Once again his foes help Ahmedinejad (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has this in common with U.S. President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair: he too speaks directly to God. Admirers consider him to be the pilot heralding the imminent return of the Mahdi, the expected Muslim Messiah.

Less undiscerning observers consider the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran to be a buffoon, without any substantive authority inside his own country -- where the key members of the government report directly to Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Khamenei -- and with a diminishing support base within his own people, caused by the extreme economic mismanagement of the mullahs.

A country that ought to have enjoyed a prosperous standard of living for its 78 million people has huge pools of extreme poverty, caused by a dysfunctional system reminiscent of India during the three decades from 1955-85 of comprehensive central planning. What passes for private industry in Iran is a collection of enterprises run like feudal fiefs by those close to the supreme leader, or regarded by him as potential troublemakers needing to be pampered out of opposition.

Ahmedinejad himself came to power Iran-style, where the counted ballots threw up -- not entirely coincidentally -- the very result favored by Khamenei, who saw the current Iranian president as a poodle who would not stray from total obedience the way Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani did during his term. Unfortunately for the wily supreme leader, Ahmedinejad began to get delusions of divine greatness within a year, even while proving inept in supervising the system in a manner that would give the people of Iran enough crumbs to remain quiescent.

President Hu Shows Who's Boss (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Four years before Chinese President Hu Jintao took over as both head of state and, more importantly in China, head of the Communist Party, this observer of his country had deduced that he was on a steady ascent to full power. Even in 1998 it was clear that the mild-mannered, ever-courteous lifelong Party member was a deadly player on the chessboard of power.

Over the preceding years he had avoided much entanglement with the reigning hierarchies in the only parts of China that President Jiang Zemin was interested in, the high-growth centers along the coast and Beijing. Instead, he used the anti-corruption machinery of the state and Party to prise away those who were less than completely loyal to Deng Xiaoping's personal choice to replace Jiang in 2002.

Barring a handful of provinces, by 1999 Hu had put into position individuals that he could relate to and that were far removed from the glitzy and immensely wealthy Jiang cohort. Over the next couple of years, he interacted extensively with senior military and civilian cadres, almost always leaving the impression of a thoughtful individual whose objective was to ensure the continuation of China's ascent begun under Mao and Deng.

Unloosing the Shiite Genie (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat 

Manipal, India — If protecting the homeland is among the primary responsibilities of a government, attempting to change the distribution of power within another country may not always be congruent with such an objective.

Given the state of conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1982, there was a compelling case for the Israel Defense Forces to enter Lebanon and take out Palestinian assets that were being deployed against the stability and survival of the state of Israel. However, there was none for attempting to bolster the position of the Maronite Christians vis-à-vis their Shiite opponents. In particular, the leading Maronite Gemayel family was known for the use of methods that could have been developed in a concentration camp.

Since 1982, the flow of covert and other support to the Gemayels from Israel grew to a level that infuriated the Shiites as well as the family's many Maronite critics. By 1987, an isolated -- indeed hated -- PLO was able to secure the backing of key elements among the Shiite factions in Lebanon, despite being overwhelmingly Sunni.

From that time to the present, Israel has enjoyed the distinction of being the only non-Muslim country targeted by militant Shiites -- a group far more virulent and effective, albeit as yet limited in strength and scope, than even Wahabbi extremists such as members of al-Qaida. Over the past two decades, Israel has concentrated its attention and resources on tackling a foe that went into action as a result of its own intervention policy in Lebanon.

Pakistan Army Versus the State (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — In 1971, following the Indian army's defeat of Pakistan in Bangladesh and the capture of 93,000 prisoners of war, an opportunity was given to the Pakistani politicians to roll back the army's control over civilian life by curbing its powers and making it a professional force. President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto squandered that chance by his cupidity and hunger for absolute power.

Bhutto, who like Pakistan's founder M.A. Jinnah was an alcohol-loving, pork-eating ersatz Muslim, pandered to the religious extremists by imposing the will of the "ulema," or religious establishment, over not only the rest of the "ummah," or Muslims, but of all Pakistani society. During his six years in power, Bhutto crushed modern private industry through extensive nationalization and converted the Pakistan Peoples' Party into a family enterprise, a character the PPP retains to this day.

After Bhutto's hand-picked army chief, Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, took over power and hanged Bhutto in 1977 for one of the numerous murders of his enemies during the previous six years, he completed the jihadisation of the Pakistan army that had begun in 1948 with the extensive intermingling of troops and religious fanatics during the 1947-1949 Kashmir war.

Zia sensibly secured the patronage of the al-Sauds by training the Saudi Arabian army and providing Pakistani guards to secure the safety of the Saudi ruling house during the tumultuous days in 1979 when Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took over power in Iran. The al-Sauds have ever since been faithful to the ancient Bedouin custom of gratitude to those that help in times of adversity, giving the Pakistan army massive financial and other backing.

Will Musharraf survive? (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Although it would be a tad unfair to compare him to a confidence trickster, Pakistan's army-appointed President Pervez Musharraf has survived by convincing a series of patrons to back him, only to let them down later.

