The PM's victory hour
Jyoti Malhotra -
Thursday, July 03, 2008 12:17 PM
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 Obama pulled off the Democratic nomination in the US presidential contest a few weeks ago, the PM and his key advisers realised that if they didn’t act now, even the time for hallelujas would soon be over.
There has been much speculation as to why the Prime Minister, eight months after he conceded at the Hindustan Times summit in October 2007 that he could live with the disappointment of India not doing the deal, has summoned a new-found determination to getting it through.
While the Left’s shrill rhetoric over the last few days indicates that it is completely taken aback by the PM’s zeal, the UPA’s allies look both shell-shocked and cheated at the thought of being denied their last desperate months in office. Meanwhile, a number of Congressmen continue to privately sneer at Manmohan Singh’s “low stakes” in political life. He never won them the election, they grumble, so what right does he now have to cut their time short.
How little all of them understand the true nature of power, which is, to exercise influence far beyond the limits imposed by your opponent’s imagination. Imagine being able to change the world – or even the way your country thinks – if you push hard enough in the direction you believe in.
Trouble with most politicians at home these days is that they’ve confused the exercise of power with the material gains that are a side benefit of that exercise. Indians may be poor as well as riven by caste and class prejudice, but leaders from Jawaharlal Nehru to Atal Behari Vajpayee and Sonia Gandhi have realized that if they’ve dared to dream, the people have usually voted them to power.
Sure, the price of onions has often brought tears to governments. Similarly, the back-breaking prices of goods wrought by inflation can become a curse of our times. But isn’t politics all about communicating your hopes and fears to your audience? Time and again, Indians have suppressed their own desire for a better life (roti-kapda-makan) and voted for the big idea that has gripped their imagination.
Far too many people in the Congress party, though, have such a practical bone in their body. They know exactly how much money is needed to run for an election. They’ve run through the permutations and combinations of electoral arithmetic so often that they’ve lost count. They act within their limitations because it’s so safe to do so.
But when all the counting and deal-making is done and dusted, you still need a leader to tell you about his or her incredible vision that could change your life – or at least the life of your nation. In recent years, Atal Behari Vajpayee won the hearts of his countrymen (and disappointed them on several counts, but that’s not the story here) because, in the teeth of opposition from his party and the sangh parivar, he reached out to humanize the enemy, for example Pakistan.
In Manmohan Singh’s case, the tragedy is that he hasn’t even been able to persuade his own establishment to let him go to that country. Imagine if the PM were still able to go to Islamabad, and if he could deliver agreements on Siachen and Sir Creek – that have been in the making since the time of Rajiv Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto. If Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi were to close that circle today, imagine the kudos that would accrue to the Congress party.
The irony is, that of the two men in the country today who can pull off a peace deal with Pakistan, one of them – Vajpayee – is both ill and out of active politics, and the other – Manmohan Singh – has such good manners that he’s unwilling to take on the naysayers.
And then there’s the Indo-US nuclear deal. It is well-known that the BJP had been negotiating the same agreement with the US, in its last months before it lost power to the Congress in 2004. Last week, L K Advani openly spoke of renegotiating it if his party returned to the throne of Delhi. Clearly, the BJP desperately hopes the Congress will procrastinate again – just as it did with the nuclear programme, which the BJP took to its logical conclusion in1998 at Pokharan – so that it can once again take credit for protecting India’s security interests.
Meanwhile, the PM’s wagering his reputation, for the second time in a year, because he believes the deal is good for India. (It lifts the ban on high-technology that has been the bane of several cutting-edge Indian projects for decades; it gives de facto, if not de jure, big power status to India; and it brings India closer to a permanent seat at the UN Security Council.) And this time, Sonia Gandhi is said to be one thousand per cent behind him.
As for Barack Obama’s comments to a senior Indian official, bi-partisan support for India in the US Congress is pure hogwash. Obama’s advisers have since told an Indian multiparty parliamentary delegation that if the deal goes through now, that’s fine, but that a Democratic President will simply not be able to push it. John McCain, too, will have too much on his hands – settling Iraq, fixing the economy -- for the first few years to take any notice of India.
Truth is, the world isn’t going to forever wait for India to make up its mind. If the Congress party has the courage to change the country, the time to do it is now. Otherwise, let us all, forever, hold our peace.