in 1962 into taking, what Mohit Sen in his autobiography, A Traveller and the Road, described as “a stand in support of the nation.” Yet, as Sen noted, neither Dange “nor anybody else went beyond categorising the Chinese attack as a mistake and an aberration. The deeper implications … for Communist ideology, theory and practice were never raised… Not the CPI alone but the whole Communist movement would have to pay a heavy price for evading troublesome questions.”

The chickens, it would seem, are now coming home to roost. In 1998, the two Communist parties went apoplectic when the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Government transformed India into a nuclear power. Their response was largely guided by Beijing’s sharp opposition to India entering the exclusive five-member nuclear club, although for the sake of respectability they used the language of the American and Scandinavian non-proliferation zealots. Whereas the Indian Communists had earlier welcomed the “worker’s bomb” of the Soviet Union and China, their unrelenting opposition to “bourgeois nationalism” prevented them extending such a courtesy to India. Communist “patriotism”, with a Hindu tinge, naturally involved abjuring Indian nationalism in favour of a make-believe socialist internationalism.

Today, the Indian Communists have resumed their battle against the old nationalist enemy. This time, however, they have chosen a more intriguing issue. Last week, the CPI and CPI(M) joined hands with the Samajwadi Party and the Muslim clergy to attack the Manmohan Singh Government’s alleged capitulation to the US on the Iran question. Declaring that foreign policy could not be conducted behind closed doors, the Left has demanded that the Government either make amends for siding with the US at the previous International Atomic Energy Authority meeting, or face the consequences of a full-scale revolt by some 100 MPs who were hitherto supporting the UPA Government. If India votes with the US at the next IAEA meeting on November 24, the CPI leader A.B. Bardhan has said menacingly, “they will have to repent it.”

The Left’s position is puzzling in two ways. First, the Communists have glossed over the apparent inconsistencies in opposing India’s own nuclear ambitions and endorsing Teheran’s clear bid to channel a part of its nuclear programme into the manufacture of Weapons of Mass Destruction. The Islamic Republic already has an intermediate-range ballistic missile, anti-ship missiles to call the shots in the crucial Gulf of Hormuz and it is also developing an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile that could have a range of 6,000 miles. According to the Washington Post, a US National Intelligence Estimate report earlier this year indicated that the weaponisation process could take another 10 years of surreptitious activity.

Second, Iran has absolutely no socialist pretensions; it is unabashedly Islamist in orientation. There may be theological differences between the Shia mullahs who constitute the last word in Iran’s national affairs and the Wahabi-inspired Islamist resurgence in the larger Muslim world but the contradictions are submerged in the wider battle against the “Great Satan” and its local ally, Israel. Iranian President M. Ahmadinejad’s threat to obliterate Israel from the map of the world wasn’t a casual indiscretion. It was in line with his Inaugural Address boast that “a new Islamic revolution has arisen and the Islamic revolution … will, if God wills, cut off the roots of injustice in the world. The wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world.”

President Ahmadinejad may well be guilty of a polemical exaggeration that comes with inexperience. Time and a show of understanding, many well-meaning votaries of appeasement contend, will almost certainly blunt his revolutionary impetuosity. But, can hope be a basis for international indulgence? Ahmadinejad has, after all, warned that “A country that is ready for martyrdom can do anything.”

For India, the issue is neither academic nor just an extension of the emerging special relationship with the US. Iran’s nuclear programme has been shown to have an “unofficial” Pakistani link, courtesy the ubiquitous A.Q. Khan. China too has its finger in the Iranian nuclear pile. Therefore, while the US certainly has reason to be concerned about the implications for the safety and security of Israel and equations in West Asia, India has to confront an additional issue. In plain language, can India afford the presence of two contiguous Islamic nuclear powers on its western borders?

Coupled with an assertive China in the east, a nuclear Iran will become a security nightmare for India. Apart from being a major psychological boost to Islamist radicalism, Iran’s nuclear might will enhance India’s strategic vulnerability and increase its dependence on the US. In such a situation, a strategic alliance between India and the US, far from being a boost to India’s regional clout, will become a defensive necessity. The alternative would either be a seriously weakened India or an India forced into an unequal strategic relationship with China.