After the dour but straightforward Jehangir Karamat was sacked as the army's chief of staff by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif for publicly asserting that the military had the decisive say in matters of national security, Musharraf' convinced Sharif that he would be a pliant replacement for the sacked general. This was an important consideration at a time when both Sharif and his brother Shahbaz were reported to be examining the military's links to the immensely lucrative narcotics trade.

For decades, ever since the Afghan jihad began in 1980, opium and its derivatives have been leveraged by elements in uniform in Pakistan to generate cash, not just to send their children abroad to study, but also to fund such "black" operations as the jihad against Indian rule in Kashmir. Politicians in Pakistan, not known for abstemious behavior, watched with envy the flow of profits from the illegal trade -- the primary reason the military wanted to retain control of Afghanistan through the Taliban -- and looked for an opportunity to muscle in.

With the assumption of office by the "spineless" Musharraf, that moment appeared to have arrived. It vanished in a cloud of dust, however, when U.S.-supplied tanks buttressed a coup in 1999 that once again put the military in the driver's seat. Less than a year later, the four army generals who had launched the coup that placed Musharraf in power were themselves edged out by a "chief executive" (later president) of Pakistan eager to show who was boss.

Since then, Musharraf has placed no fewer than 37 presumed loyalists into top command positions within the military. He has given their men -- being a Wahabbi state, the women of Pakistan are not considered good enough to command -- hundreds of well-paying (in both salary and bribes) jobs in the Pakistan state sector.

Why India Rejected the Nuclear Deal (UPIASIA)

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.

The Arranged Marriage Between India and the United States (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Unlike in the West, where couples meet, mate and then decide on marriage, in India it is parents, family and friends that substitute for Cupid. Not accidentally, few such pairings are driven by romantic considerations. Instead, an assessment is made of how the two families can benefit from the match, rather than simply the individuals on whose behalf a decision on pairing is being taken.

Unsurprisingly, the choice of Mom, Dad, Uncle and Family Friend is seldom that which either the groom or the bride would have selected, had they the right to do so. Interestingly, most such marriages work, usually much better than in societies where personal choice is given precedence over family needs.

Over the past five years the United States and Indian militaries have been discovering each other, much like a couple brought together under family pressure. Fresh from their interaction with counterparts in Pakistan -- whose military goes ape at the prospect of a U.S.-India alliance -- and loaded with tales originating from the time of the Indian-phobic Winston Churchill about the " unreliable" Indians, those within the U.S. military that began dealing with the Indian army, navy and air force came prepared to dislike their new contacts.

If the Americans were distant, the Indians were paranoid, and several promising careers within the three services were blighted on the charge of "fraternization" with a U.S. officer, usually female. Not merely more private actions, but even an exchange of "inappropriate" emails was cause for retribution. Only very recently has the Indian establishment come to accept that a consensual relationship between two adults, each of whom may wear the uniform of what is today an allied country, need not be treated as a security disaster.

Nepal Needs Free Elections (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat 

MANIPAL, India, June 26 (UPI) -- A year ago, when the government of India invited all major political groups in Nepal to a conference in New Delhi, a sympathetic New Delhi forced through an alliance of eight parties that would take over effective power from King Gyanendra, seen widely as leaning too close to China.

By then, the king had destroyed what little support he had within India's ruling United Progressive Alliance government by sponsoring a resolution at the South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation summit in Dacca calling for China's entry into SAARC as an "observer." Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka backed the move enthusiastically.

Had the previous National Democratic Alliance regime not lost power in the 2004 general elections, India at this stage would have exercised a quiet veto, thus returning the suggestion to cold storage. However, the Congress-led UPA depends for its parliamentary majority on the Communist parties and hence could not oppose a move backed by the majority of SAARC countries.

After the summit, however, steps were taken to neuter the king of Nepal's powers by installing a supposed democracy in place of the Gyanendra-led autocracy. Yet reality was that the very Nepali Parliament that had been dissolved by the king in 2002 was brought back to life, in the opinion of constitutional experts, illegally. The members of this "elected" Legislature last faced an election in 1999.

Only Free Elections Can Save Nepal (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — A year ago, when the government of India invited all major political formations in Nepal to an "offer you can't refuse" conference in New Delhi, a sympathetic New Delhi forced through a "democratic" alliance of eight parties that would take over effective power from King Gyanendra, widely regarded as leaning too close to China.

A short while back, the king had destroyed what little support he had within India's ruling United Progressive Alliance government by sponsoring a resolution at the South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation summit in Dacca, calling for China's entry into SAARC as an "observer." Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka backed the move enthusiastically.

Had the previous National Democratic Alliance regime not lost power in the 2004 general elections, India at this stage would have exercised a quiet veto, thus returning the suggestion to cold storage. However, the Congress-led UPA depends for its parliamentary majority on the communist parties, and hence could not oppose a move backed by the majority of SAARC countries.

