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.


[Original link dead, can also be found on: http://www.indiarightsonline.com/Sabrang/india7.nsf/38b852a8345861dd65256a980059289d/f4287523fe4f4bd1e52570cf00072f5a?OpenDocument ]

India and the U.S. as Allies (Beijing Review)

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently visited the United States, where his country won a strong endorsement as a rising power. The two countries issued a joint statement, pledging that they will cooperate in hi-tech and space exploration industries. In an interview with BEIJING REVIEW, MD Nalapat, professor of geopolitics at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education in India and UNESCO Peace Chair, commented on the closer ties between India and the United States.

BEIJING REVIEW (BR): Could you give your comments on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to the United States and the development trends in India-U.S. relations?

MD Nalapat (MN): Although there have been many favorable comments these days on the “rise” of India, the fact is that it is still a very weak country. More than 300 million citizens are close to starvation levels, and around that number are still illiterate. The physical infrastructure in India—roads, airports, energy, ports—are still of very low standard, while several bureaucratic obstacles to development continue. In India, the media and the courts consider it suspicious if quick decisions are taken. As in the case of every big project, there are interested individuals who make allegations of corruption, even when the project is in the public interest. As a result, big monopolies and dishonest business groups bribe officials to delay or even destroy new proposals floated by rival companies. Crooked politicians and bureaucrats can collect a lot of illegal cash for blocking projects, while at the same time, nobody will bring them to account. In India, delay is seen as normal.

The fact is that even in 2005, India has not reached the level of economic reform that China, under the wise leadership of Deng Xiaoping, enjoyed by 1985. Despite this, I am highly optimistic about India’s future. The reason is that both the sources of wealth as well as the geopolitical situation have at last moved in favor of India.

Increasingly, services and “knowledge industries” are displacing manufacturing as engines of prosperity. These do not need the same amount of physical infrastructure as manufacturing, so India’s handicap does not matter so much. Secondly, although some unwise minds in the Union Finance Ministry are seeking to place constraints on the information technology, services and knowledge sectors, they have not been affected by a slowdown in growth, the reason being the expanding demand for services that the highly trained, English-speaking Indian people are well equipped to provide.

In my view, relations between the United States and India are likely to develop into a full alliance, such as what the United States has with Japan. Although some political parties in India oppose this, the rising middle class in India welcomes such a development and will give it strong support. The new “Cooperation in Farming” announced by President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Singh will help convince farmers also to support this, while industrial workers will be happy at the extra jobs that will come when New Delhi and Washington become close allies. Hence, in my view, those opposing an India-U.S. alliance will not be able to succeed in stopping what geopolitical changes are making possible

(BR): It seems that the United States is now aiming to boost India as a counterbalance against China’s rise. However, Singh said at the end of his U.S. visit that close India-U.S. ties would not come at the expense of Pakistan or China. How do you evaluate the U.S.-China-India triangle?

(MN): Rather than stand by and do nothing while a single power grows in Asia to a level where it becomes as influential as the United States in the Americas during the 19th century, many policymakers in several countries would like to see India reach as close to China as possible, and would be ready to help such a process. Thus, while China will have the disadvantage of a “headwind” caused by a negative reaction to its rise, especially military, India is beginning to get the benefits of the favorable “tailwind” caused by a desire in many to see that the country does not lag behind China.

In my view, it is the “China factor” that has played the biggest role in the increasing international attention given to India by the United States, although this will be denied by the officials of both countries. You will remember that when the United States and Pakistan were active against the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan, they denied to the end that they were in fact doing what they were doing, ensuring the defeat of Moscow. Of course, there are other reasons as well, including the importance of India as a source of skill for the Knowledge Economy. Has the fact that India is the world’s most populous democracy played a key role in the transformation of attitudes by Washington toward New Delhi? I do not think so. India has been a democracy since 1947, and yet has been discriminated against by the United States repeatedly, including the transfer of technology. Prime Minister Singh has got the benefit of the shift in U.S. attitude and priorities in favor of India, though it is a fact that he himself is a brilliant scholar who recognizes the substantial benefits that India can get out of partnership with the United States.