Since it is not the apparent intention of the Communists to nurture Indo-US friendship, its motives in making the Iranian question a prestige issue are plainly suspect. Socialist countries created in the Stalinist mould have never had inhibitions in using local Communist movements to further its foreign policy objectives. China is no exception.

It is not in Beijing’s economic or strategic interests to have a democratic India playing a major role in Asia, either in conjunction with Washington or independently. Its opposition to India’s entry into the P-5 nuclear club and its determination not to allow any other permanent Asian member into the Security Council are part of a larger design to both contain and encircle India. In this scheme, the Indian Communists have an important role to play in muddying the waters domestically. This makes it obligatory for India’s pre-eminent nationalist parties, the Congress and BJP, to work discreetly in tandem to secure the country’s future and prevent the blatant communalisation and subversion of foreign policy.

(Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, November 18, 2005)

On a common plane (November 4, 2005)

The Oil For Food shindig has raised issues of ethics

By Swapan Dasgupta

India’s beleaguered External Affairs Minister K. Natwar Singh and the equally harried British MP George Galloway are about as similar as chalk and cheese. Singh, a refined product of Mayo College, St Stephen’s and Cambridge, is a former diplomat who married into the Patiala royal family. Galloway, on the other hand, proudly boasts his working class Scottish origins and revels in a form of inverted snobbery. If Singh speaks in measured tones, is a bibliophile and oozes charm and courtesy, Galloway is brusque and is prone to flying off the handle. Those who watched Galloway’s dramatic re-entry to the House of Commons in the face of overwhelming odds last May will remember his memorable slugging match with TV presenter Jeremy Paxman. In the Beltway, they still talk about his pugnacious banter with the stuffed shirts at a Senate Committee hearing earlier this year, when he gave as good as he got. By contrast, Singh’s foray into the pre-Cold War world of non-alignment is a guaranteed cure for insomnia.

Yet, today, thanks to very strange circumstances, Singh and Galloway find themselves in the same boat. Both have been accused by the UN-sponsored independent committee headed by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker of benefiting financially from the regime of the ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Singh has been called a “compromised” politician and a lobbyist and the Opposition BJP has demanded his resignation. Galloway has been compared to Lord Haw Haw—the English renegade who became a publicist for Hitler—and described by a US Senator as “not an honourable man or a good man”. His conduct is being investigated by the British parliamentary commissioner for standards. Both have vehemently denied the accusations, both have threatened legal action and both are fighting for their political survival.

The alleged misdemeanours of Singh and Galloway centre on Saddam’s successful subterfuge of the UN-monitored Oil for Food programme in Iraq. Having decided that its oil wealth could be transformed into a powerful foreign policy weapon and an instrument of Baathist self-aggrandisement, the Saddam regime honed in on individuals who could gauge the lucrative potential of anti-imperialism. What Saddam did was nothing novel. He merely emulated the patronage disbursement methods of the erstwhile Soviet Union. More to the point, these complicated financial dealings would have remained undiscovered had President George W. Bush not forced a regime change in Iraq in 2003.

For George Galloway, if the Senate’s Governmental Affairs Committee inquiry and the Volcker Report are to be believed, the Iraqi gift of oil sale rights meant entering into an understanding with Fawaz Zureikat, a Jordanian businessman friend. It was Zureikat who sold these rights to Switzerland-based oil traders, received the money, collected the illegal surcharges and funnelled the proceeds into the accounts of a charity run by Galloway and his estranged Palestinian wife Amineh Abu Zayyad. The linkages between money paid by Swiss oil traders into Zureikat’s account and their disbursement into bank accounts in Jordan held by Zayyad have been established by both committees. Galloway’s former wife benefited to the tune of $700,000, a not inconsiderable sum.