After the summit, however, immediate steps were taken to neuter the king of Nepal's powers by installing a "democratic" government in place of the Gyanendra-led "autocracy." Such was the headline. The reality was that the very Nepali Parliament that had been dissolved by the king in 2002 was brought back to life, in the opinion of constitutional experts, illegally. The members of this "elected" legislature last faced an election in 1999.

Once revived, the Parliament expanded its strength by a third, nominating the additional members mostly from the ranks of the Maoists. It had been this armed group that had stymied repeated efforts to hold elections since former Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba dissolved Parliament in 2002 to head off certain defeat in a no-confidence motion brought against him. Since then, Nepal had seen a succession of nominated prime ministers, each chosen by King Gyandendra after the previous incumbent finally admitted defeat in his efforts at holding elections in a country where the Maoists killed any candidate not sympathetic to them.

The United States should be Quadricultural, not Unipolar (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — By granting itself a patent on individual freedom combined with democratic elections, the West has persuaded itself that it is seen as a benign entity in the rest of the world -- almost all of which decades ago was occupied and governed by European countries intent on using native resources to promote their own interests.

However, the return of Western soldiery to Afghanistan and Iraq has caused formerly colonized countries to fear that once again they are at risk of occupation. Both Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki have zero control over the militaries swarming across their respective countries, or over many of the functions normally associated with sovereignty. "Advisors" in both Kabul and Baghdad have the final say, a fact that is not hidden from the local populations.

Today, NATO forces in Afghanistan and Coalition troops in Iraq are ensuring a steady increase in the insurgency. George W. Bush, Tony Blair, John Howard, Angela Merkel and other Western leaders have together performed a miracle -- they have made the Saddamites popular in Iraq and the Taliban recover its resonance in Afghanistan.

Because of the melding of the identities of the United States and the European Union into a single "Western" entity, Bush rarely ventures beyond Europe -- and countries with European-origin majorities -- in securing military allies for his numerous military sallies into distant lands. Within the United States, only the west coast has succeeded, to a limited extent, in freeing itself of the delusion that the United States is a European country transplanted across the Atlantic. The South and East are in thrall to a concept of nationhood with a European identity at its core -- a concept expressed in the many writings of Samuel Huntington.

India's 'Caste' in the Global Nuclear Network (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat 

Manipal, India — A millennium ago, when Muslim armies began succeeding in defeating their Hindu rivals, such victories came despite the latter's greater opulence. A contributory factor was caste. Only certain "high-born" groups were permitted to bear arms in defense of the state. Their number did not exceed 9 percent of the total population. Had a more equitable social structure been in place, India's history may have been different.

It was only in the 1960s that democratic elections became the instrument through which the "backward castes" were able to claim equal rights with the rest. Ironically, since that time a new caste system has arisen, again one that denies upward mobility to those condemned to second-class, or worse, status. This is the international nuclear order implemented through the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which permanently restricts the right to possess nuclear weapons to only five countries -- the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China.

Since then, Israel, India, Pakistan and now North Korea have emerged as de facto nuclear weapons states. Of these, Israel has not thus far tested a nuclear weapon, although it has clearly had access to the technology needed to build a stockpile of them. Of the other three, Pakistan and North Korea are both authoritarian states known to have proliferated both nuclear as well as missile technology, and to have secured the know-how for developing both from third countries.

Sonia Gandhi Losing India's Cities (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Although most international commentators spoke of the Congress Paraty's victory in the 2004 Indian elections as the "revolt of the poor," in reality it was the result of defeating their BJP-led rivals in every major city in India bar Bangalore. Rather than a vote against economic reform, it was the slowing down of reforms during the last two years of the BJP-led regime that made the urban middle class -- now 220 million strong -- either abstain or vote against the BJP.

Unfortunately, the present "owner" of the ruling Congress Party, Italian-born Sonia Maino Gandhi, joined the usual pundits in seeing her victory as a vote against reform, and has reined in the economist Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has instead concentrated on two fields where he is an obvious novice: foreign policy and national security. His experiments in appeasement have been based on a liberal belief that jihadis are just misled idealists who can, with tenderness, be corrected.

Simultaneously, just as the United States and the European Union are beginning to accept New Delhi's traditional stand that Pakistan under its generals is part of the problem and not a solution, Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi have been cozying up to Pervez Musharraf. They have publicly taken at face value his claim that the jihadis in Pakistan operate independently of the army, even though many routinely use military communications equipment and are trained by those in uniform. It is small wonder that the nearly three years of United Progressive Alliance government have witnessed a sharp increase in Maoist insurgency and the revival of the Kashmir jihad. The army has become dispirited by consistent pressure from the Congress-led government to go soft on the jihadis and surrender Kashmir's Siachen heights. Also, India's nuclear scientists were dismayed at the conditions set out under the Henry J. Hyde Act passed by the U.S. Congress last year, which would in effect end India's three-decade quest for a nuclear deterrent against China.

Will India-U.S. Ties Get Nuked? (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPAL, India — A smiling U.S. President George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced on July 18, 2005, that a U.S.-India agreement would be concluded that would regularize nuclear trade between the two countries, and consequently, the rest of the world.

