Manipal, India — If we take away the
near-automatic, and usually fallacious, identification of a country with its
government, and use the views within an elected Parliament as a better guide to
opinion, then there is a majority against the George W. Bush-Manmohan Singh
nuclear deal that crosses 70 percent.
Regrettably for India's ruling Congress
party, Sonia Gandhi gave up her struggles with formal education very early, and
since her marriage to a scion of the Nehrus has lived a life as cocooned as any
royalty. She chose as prime minister an individual as unschooled in the actual
rough-and-tumble of politics as herself. Manmohan Singh was pitchforked into
politics by former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao in 1992, and after a disastrous
showing in the "safe" and urbanized New Delhi constituency in 1996,
has refused to enter an electoral contest.
Small wonder that both misread the
chemistry of the country and went ahead with a nuclear deal that does India the
"favor" of being accepted as low caste rather than an outcaste, as
the country has been treated under the leadership of the United States, China
and the European Union since its first nuclear test in 1974. "Low
caste" in the context of the nuclear sector can be held to refer to
countries that have been given the privilege of supervised and limited access
to nuclear technology, a category that includes most countries in the world.