Although Singh’s alleged dealings with the Iraqi regime have not been scrutinised in as much detail, the Volcker Report has divulged enough to put a question mark on his political future. Singh and the Congress Party were allegedly granted similar oil sale rights. The allotments were passed on to a Swiss company Masefield AG for handling. The Volcker Report, however, has provided no details of payments made to either Singh or his nominees, but there is a presumption that payments were made which yielded the beneficiaries a profit which, many believe, were as high as 30 per cent of the contract value.

There are, however, another set of transactions which are more damaging. The Iraqis, it would seem, also gave oil rights directly to Masefield. The Volcker Report says it that Singh was to be the “non-contractual beneficiary” of these deals. In concrete terms this meant that the illegal surcharge amounting to $749,197 would be handled by Singh or his nominee. Consequently, $748,540 was paid to Hamdan Export and its owner Andleeb Sehgal, a close family friend of Singh, in Jordan at various times in 2001, presumably by Masefield. The money was then further diverted into the accounts of Iraqi officials, as kickbacks.

The Volcker Report refers to “layers of individuals and companies between the allocation and end-use of Iraq’s crude oil (which) resulted in transactions where the UN could not determine from the face of the contract who actually was benefiting from or controlled the purchase of oil.” In the transactions with which Singh is linked, there are two routes. The first involved the contracted beneficiary selling his rights to an oil trader and making a profit from the commission. The second involved the oil trader securing the allotment directly but channelling the surcharge into the accounts of the specified “non-contractual beneficiary”. This money was then routed back into Iraq. At this point, the “non-contractual beneficiary” became the handling agent of Iraqi kickbacks.


The Volcker Committee says that its claims are backed by the records of the Iraqi State Oil Ministry Organisation (SOMO), bank records in Jordan and other records found in Baghdad. If true, it would suggest that both Singh and Galloway have some explaining to do. Certainly, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s stated belief that the facts are “insufficient” to warrant “any adverse conclusion” against Singh seems a trifle hasty. It does not behove a Prime Minister to dismiss an international inquiry so peremptorily.

What is interesting is that in protesting their innocence both Singh and Galloway are speaking the same language. Galloway has suggested that the documents implicating him are “fabricated” and Singh told The Hindu that the Volcker Report was based on “forgeries.” Testifying under oath to the US Senate committee on May 17, Galloway stated that “I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader, and neither has anyone on my behalf.” He added that the businessman Zureikat “never gave me a penny from an oil deal, from a cake deal, from a bread deal, or from any deal.” On his part, Singh hit back with a series of questions: “Is there any evidence that I or my son ever had contact with this company (Masefield AG) or any other company involved in this? Is there any evidence that I had ever heard of this company?”

Finally, Galloway has consistently seen the attacks on him as part of an orchestrated political campaign. He has stuck to his position with great theatrical aplomb, prompting Senator Coleman to observe that “It’s a constant pattern of deny, deny, deny… It’s something he does all the time—shifting the focus to something that is not in front of you.” Being India’s External Affairs Minister, Singh should have been more inhibited. But he too has charged Volcker of targeting those who opposed US intervention in Iraq. “I opposed sanctions, I opposed the war and I opposed sending Indian troops to Iraq.”

Both Singh and Galloway are blessed with political certitudes. Of course, they are not alone. Throughout India and Britain there are countless well-meaning individuals who believed President Bush’s Iraq war was a misadventure. Fortunately, few of them find their names listed as “non-contractual beneficiaries” of illegal deals cut by a tyrannical regime. The issue is not politics but ethics. It is this issue that has to be addressed by both the anti-imperialist patrician and the radical plebeian.

(Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, November 4, 2005)

Conservative wisdom (October 21, 2005)

There is a deep distrust of inner-party democracy in India

By Swapan Dasgupta

As a political creed, Conservatism, with a capital C, is naturally nation-specific. Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and even Lee Kuan Yew may inspire Conservatives across national boundaries but, at the end of the day, Conservative parties depend on home-grown heroes and a very indigenous idiom. Apart from the loose commitment to individual freedom, entrepreneurship and national identity, there is little that President George W. Bush has in common with, say, President Jacques Chirac. Yet both represent the dominant Conservative trends in the US and France. Likewise, there is a marked difference between the Conservatism of Lord Salisbury, whose portrait occupies the pride of place in London’s Carlton Club, and Margaret Thatcher. One was a 19th century Tory grandee who flaunted his “illiberal” credentials; the other, a grocer’s daughter, was in many ways a radical.