Since the first Indian nuclear test in 1974, India has been the primary target of a comprehensive set of sanctions designed to prevent any external help to the Indian program. Along the way, a large number of hi-tech items -- such as supercomputers -- were made out of bounds to India, which nevertheless persisted with its program, detonating six nuclear devices in 1998 and moving ahead toward development and deployment of a "triad" of nuclear weapons systems that would ensure delivery from the land, air and sea.

Unlike Pakistan, China and Russia, India has not transferred nuclear or missile technology across its frontiers -- hoping to be rewarded for such good behavior by cooption into the major league of nuclear weapons states (NWS). It seemed that on July 18, 2005, the day had finally arrived -- early reports of the U.S.-India understanding were unanimous in stating that the Bush administration had finally given up on containment, and had accepted -- de facto if not yet de jure -- that India was an NWS, and that it therefore made sense for the five "declared" weapons powers to bring it into the fold before New Delhi decided to act the outsider, after being treated as one since 1974.

Influential voices within the country's nuclear and security establishment had been calling for nuclear cooperation with other countries that felt shortchanged by an international architecture that had changed hardly at all since World War II. Among the prospective partners would be Vietnam and Venezuela, who would see little attraction in remaining within the confines of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty were India to offer cooperation in energy.

The Hypocrisy of the Wahabbis (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Although the U.S. State Department considers the Wahabbi sect to be engaged in "purifying" the Muslim faith, in fact what Mohammad ibn Abdul Wahab created three centuries ago was an entirely new faith, used thereafter to uproot the Sufi-suffused Islam that had gifted scholarship and success to the Muslims. Neither of his two biographies is credible, both being the work of admirers of the al-Sauds, the family later installed as the titular masters of the Arabian Peninsula.

Abdul Wahab developed his teachings to protect the absolutist rule of the al-Sauds, wrapping them in a cloak of piety that concealed personal conduct the opposite of the example set by the Prophet Mohammed. The founder of Wahabbism was an individual who sought to uproot traditional Islam from the land where it was revealed.

Early in his career as a preacher, Abdul Wahab formed a partnership with Muhammad ibn Saud, whereby the desert chieftain's dynasty was declared by the preacher to be the legitimate rulers of the lands where Islam first took root. A grateful ruler promptly anointed Abdul Wahab as the only correct teacher of the tenets of Islam. That the Muslim faith, democratic in its chemistry, explicitly rejects kingship, or that the Prophet Mohammed is the only transmitter of the Word of Allah, were seen as inconsequential.

Almost from the start of their sojourn into fortune, the al-Sauds fastened themselves to the flanks of the British, thereby gaining assistance in their battles with other chieftains, until their presumed loyalty finally earned them installation in 1932 as masters of the land they called "Saudi Arabia." But for British and later U.S. help, the al-Sauds would have remained just another of several tribal families, very possibly made extinct by those angered at their incessant aggression.

Why Muslims hate the United States (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Anger against the United States within the Muslim "Ummah," or diaspora, has risen above the level aimed at the USSR after its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. The United States seems on course to overtake Israel as the primary object of hate. This despite a well-funded campaign to convince Muslims that Uncle Sam loves them and is eager for reciprocation.

Unfortunately, apart (presumably) from Muslims resident in the country itself, followers of Islam around the globe see the United States as determined to emasculate and finally eliminate them. Such views have been in vogue since the 1950s, so it would be inaccurate to credit this perception entirely to George W. Bush, great though his contribution has been.

Since 1945 the United States, after being isolationist for most of its previous history, has metamorphosed into the most interventionist nation since the inhabitants of Britain decided in droves during the 18th century to leave their insipid food and miserable climate behind and seize control of much of the globe. Sadly for the United States, this attempt at emulating Britain has simply reinforced Karl Marx's dictum that history the second time around converts itself from tragedy to farce. A historical evaluation of the strands that fuse into Muslim hatred for the United States would be too ambitious for this column, which will therefore confine itself to some of the reasons behind the current loathing.

George W. Bush and other U.S. policymakers often speak of their desire to "bring democracy to the Middle East" by "empowering the people" and backing "voices of moderation" within the Islamic world. They apparently see no irony in the use of such language when the two King Abdullahs, Pervez Musharraf, Hosni Mubarak and the Turkish General Staff -- to name a few -- are given U.S. cover.

Losing Minds and Hearts in Iraq (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — India has been at the business end of jihadi-funded insurgency since 1981, the year in which Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) began to organize a "Khalistan" movement that would in a couple of years launch a terror campaign in India's Punjab State. Although local members of the Sikh community declined to come on board, enough funds were raised from ethnic Sikhs in the United States and Canada to provide the funding for a vicious struggle that lasted till the mid-1990s.

The Khalistan movement blended seamlessly with the other jihadist operation in Kashmir, an insurgency set off by those who returned to the Indian-held part of the state after receiving training in Pakistan from 1982 to 1988. It is still smoldering, and has thus far cost 73,000 lives, mostly in the killings of Muslims by Wahabbis.

