July 2008 - Posts - Mappings

July 2008 - Posts

Singh is a nuclear Kinng!

Posted by Jyoti Malhotra at 
Every day that I have been Prime Minister of India I have tried to remember that the first ten years of my life were spent in a village with no drinking water supply, no electricity, no hospital, no roads and nothing that we today associate with modern living. I had to walk miles to school, I had to study in the dim light of a kerosene oil lamp. This...

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The Bengali and the Marxist (with apologies to Amitav Ghosh)

Posted by Jyoti Malhotra at 
The morning after Day One in Parliament, where the UPA government's trust vote is being debated on the Indo-US nuclear deal -- today, that is July 22, the vote will take place -- the Bengali and the Marxist (with apologies to Amitav Ghosh, for letting this sound like a novel by him) emerged as the two real heroes of the day. Foreign minister Pranab...

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Jab They Met : Foreign policy and domestic politics

Posted by Jyoti Malhotra at 
The holy trinity descended on the capital on Saturday evening – National Security Adviser M K Narayanan, Foreign Secretary Shivshanker Menon and Atomic Energy chief Anil Kakodkar – seeking to win over a largely converted press to the advantages of the Indo-US nuclear deal. But the way they tied themselves up in knots over spelling out the detail! India...

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Lalu sells the nuke deal

Posted by Jyoti Malhotra at 
Rank opportunism or cold blooded realpolitik? On Friday morning, as the UPA’s allies streamed out of a meeting with Congress president Sonia Gandhi, External Affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee laughed so heartily at his own slip of tongue (“we have just concluded a UPA-Left meeting”!) that it seemed quite clear that the Congress party had managed to...

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PM nukes Left, signals to IAEA

Posted by Jyoti Malhotra at 
The sound and fury over the Indo-US nuclear deal over the last few weeks has resulted in such a complete breakdown of trust between the Left parties and the Congress-led government that yesterday’s secular allies have been reduced to, today, spitting fire and brimstone at each other at every opportunity. All day on Thursday, Left leaders gnashed their...

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The PM's victory hour

Posted by Jyoti Malhotra at 
Barack Obama’s comments to a senior Indian official, a couple of months ago, that he would not make an “exception” for India on the nuclear deal if he came to power, was probably the last nail needed to convince Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that the body in the coffin – in this case the nuclear deal – was already being prepared for burial. So when...

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