Notwithstanding the absence of anything remotely resembling a Conservative International, the British Conservative Party holds a very special place in the hearts and minds of most ideological Conservatives—to be distinguished from instinctive Tories. First, Britain has the longest, unbroken tradition of political Conservatism. Second, this Conservatism, in a very un-Conservative way, has actually been articulated as a philosophy by thinkers by, among others, Edmund Burke, Sir Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph. Theoretical rigour may now be the hallmark of the Neo-Conservatives in the US Republican Party, but the process predated the Jewish intellectual concerts from Trotskyism. Finally, the British Conservative Party has had the uncanny ability to reinvent itself periodically. For over 150 years, it has demonstrated its willingness to not only change but change for the better.

This week, the Conservative Party has completed the first round of an elaborate exercise to elect a leader to succeed Michael Howard. From a field of four, the party’s elected MPs in Westminster have short-listed two candidates. Approximately 300,000 Conservative Party members across Britain will now elect one of them as leader. As an exercise in democratic consultation, the process is exciting. Unlike the past when either the incumbent chose his successor or left it just to the MPs, the present procedure ensures that the new leader is both acceptable to parliamentary colleagues and endorsed by the foot soldiers. Since MPs are most concerned with winning power and the grassroots activists with Conservative values, the winner in the leadership race is expected to marry the twin imperatives of pragmatism and ideology.

It is instructive to scrutinise the leadership contest in the Conservative Party in view of the imminent changes in the Bharatiya Janata Party, the only party that fits the Conservative tag in India. In end-December, at the conclusion of the party’s National Council meet in Mumbai, party president L.K. Advani will hand over charge to a “colleague”. With just 10 weeks to go before the event, there is an eerie silence from within the party over the succession. While the media has speculated wildly over Advani’s successor, the party itself is in denial about the succession.

The contrast with the Conservative leadership contest couldn’t be more pronounced. For the past four months there has been a vibrant public debate about the future of Conservatism in a post-Thatcher Britain. Has the image of the party become excessively “ugly”? What has to be done to connect Conservatism with modernity? Should core values prevail over electoral imperatives? Should the new leader merely look to the committed or address floating voters? These are some of the important questions that have been addressed by the candidates for the top post. There has, in short, been a healthy exchange of ideas.

True, some of the preoccupation has been over image and the background of the candidates. The privileged Eton and Oxford background of 39-year-old David Cameron has been juxtaposed against the more humble origins of David Davies. At 65, Kenneth Clarke has been painted as a man of the past. There have been rude remarks of him having too much hair in his nostrils. Some retired colonels in the Shires have expressed indignation over Cameron’s ambivalence over a wild past, while old ladies have warmed up to him as the new “alpha man”.

The extent to which the replication of American primaries in the Conservative Party helps its members make a wise choice is still a matter of conjecture. However, there is little doubt that the process itself will be invigorating for a party that has tasted three consecutive election defeats. Although the Westminster system is parliamentary, electoral encounters are invariably presidential in nature. Voters in Britain do select an MP but they actually vote for a Prime Minister.

As of now there is little clarity in the BJP as to whether it is choosing a president to run the organisation or selecting a leader who will be the public face of the National Democratic Alliance in the next general election. In all probability, the wise men in the Sangh Parivar will settle for a president who can bring some order and stability back into the party and help it get over the turbulence of the past year. The choice of a prime ministerial candidate is likely to be deferred, at least till as long as Advani remains Leader of Opposition.

Yet, the choice cannot be deferred indefinitely. While the return of stability in the organisation is imperative for the BJP to play the role of a robust opposition, the NDA will need a face to posit against Sonia Gandhi in the next general election. There are at least four leaders, three of whom were Cabinet ministers in the previous NDA Government and one who is a Chief Minister, who could, arguably, occupy the space vacated by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. But how will the leader be chosen?