In 1989 the USSR was defeated in Afghanistan and the ISI transferred its attention to Kashmir. Unfortunately for them, New Delhi proved a tougher proposition than Moscow, the reason being the manner in which the security forces conducted anti-jihadist operations. Given their low level of financial resources, these had perforce to depend on the "software" of psychological warfare against the jihadis, placing emphasis on changing of mindsets and preventing of unity between those disaffected with Indian rule.

In contrast, the United States has thrown into battle in Iraq a (usually wasted) flood of material resources, with far less success than the Indian armed forces have shown in Kashmir, where the jihadis have been beaten to the ground and are now desperately clutching at diplomacy to rescue themselves from the pit they have been pushed into.

Why India Will Sit out Iran (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat


Manipal, India — Iran's ongoing effort to master uranium enrichment technology, despite its denials, is likely to lead to a series of surgical U.S. air and missile strikes designed to cripple reprocessing capacity. The risks and rewards of such an action have been extensively detailed; hence the focus here is on a small part of the overall mosaic -- the response of India to such a strike.

Although Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is solicitous of perceived U.S. interests, and has been working to create an alliance between the world's two biggest democracies, geopolitical logic will dictate that New Delhi will sit out a future Iran conflict, rather than follow its instincts and back the United States.

In evidence that India-Iran strategic ties remain in good standing, the chief of the Iranian Navy, Rear Admiral S. Kouchaki, is on a March 4-9 visit to India, during which he will visit key installations and discuss joint exercises.

The reasons for India to avoid conflict with Iran are primarily four:

First is the Shiite factor. There have been a little over 17,000 Muslim-Hindu clashes since India became independent in 1947, of which less than two hundred involved Shiites and Hindus. Almost all such clashes have been Sunni versus Hindu, and 87 percent of these have been Wahabbi-Hindu, as the more moderate sections of Sunni Muslim society seldom adopt a confrontational posture with their Hindu neighbors.

Facing Western Supremacy (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

NEW DELHI, Feb. 13 (UPI) -- The foreign ministers of the three giants of the Asian landmass -- Russia, China and India -- will meet Feb. 14 in New Delhi to advance an old proposal for a Trilateral Global Alliance that would effectively exclude the West from a position of superiority in Asia, before achieving the same purpose in Africa and South America.

Although at present only a gleam in the eye of geopoliticians, the TGA has made enough progress in the past two years to indicate that within the next three, a framework agreement could be signed by the three heads of government that would codify the principles and objectives of this partnership aimed at limiting Western power.

It is interesting to note that European powers all won special advantages in the rest of the world not by peaceful cooperation, but by conquest. This is perhaps the reason why soldiers, sailors and airmen play a much bigger role in Western "diplomacy" than diplomats themselves.

Australia, for example, has now joined hands with New Zealand in sending armed troops to small island countries near them, in order to enforce their will over the peoples there. So dominating is Australia that even the present Timorese leadership -- the recipient of huge funds and other aid from Canberra in its long battle against Indonesia -- has now sought to distance itself from a country that seems determined to rule the territory by the gun.

Don't ignite the Shiites (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPAL, India, Jan. 22 (UPI) -- The origins of al-Qaida can be traced to the decision taken by the British sometime in 1911 to back the raggedy assembly of Bedouins led by the al-Saud clan against the Turks. The add-on to this was the support it gave to Wahabism, a creed that had originated two centuries before, and which sought to smother the Muslim faith in its primitive desert beliefs and practices.

In 1932, London served as midwife to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a Wahabi outpost in a sea of moderate Sufi peoples, and has backed it ever since, being joined by the United States soon after World War II. If then the reason for this support was Turkey, from the 1960s till 1979 it was Arab nationalism, exemplified first by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and by the secular if thuggish Baath regimes in Syria and Iraq.

That year, Moscow made the mistake of invading Afghanistan, and then-CIA Director William Casey, followed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, accepted the Saudi suggestion that they use Pashtun Wahabis trained in Pakistan to drive out the Soviets, rather than the far more numerous Pashtun nationalists. Of course the nationalists loathed Pakistan, while the Wahabis were dependent on that state's jihadi army.

India's Nuclear Sell Out (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPAL, India, April 7 (UPI) -- If his July 18, 2005 deal with U.S. President George W. Bush is implemented, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will ensure that India would never, at least in the next half-century, rival China as a technological or military superpower.

The act of scientific strangulation in the Singh-Bush nuclear agreement would rapidly push India downwards to the level of Lesotho and Botswana in nuclear and missile science. After half a century of protecting its nuclear technology, the country would slide into the category of "recipient countries" explicitly marked out for it by Bush. As such, India would no longer be permitted to even reprocess uranium on its own, but would have to depend on "advanced countries" such as Japan and Germany for this essential process. Ironically, at present India is far ahead of both in nuclear science.

Just as others did before him, Manmohan Singh has made the mistake of believing the temporary backing of the U.S. bureaucracy to be sufficient protection from the angry reaction of his own people, once the consequences of his actions become clear. However, in this case, the price for such misdeeds is likely to be paid not by Singh personally but by the Congress Party, which will henceforward be seen as having betrayed its nationalist past.