About statements, I always look at “facts on the ground” rather than statements. The facts on the ground are that India is trying to compete with China in markets such as the United States, seeking for example that Wal-Mart source more of its supply from India, securing energy supplies and technology and attracting foreign investment. The relationship between the two countries is more competitive than collaborative.

(BR): The U.S. policy toward India’s nuclear ambition has changed a lot. Opponents said that Bush’s proposal would undermine global nuclear safeguards. What are your comments?

(MN): Global nuclear safeguards have been shown to be ineffective in stopping proliferation. Both North Korea and Pakistan have shown that the existing non-proliferation regime is often unable to stop the flow of dangerous material and technology across borders. India has an indigenous nuclear and missile program that cannot be affected by sanctions. The United States has understood this, and has cleverly decided to work with India in order to stop New Delhi from selling nuclear technology or developing its own “fast bred thorium-based” reactors without any U.S. leverage. Although some scholars say that the Bush-Singh nuclear accord is a defeat for the non-proliferation lobby, the fact is that the United States has no other option. Thirty years of sanctions have failed to stop India from developing nuclear technology. It is good that they have accepted this reality rather than behave like Don Quixote tilting at windmills on his donkey, which is what the non-proliferation “experts” are doing in the case of India.

Both Washington and New Delhi will, I expect, work closely together to ensure that cross-border proliferation gets stopped. All sincere friends of India should welcome getting India on board as an ally in the battle against the spread of dangerous technologies.

(BR): How would India balance its relations with Russia and the United States? Is there a preference or a priority?

(MN): Russia will always remain a close friend and brotherly ally of India. There is no contradiction between a new alliance with Washington and the old alliance with Moscow. In my view, as India develops as a result of the favorable international situation, Russia will find it of more value as a partner than if New Delhi were to remain backward and isolated.

(BR): How do you view India’s role in the UN? What are your opinions on India’s bid for a permanent UN Security Council seat?

(MN): Frankly, I find it difficult to understand why the government of India is spending so much money, time and attention on becoming a permanent member of the UN Security Council. India has risen despite the fact that it has only a very small formal position in the present UN structure. Of course, bureaucrats will be happy [if India becomes a permanent member of the Security Council] because a few more of them will get high-paying UN jobs. But this will be of no relevance at all to the population of India, especially the poor. Of course, if France, Russia and Britain can be members, India too deserves a seat. However, to me the expansion of India-U.S. cooperation or the greater understanding between India and China are much more important than a UN seat, and I wish the government of India would pay more attention to such issues than spend so much effort begging the international community to accommodate India in the Security Council.

(Beijing Review, Vol.48 No.31, 4 Aug 2005) [Interview]

http://www.bjreview.cn/EN/En-2005/05-31-e/w-3.htm

America's China Blindness (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

NEW DELHI, June 21 (UPI) -- Hard times are tough, but good times can be even worse. Since the Vietnam defeat in 1975, the United States has not suffered a serious overt blow to its military power, with the result there has been no serious effort at reconfiguring strategies in a context in which India and China displace Europe as the geopolitical pivot of the Eurasian landmass.

Over the coming decade, the "European premium" that has enabled the countries of the West to enjoy a standard of life far in excess of their productive capacities, or future potential, will gradually erode. Only the countries of East Asia and West Asia are victims to this premium now. For the most part, both Arab and Sinic societies are in a time warp. They are unwilling to accept that the center of excellence is shifting from Europe to Asia and North America.

However even they are changing slowly so a secular decline in the standard of living within Europe seems inevitable.

Due of the momentum created by its size, the United States has been able to shrug off the effect of mistakes in policy, creating for itself the illusion it still has time on its side. The fact is 2005 is the equivalent of 1905. The world is about a decade from a possible major international conflagration, one that is likely to be centered in East Asia.