The question arises because there has been a deep distrust of vibrant inner-party democracy in India. Neither Mahatma Gandhi nor Jawaharlal Nehru could countenance a Congress president elected against their wishes. Both Subhas Bose and Purshottam Das Tandon were unceremoniously dumped after winning presidential contests. To circumvent the problem, the very idea of elections for top political posts was done away with. Regimented consensus and unanimity became the norm. A spurious form of discipline was posited against the dangers arising from factionalism. Consequently, splits became the norm in India because the avenues of discussion and dissent were foreclosed.

The BJP faces the problem as much as the Congress does. Whereas in the Congress it is the ubiquitous high command that calls the shots, in the BJP a clutch of elders take all the crucial decisions. Pramod Mahajan’s veiled protest against this practice, in a TV interview last week, was valid. Equally valid was his suggestion that the National Council should elect the next party president. However, unless the outgoing president is bent on imposing an unacceptable candidate on an unwilling party, it is unlikely that anything remotely resembling the Conservative Party leadership contest will be witnessed in Mumbai in December. Even if a contest is forced, it will end up as a non-contest.

The political culture in India hasn’t sufficiently evolved for inner-party battles to be conducted in the public gaze without this jeopardising the overall health of the organisation. The overwhelming consensus is that family matters should be settled internally and behind closed doors. The BJP perceives itself as a joint family. In such a set-up, it is always the moral guardians who are entrusted with crucial decisions on behalf of the collective.

It is not classical democracy in the Western sense but it is a manifestation of Indian Conservatism.

(Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, October 21, 2005)

Truth beyond the archive (October 7, 2005)

A public inquiry into Mitrokhin's disclosures would be helpful

By Swapan Dasgupta

It is habitual for the Opposition to make exaggerated demands on the Government of the day, and equally routine for ministers to reject them peremptorily. Yet, it was singularly discourteous of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to, first, disregard a joint letter on The Mitrokhin Archive disclosures from Atal Bihari Vajpayee and the Leaders of Opposition from both Houses of Parliament and, then, organise an uninformed media response by the Minister of State for Home Affairs S.P.Jaiswal. In view of the grave charges of KGB penetration into the Government, intelligence agencies, politics and media of the country, particularly in the 1970s, the BJP leaders pressed for a public inquiry. In the first official reaction to the disclosures, Jaiswal claimed that the BJP indignation was “devoid of merit.” Echoing the Congress spokesman’s charge of unsubstantiated “sensationalism” levelled against Vasili Mitrokhin, the Minister said that the Government was not expected to take note of every allegation by retired spooks.

Despite Jaiswal’s misplaced bluntness, the Government’s response fits a pattern. From the day extracts from The Mitrokhin Archive-II began appearing in the media, nervous Congressmen and Communists have been consciously trying to equate the disclosures with some of the more incredible tell-all memoirs of defectors and ex-spies. The voluble CPI leader A.B. Bardhan, for example, called the book a “spy thriller” and the Congress spokesman even suggested that it “should not be dignified by (a) reaction.” To add to the volley of trivialisation, a retired intelligence officer conveniently revealed that two leaders of the erstwhile Jana Sangh held “secret” meetings with a KGB agent at Wengers, once a favourite meeting point for Delhi politicians. The CPI(M) too fleetingly entered the battle screaming libel, and then quietly withdrawing when it dawned on its leaders that it was actually the KGB which had sullied the late Promode Das Gupta’s reputation by painting him as an IB informer.

While it is compelling to suggest that there is little point in raking up the past, now that the Soviet Union is itself history, it would be a mistake to view Mirokhin’s disclosures as yet another motivated and unsubstantiated leak. First, unlike the spy hunts that routinely arouse Cold War nostalgia in the West, The Mitrokhin Archive is not based either on intelligent deductions or casual reminiscences of retired George Smileys. Mitrokhin, who defected to the UK in 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was not personally involved in the KGB operations he has described. He was an archivist who had unique access to all the KGB files, including the identities of moles, sleepers and informers. For more than a decade, he made copious notes in longhand from the files and, when the opportunity presented itself, passed these on to the British MI6. The Mitrokhin Archive is the closest approximation to a history of the KGB, as seen through the organisation’s own records. Its importance is stupendous.