Emasculating Nuclear India (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

NEW DELHI, March 13 (UPI) -- There is zero doubt that India and the U.S. are natural partners. Steady migration to the U.S., the ever-denser interlinking of the hi-tech industry in both countries, and common threats from religious fundamentalism and political authoritarianism mandate that Washington and New Delhi forge an alliance that is as close as that between the U.S. and the UK.

However, the caveat to this is that such a partnership can only be on terms that are the same as what the U.S. accords to the U.K. In brief, the U.S. has first to accept India as a nuclear weapons state that deserves permanent membership in the U.N. Security Council. Unfortunately, almost all the formulae trotted out by the "South Asia" brigade in U.S. think tanks and other centers of influence such as the State Department implicitly or otherwise seek to "engage" India on terms that would, if accepted, result in an emasculation of the world's most populous democracy.

The proposed Nuclear Deal falls squarely in this category, and will, if sought to be implemented, push official U.S.-India relations back to the frost of the Cold War period.

Indians love flattery, and often surrender substance in exchange for a verbal pat on the head. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, by education as well as by his experience in international institutions, is predisposed to uncritical acceptance of the standard Western worldview, which implicitly sees India as a juvenile power needing mother-henning, and definitely not mature enough to be trusted with grown-up implements such as nuclear weapons and their associated delivery systems. This mistrust of the country's maturity -- despite New Delhi's impeccable non-proliferation record to date -- infuses the terms of the deal that has been agreed to by the Sonia Gandhi-led coalition government, hungry as always for formal acknowledgment of its improving status. Were the agreement to be implemented, India would almost immediately lose its chance to switch to the thorium cycle, and within 12 years would find its tiny arsenal of nuclear weapons depleted to irrelevance.

Religious Supremacists (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPAL, India, Nov. 25 (UPI) -- Thanks to the extraordinary burst of innovation and enterprise created in the countries of Western Europe during the previous five centuries, the world came under their tutelage. However, those from the region who lacked the characteristics of rationality, resourcefulness and drive that resulted in the west leading the world fell back on the absence of skin pigment to distinguish themselves as superior from the rest of humanity. In this, they were merely following an ancient precedent. For example, the very Sanskrit word for India's 4,000-year old tradition of caste is "varna," meaning: color. Indeed, the Slavic peoples used this characteristic to name the lands in which they resided. Thus, "Russia" means "Land of the Blonde" while "Belarus" goes even further, signifying the "Land of the White Blonds." Small wonder that notions of racial supremacy grew in Western Europe, sometimes even crossing the bounds of color, as for example in much of the European continent during the period when those belonging to the Jewish faith were discriminated against and finally, sought to be eliminated altogether. The Holocaust has been the vilest depth in human history of a deformed social consciousness that survived in the modern era in locations such as the segregated south of the U.S., and countries such as South Africa, where "racial supremacy" was the norm.

Today, neither does segregation exist in the U.S. nor apartheid in South Africa. The notion of racial supremacy has become an international outcast, even though sporadic manifestations of old attitudes linger, as for example in the recent German political formulation, "Kinder statt Inder," which implied that people coming from India were less than human. However, in practically all of western societies, discrimination based on color has practically disappeared, even though there are occasional "glass ceilings" that limit the upward mobility of those with a higher level of cutaneous pigment. Once identified, these are pulled down. The result has been that in advanced western societies such as the U.S. and Israel, those whose ethnicity comes from India have frequently bested others from locations in Europe.While "Race Supremacists" have been under attack from the civilized world, and are either extinct or on the defensive, another brand of hate crime flourishes undisturbed, even in countries that are the allies of the West. This is "Religious Supremacy," the belief that those practicing a particular faith have the same "right" to discriminate against others that "White Supremacists" in the past saw as their God-given privilege to consign the rest to a permanently inferior status. In states governed by religious supremacists, those belonging to other faiths lack the freedoms enjoyed by the privileged. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, those who do not belong to the Wahabbi creed lack the elemental right to build their own houses of worship and to openly pray in them. There are mosques in Israel and the U.S. that have Wahabbist elements in them, but no trace of a synagogue or even a church in Saudi Arabia. In another such country, Pakistan, the legal and electoral system itself discriminates against minorities. While in the past color was the engine of injustice, these days it is creed. What is taking place in countries that discriminate against minorities is as vile as what was seen - and demolished - in the segregated U.S. south or in apartheid-era South Africa.

Indeed, while the United Nations General Assembly has several times discussed apartheid and racism in general, it has thus far been as silent as western and other chancelleries in identifying the discrimination and segregation that takes place in "religious supremacist" countries. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, those who are Shiite, non-Wahabbi Sunni, non-Muslim or women suffer severe discrimination, and are denied the rights that are given to adherents of the Wahabbi creed, who alone are permitted to set up houses of worship and who are given preferential treatment in several ways. This is a "hate crime" as noxious in its logic and effects as racial segregation. Indeed, in that particular country, even Wahabbis do not yet have the right to vote. The entire authority within the state adheres -- naturally -- to close relatives of the founder of the Saudi faith, Abdul Ibn Wahhab. While Khomeinism in Iran is a close cousin of Wahabbism in its world-view, there are Sunni houses of worship in Iran, and even a few synagogues, although in other respects the two countries are alike. In both, an unelected group controls the government, and bases this usurpation of power from the hands of the people on religious grounds. Indeed, Khomeinism is as much a perversion of Shiite Islam as Wahabbism is of Sunni Islam. 