Oil Conspiracy Theory (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPUR, India, May 31 (UPI) -- Nature and the "street" both abhor a vacuum, and even after Sept. 11, 2001, it is those active in the "War of Revenge Against the Crusades" who are more adept at crafting tales designed to link the United States with the unemployment, rage and perception of helplessness that provides recruits to the jihad.

While conspiracy theories that seek to "prove" that the United States -- together with those familiar villains, the "Zionists" -- is engaged in a war against Islam, thus far such street gossip has permeated only the Muslim countries, principally Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan. The rest of the world has not been infected with this virus.

Indeed, a case can be made that the United States is more popular today in the poorer parts of the globe than it is in Europe. Unlike the period from the 1950s to the 1980s, when the United States was the target of the resentments and insecurities felt by those recently freed from colonization, from the time cable television spread in the mid-1980s,"street" perceptions of the United States outside the Muslim world have improved steadily. In the words of Jairam Ramesh, an Indian economist, while the cry may still be "Yankee, go home!", to this is added, "but take me with you."

For a superpower, the United States has been demonstrably inept in factoring in psychological attitudes and reflexes in countries visited by U.S. "experts" only in the safety of air-conditioned hotel and conference rooms. Thus, in Iraq the United States appointed an American "administrator" and Iraqi "advisers," when common sense would have indicated that it ought to have been the other way around.

Iran's Unlikely Champion (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPAL, India, March 23 (UPI) -- Unlike its Sunni counterpart, the theology of which has often been used by autocrats to profess a divine sanction for their license, Shiite Islam had at its theological core the concept of the separation of mosque from state.

The philosophy was clear that until the 12th imam of legend returned from his occultation to take over governance, the clergy were to leave temporal matters alone. It took nearly a thousand years for this tradition to get diluted when, in 1501, the Safavids installed Shiite Islam as the religion of the state.

Almost a half a century later, the Shiite tradition of separation of temporal from spiritual got wholly subverted by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who implemented his innovation of a "Velayet-i-Faqih." He -- in the same way as Sunni rulers -- had "divine" sanction to run the administration the way he saw it. This perversion of genuine Shiite tradition has resulted in a crisis of identity in Iran, where those who can be accurately described as "Khomeinist" rather than Shiite or even Muslim rule in the name of the creed they have rendered unrecognizable from its roots.

Given the tension that has existed between Shiite and Sunni Islam from the death of the Prophet Mohammad in AD 632, it is remarkable how closely "Khomeinism" follows in its chemistry and practices a like perversion of Sunni Islam that was invented by Abdul Wahhab, who died in the 18th century, and has now supplanted Islam as the state religion of Saudi Arabia.

Not Our Problem (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPAL, India, March 1 (UPI) -- The Maldives is a tiny group of islands nestling in the Indian Ocean that got into the news only because of the Dec. 26 tsunami. For years it has been the focus of concerted NGO action designed to convert the regime into a genuine democracy, with political parties and a Westminster-style parliament where the two sides glower across the aisle at each other.

India has shown that multi-party democracy can work even in conditions of illiteracy and poverty. The country borrowed heavily from British political institutions, even while retaining most of the administrative and judicial infrastructure left behind in 1947.

Another country that could succeed in such a transformation is Iraq, which has a sizeable middle class and a national consciousness based on the centuries of civilization in the region, beginning with Mesopotamia. To interpolate from this that a similar graft would succeed in the very different scale of the Maldives may be a mistake.

A rough rule of thumb would be that it takes a minimum population of 5 million in order to create the diversity that is called for by a multi-party democratic system. A lesser number would not be able to sustain the spread of debate and contain it within bounds that do not result in widening fissures within the society.

To take the example of the Maldives again, it is a fact that the Maymoon Abdul Gayoom regime is paternalistic and lacks a significant machinery to monitor and respond to public opinion. It is equally a fact that the Maldives is a moderate state with an overwhelming Muslim majority, and that President Gayoom has thus far succeeded in keeping in check Islamists funded by Pakistani, Malaysian and Saudi Arabian religious charities. It is this visible secularism that has motivated such intervention, which has succeeded in creating a small but very vocal group of democracy activists that are calling for an Islamist state.