Second, although Mitrokhin was personally anxious to secure the publication of all the material he smuggled out of the erstwhile USSR, the British Government was more circumspect. Realising the explosive nature of its contents and its likely consequences, it evolved a rigid criterion to determine what should be published and what should be left unsaid. Malcolm Rifkind, the Home Secretary in John Major’s government decreed that “The names of people the KGB had targeted for recruitment or attempted to influence could not be made public unless they had been prosecuted or convicted or they had agreed to the release of their names.” Rifkind was particularly insistent that it was not up to the intelligence agencies “to decide whether or not names should be revealed.” He also made it clear that this “did not apply to British names.”

The decision to impose political control over the publication of the Mitrokhin archive was subsequently upheld by a June 2000 report of the Intelligence and Security Committee of the House of Commons, chaired by Tom King. The King Report specified that the release of details would be undertaken in a “controlled manner” and that “none would be published without Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Security Service clearance.” An inter-departmental working group under Whitehall’s Intelligence Coordinator was established and it ensured that “the policy on the exclusion of certain categories of information from the book was complied with.”

The predictable dismay among readers that The Mitrokhin Archive names only those who are dead is understandable. However, that is not because Mitrokhin’s notes were patchy. The names of those who helped the KGB in the past and who continue to play a role in public life have been carefully omitted for diplomatic reasons. The British Government, it would seem, was anxious to ensure that it was discreetly detached from a publication that is for all practical purposes an official publication.

Yet, the agonised soul-searching in Whitehall does convey a powerful message. It implies that the carefully vetted details which were found suitable for publication bear an official stamp of authenticity. For an Indian Minister to describe the The Mitrokhin Archive as a series of baseless claims is an act of puerile evasion.

In pressing for a public inquiry, whether in the form of a Joint Parliamentary Committee or a specialist investigation like the one that followed the Kargil war, it is instructive to read British Home Secretary Jack Straw’s statement to the Commons on October 21, 1999. “Thousands of leads from Mr Mitrokhin’s material have been followed up world-wide”, he said. “As a result our intelligence agencies in cooperation with allied Governments have been able to put a stop to many security threats. Many unsolved investigations have been closed; many earlier suspicions confirmed; and some names and reputations have been cleared. Our intelligence and security agencies have assessed the value of Mr Mitrokhin’s material worldwide as immense.”

There is absolutely no ground for believing that what is true for the West isn’t true for an India which was described by Mitrokhin as “the easiest country for KGB operatives to penetrate.” What needs to be investigated is not merely the lavish funding of the Communist Party and its fellow-travellers. Mitrokhin has underlined the broad contours of the subversion of India’s intelligence agencies, the diplomatic service and the media. As an emerging global power, India cannot be unmindful of the disastrous consequences of a rotten inheritance.

Is a public inquiry feasible? More important, can such an inquiry go beyond what has already been published?

The answer to both questions is a categorical Yes. Britain may have been loath to make all the details provided by Mitrokhin public but it has indicated its willingness to share, in a “proper and controlled manner”, additional information with “liaison partners”, a euphemism for intelligence agencies of friendly countries. Indeed, there is enough reason to believe that some of this information was supplied to Indian intelligence during the time the NDA was in power. If not, the British Government has kept open the possibility of sharing much more of what Mitrokhin revealed as a part of “reciprocal exchanges of information between liaison partners.” India and Britain share extremely cordial relations and there is an institutionalised arrangement of intelligence sharing. The Government cannot proceed on the a priori assumption that Britain will not oblige Indian requests for more information.

In a sense, it all depends on the UPA Government’s sincerity in pursuing an inquiry that could well show up its Left allies in very poor light. With the right measure of political will and diplomatic adroitness, The Mitrokhin Archive could pave the way for an overhaul of India’s national security.

(Published in The Telegraph, October 7, 2005)