Ekalavya’s Thumb (The Asian Age)

By M.D. Nalapat


The Mahabharata has the story of Ekalavya, a youth who learnt archery on his
own, but accepted Dronacharya as his guru. When the teacher saw that this
lowborn youth was far more proficient than Prince Arjuna, he demanded
Ekalavya’s thumb as his dakshina, thus cutting away the competition. In the
assembly of nuclear weapons states, India the underdog has consistently been
pressured by the United States, China and the EU to cut off its nuclear
thumb. Nine Prime Ministers have refused to succumb to that demand.


Now the tenth — Manmohan Singh — is on course to emasculate nuclear India,
through the signing of an agreement with President George W. Bush of the US
that, if implemented, will reduce India’s indigenous nuclear programme, both
civilian and military, to a state of dependency on the goodwill of other
countries and harmlessness towards those powers that have the capability of
launching a nuclear attack on the billion-plus population of a country that
Manmohan Singh has sworn on oath to defend.


Since the Singh-Bush nuclear agreement was arrived at on July 18 this year,
there has been a steady patter of articles from experts, almost all
laudatory. The writers are all honourable men, and with very few exceptions,
they have spent years or at the least several months in the US imbibing the
strategic thought of that remarkable country. It must have been painful to
accept the charity of foundations and institutes, and to always be aware
that India is a country much less powerful and very, very much poorer than
the US.


Small wonder that any sign, even a symbolic one, of recognition gets prized.
No surprise that the very act of stroking becomes a desirable reward in
itself. India is a Third World country with a middle class possessing First
World intellects, the owners of which go about with angst in their souls, an
ache relieved only by pats on the head, by promises that they will — at last
— be treated as serious people.


As one of the two Burnses (both US under-secretaries of state), who spoke at
a recent hearing of the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, simpered
smugly (aware that his words would fall as honey on the respect-thirsty
strategic experts whose op-ed pieces are so necessary for Manmohan Singh to
sell his sell-out to the Indian people), India has at last reached, if not
adulthood, then teenager status by signing the nuclear agreement.


Once the country’s nuclear programme has been completely starved and gutted
in a decade, the same breed of officials will declare the country grown up.
The naked emperor would be humoured as though he had on attire more
substantial than skin.


According to domestic backers of the July 18 agreement, the deal “proved”
that the US had put the Cold War behind it, and graciously condescended to
overlook such peccadilloes as the Non Aligned Movement, the axis with the
USSR and Nehruvian socialism.


>From now onwards, realism and self-interest would lie at the core of India’s
foreign policy, not an Alice in Wonderland capacity to act as though the
imaginary were in fact the verities, a tendency to ignore the real in the
making of policy. Post 7/18, New Delhi would be treated on par with London,
Paris, Moscow, Beijing and of course Washington in the nuclear field,
although the change would be informal, there would be a live-in relationship
rather than a marriage, but there would be children, and these would have
full rights of inheritance.


In other words, India would have the same status as the P-5 in that little
matter of the Additional Protocol of the IAEA. There would be no hurdles on
its right to extract fuel rods from civilian reactors for military use, for
example. Meanwhile, Uncle Bush would make sure that the country’s nuclear
power industry was enabled to import technology and materiel as freely as
India’s rival in Asia, China, although Dubya drew the line when it came to
New Delhi’s exporting nuclear technology with the abandon of Beijing.


Indeed, exports were to be totally banned. But that, the experts assured us,
was hardly needed, for the country would need to keep for itself all the
technology it had developed, together with the bounty supplied by the
beneficence of Washington. Soon, energy shortages would become a
rapidly-lessening memory as the US-boosted Indian nuclear power sector
revved up.


In the next year, Manmohan Singh would stand alongside Tony Blair, Jacques
Chirac and Angela Merkel as one of the international Big Boys, so what if at
home he was merely a servitor (although one shown every external sign of
deference) of the Nehru family? As Burns 1 (or it may be Burns 2) lisped,
India was growing up. Hooray!


Alas for the cheerleaders, that was the only remark from the two Burnses
that could — by a wild flight of the imagination — be termed as favourable
to India. One after the other, they enumerated to the members of the US
Senate what Manmohan Singh had committed his country to do on July 18,
2005:l India would not have the same rights under the Additional Protocol as
those given to the P-5. Indeed, it would be Washington — acting through the
IAEA in Vienna — that would decide on which of this country’s nuclear
facilities was to be placed under fullscope safeguards.


