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--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='sad.gif' /><!--endemo--> Sunday 24 September 2006
After running a coalition of divergent interests in India, I think, MMS has matured to carry out with finesse.
karat karat abhayas se jarmati hot sujan
rasri awat jaat te sil par parhat nishan
Can one pursue a "non-aligned" policy as well as a "strategic partnership" with a super-power? India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has just proved such a paradoxical feat an eminently feasible exercise.
Singh has done this so successfully that he appears to be aligned with both sections of the domestic opposition - the left and the right - on India's role in the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM). He has attended and returned from a summit of the movement that media spokespersons of the right have described as "a Cold War relic" and posed for the camera with Fidel Castro, whom they regard as a fossil. He, however, has also played at the summit a role that the right can only rejoice over.
Before Singh left New Delhi for Havana to attend the NAM summit on September 15-16, both these political camps had made their positions clear. The right voiced fears about what India's participation in the event could mean for the special ties forged with the George Bush administration and their future. The left wondered and worried about the role the high-priests of India's external affairs establishment would play in Havana - whether they would continue its collaboration with Washington or, as a left leader put it, use this "opportunity to correct its foreign policy course."
No doubt was entertained, however, in a notable external quarter. On the summit's eve, on September 14, US State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack told the media in Washington that the Bush administration had "friends" in the NAM who would "support its vision of greater democracy and freedom." McCormack went on to specify India and Indonesia as the leading examples of such NAM members.
He proved more right than the domestic doubters. Singh and his mandarins went out of their way to vindicate McCormack, well in advance of the summit.
The elite media, with its entrenched pro-West and anti-NAM bias, cheered on the prime minister and party as they testified to their determination to depart from India's and the movement's "anti-imperialist" traditions. Sample: "Even as Venezuela's tin-pot dictator Hugo Chavez and his host plan to use the NAM's Havana pulpit to sharpen their anti-US rhetoric, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has indicated that India was not enthusiastic about this project.... The Prime Minister, in his interaction with reporters accompanying him to the summit, suggested that he did not wish to see NAM as an anti-US grouping. "I don't buy this argument that most members of the NAM do not want relations with the US."
Another report, based on official briefing, said that the "Indian effort" at the summit was "to steer clear of two new tendencies that would have taken the movement away from its moorings." The first was "Malaysia's promotion of the Islamic agenda in its role as both the Chairman of NAM and of the Organisation of Islamic Countries that would have resulted in an almost exclusive focus on the issues relating to West Asia."
The second was "the radical tendency of Cuba with unnecessarily strong language and rhetoric that would have made engagement with the rest of the world difficult." Especially the engagement of New Delhi with Washington, as the Singh government awaited the finalization and formalization of the US-India nuclear deal, which has a few more legislative hurdles to cross.
The Christian Science Monitor needed no briefing from New Delhi to see the connection. As the summit got under way, it reported that NAM member-states were preparing a draft declaration supporting Iran "in its game of nuclear chicken with the West." They were also trying to "enlarge the definition of terrorism to include both the US occupation of Iraq and recent Israeli actions in Lebanon."
"In the past," the paper said, "India might have joined the cavalcade of anti-US decrees" - and subscribed to a definition of terrorism that did not spare occupiers and aggressors. "Today, it clearly will not. India's strategic goals are increasingly consistent with those of Washington, from economics to security.... And with the US Senate considering a deal that would accept India's status as a nuclear power, India has no interest in provoking its new friend with bombastic statements about neo-imperialism."
"It's about how we move from being a protester of the world order to one who takes responsibility for the management of it," said C. Raja Mohan, a leading defender of the nuclear deal, who is no stranger to readers of these columns. The statement reflects a conviction that, from a membership in the nuclear club, it is but a step or maybe a series of steps to a seat in the United Nations Security Council. India's role in the NAM summit was but a rehearsal for a bigger one in the world body.
Domestic critics of India's involvement in the NAM have often decried the movement's hostility to the country's nuclear ambitions. Writing on the eve of the summit, former diplomat G. Partharsarathy said: "India has also gained little by its past support for the Arab cause and for the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. South Africa and Egypt are today members of the 'New Agenda Coalition,' which regularly demands that India should sign the NPT as a non-nuclear weapons state and accept IAEA safeguards on all its nuclear installations. And at the Johannesburg NAM summit in 1998, President Nelson Mandela heaped a double insult on us by criticising our nuclear tests and becoming the first NAM Chairman to refer to the Kashmir issue in his address to the summit."
The Havana summit heaped no such humiliations on official India. It conducted itself here as a state awaiting a leap to legitimacy as a nuclear power, and got away with it. It did so on both the nuclear issues to be brought up at the summit.
The first, of course, was the Iran issue. India, certainly, could not vote against Iran here as in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). But it played the role of a nuclear power to perfection when Singh reminded Iran of its "obligations" in additions to its rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which India has refused to sign resolutely all along.
At the 13th NAM summit in Kuala Lumpur in February 2003, former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee dealt with the then-topical Iraq issue. He declared: "The world's attention ... is riveted on Iraq. Like every other non-aligned country, India fervently wishes for a peaceful resolution. We also support the multilateral route of the United Nations to address this issue. But objectivity - and not rhetoric - should govern our actions. Weapons of mass destruction do need to be eliminated. It is essential that Iraq complies fully with the obligations it has accepted, including disarmament ... As a fellow-member of NAM, this is our sincere advice to Iraq." India's stand on Iran at this summit was almost identical.
On the second nuclear issue of disarmament, India's role was to work for the removal from the summit's final declaration of all references to such ideas as weapons-of-mass-destruction-free (WMD-free) zones in such regions as West Asia. A deal behind the US-India deal, perhaps, was to avert such a danger for Israel's nuclear arsenal.
Almost identical, too, were the stances of Vajpayee and Singh on terrorism. The former Prime Minister told his Kuala Lumpur audience: "The threat of global terrorism presents our movement with an immediate test of its commitment to its core principles. It is imperative that we take a clear and unequivocal stand on this scourge. There can be no double standards, no confusion between terrorism and freedom struggles, and no implicit condoning of terrorism through an investigation of its 'root causes.'"
Singh, for his part, proclaimed: "If NAM is to be relevant in today's circumstances, it cannot afford to equivocate on the subject of terrorism." Reports based on official briefing make it clear, again, that the Indian delegation was concerned that "the determination to fight terrorism would be diluted with qualifications over the right of oppressed people under occupation and the right to self-determination." The final wording, adopted under India's pressure, committed the movement to counter terrorism committed "wherever, by whomsoever and on whatever pretext."
Bush could not have agreed more with both the prime ministers on the definition of terrorism that recognized neither "root causes" nor resistance to "disproportionate use of force," as state terror is diplomatically described.
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tongue.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tongue.gif' /><!--endemo--> <span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'><span style='font-family:Arial'>When you can't run your non aligned car; the chances of moribund non aligned movement's revival are next to nil. And it has neither relevance nor appropiateness in geopolitics of today. When USA was being actively opposed by erstwhile USSR, NAM might have made some sense but in today's world non alighnment has no meaning whatsoever. As far as India is concerned, we have many better things to do e.g. we have 25% population of world who lives on paltry sum of <$1/day; so, we should be using our resources to bring them above the poverty line. Moreover, there is already UN to take care of such issues as can come up in NAM. There is no need to flog the dead horse like NAM.</span></span>[FONT=Arial][SIZE=7][COLOR=red]