Once having handed over its nuclear jewels to the very powers that had been
seeking to gut India’s nuclear programme for four decades, not to speak of
the clueless Manmohan Singh, no future government in New Delhi would have
the authority to snatch back these facilities from the slow asphyxiation
that fullscope safeguards would condemn them to. Of course, there would not
be any such condition imposed on the US.


If Dubya or any of his successors decided that even the peanut concessions
offered to New Delhi by the July agreement needed to be cut off, they could
walk away from the deal and leave India with its commitments intact, as any
safeguards set in place would need to be “in perpetuity.” That those close
allies, the US Arms Control lobby and China regard even the Bush-Singh deal
as overly generous to India shows the malevolence with which the two view
this country’s anaemic but persistent efforts to create for itself a
defensive capability against nuclear attack.


l India would have to achieve in practice what has never before been
attempted by any other power, and which is regarded as financially ruinous
and technologically impractical by those who have a better knowledge of
nuclear physics than two individuals who worked — overtly and otherwise —
both on the details of the nuclear agreement as well as on its selling to
the Prime Minister: foreign secretary Shyam Saran and Planning Commission
deputy chairman M.S. Ahluwalia.


As the US side would need to make its peanut deliveries only after this task
had been carried out to the satisfaction of Senator Biden’s friends in the
Arms Control lobby, clearly anybody who held his or her breath waiting for
this assistance would choke to death, the same fate envisaged for the
indigenous Indian nuclear programme. Even assuming that the impossible task
of civil-military separation were carried out by India, Washington would be
obligated to provide only “purely civilian-use” technologies.


The 7/18 agreement’s wordage is clear that any future nuclear-related
cooperation between the US and India would completely exclude any
cooperation that could in any way assist the development or production of
nuclear weapons. In view of the dual-use nature of much atomic equipment and
process, this would mean that bathtubs or at the most chemical toilets would
be the only big items to come in as reward for destroying the country’s
nuclear industry.


* In order to earn the heavenly privilege of clasping hands with Merkel,
Chirac and Blair (although as the fraction in the proposed
five-and-a-twentieth schema set out on July 18) as they waited for Bush to
emerge from his trout fishing, Manmohan Singh would have to ensure that
India unfailingly tagged along behind the US and the EU as the two went
about rewarding India’s tormentors (e.g. Pakistan) and tormenting New
Delhi’s allies (e.g. Iran).


As in the case of its own nuclear facilities, it would not be India that
would decide who its friends were and who foes, but the White House. As a
country with a stake one-twentieth of that enjoyed by Paris and London,
could not realistically be described as a US ally or even a quasi-ally,
India would revert to historical form and once again become a dependency,
certainly in the fields of foreign policy and nuclear technology.


* The increased costs of the (almost certainly futile) efforts at separating
civilian from military facilities and the blockages created by such a
differentiation would slow down and finally kill off the country’s
thorium-based fast breeder reactor programme. This would remove the best
chance India has got of ensuring a reliable and reasonably-priced energy
source within a decade.


7/18 would also gut the country’s R&D in the nuclear field thanks to the
IAEA-imposed barriers on almost all the country’s present nuclear assets.
This would rapidly make India as dependent on foreign technology and
assistance in the nuclear field as Brazil, South Africa or Taiwan. Whether
Manmohan Singh’s successors will remain invited to western summits after the
objective of destroying India’s indigenous nuclear programme is achieved is
an open question. Perhaps they would, for comic relief.


* India would also have to immediately and fully cap its fissile material
capability, thus becoming the first country in the world to — in effect —
accede to the Fissile Materials Cutoff Treaty. This would deal the final
blow to its military capability, which would anyway have become
significantly attenuated by the drastic separation of civilian from military
facilities, and the stopping of any help of the one to the other.


Any chance of putting in place a credible nuclear deterrent — even a
minuscule one, not to talk of a minimum stockpile — would evaporate. A
recitation of the extent to which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh — who has
abandoned economics to Sonia Gandhi and the Communists and is these days
concentrating on foreign and security policies, about which he is amateur to
a degree dangerous to the country’s interests — would go, could go on for
much, much longer.


Suffice it to close with Iran, the country that — because of the obstruction
of US ally Pakistan — is India’s only land bridge to Central Asia, and which
is a primary source of energy supplies. Tony Blair, George W. Bush and
others responsible for the US-UK strategy in Iraq repeat endlessly that
Saddam Hussein “fooled the world” by saying that he had WMD, when in fact
the Iraqi dictator several times publicly admitted that he did not.


In the same mendacious way, the same clique claims that Iran is “in breach
of international obligations,” when the reality is that Tehran is not (thus
far) in violation of the NPT. The centrifuges imported by Tehran from
Pakistan are technically unable to produce weapons-grade uranium, a fact
known to any physics graduate. Of course, while the proliferating Pakistan
is rewarded, including very generously by Manmohan Singh, Iran is getting
readied for slaughter.


Till today, the Shia community worldwide has almost totally kept aloof from
the type of violence that has brought such a bad name to a great faith. This
may change. Shias may join Sunnis in the terrorist brigades, while Manmohan
Singh jets off to London for that delicious photo-op.


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