Archappeaser
N.V. Subramanian
20 September 2013
[Manmohan Singh has lowered India.]
There is a variety of prime minister who may be called a World Bank or International Monetary Fund prime minister. He has no roots in the country, is scarcely engaged with its politics and culture, and remains alienated from the people for all the years in office. On the other hand, he is solely beholden to those that managed his appointment, the international financial institutions, which then proceed to press their extortionate claims, which are eagerly and obligingly accepted and provisioned. At a remove stands the United States, masked in fraudulent liberalism, which underwrites all such political shenanigans, and makes windfall gains in the process.
Since as long as one remembers, it was generally felt that even the most promising candidate could not become prime minister of India without the United States’ approval. Perhaps Indira Gandhi was the last exception to this rule, and the United States tried its utmost to destabilize her government. Her more significant successors thought it advisable and expedient to keep America on their side, sometimes willingly, and often due to compulsions. Prospective prime minister candidates have also made pilgrimages to Washington to stake their claim to the corner office in South Block, but America is not always easily wooed.
When Manmohan Singh was drafted as finance minister, he was not P.V.Narasimha Rao’s first choice, it being Indraprasad Gordhanbhai Patel, who for his own reasons turned down the job. Patel described Manmohan Singh as an overrated economist and an underrated politician and ten years of the United Progressive Alliance government under his leadership entirely have proved that. But even when he was first appointed, the corridors of power were full of insinuations about his World Bank-International Monetary Fund backing, and his receipt of the United States’ wholehearted blessings.
Since as long as one remembers, it was generally felt that even the most promising candidate could not become prime minister of India without the United States’ approval. Perhaps Indira Gandhi was the last exception to this rule, and the United States tried its utmost to destabilize her government. Her more significant successors thought it advisable and expedient to keep America on their side, sometimes willingly, and often due to compulsions. Prospective prime minister candidates have also made pilgrimages to Washington to stake their claim to the corner office in South Block, but America is not always easily wooed.
When Manmohan Singh was drafted as finance minister, he was not P.V.Narasimha Rao’s first choice, it being Indraprasad Gordhanbhai Patel, who for his own reasons turned down the job. Patel described Manmohan Singh as an overrated economist and an underrated politician and ten years of the United Progressive Alliance government under his leadership entirely have proved that. But even when he was first appointed, the corridors of power were full of insinuations about his World Bank-International Monetary Fund backing, and his receipt of the United States’ wholehearted blessings.
As finance minister, among other things, he choked funding for the Department of Energy’s thorium-based three-stage nuclear power programme which should keep India, on a conservative estimate, energy self-sufficient for 400 years.
That subsequently as prime minister he buried the indigenous thorium project for uranium-dependent imported reactors, principally from the United States, is all of a piece. The Indo-US nuclear deal was designed to kill the country’s home-grown technology, make it reliant on foreign uranium fuel, and thereby open the way for the cap-and-rollback of the strategic nuclear programme. The nuclear pact incorporates a voluntary no-test undertaking from India, whose fusion weapons direly need a second round of explosive detonations to remain credible deterrents. Based on the Bhopal gas tragedy experience, the Indian Parliament passed a tough nuclear liability law. Acutely distressed because it frightened American reactor manufacturers, Manmohan Singh is determined to dilute it.
Manmohan Singh is controlled by two bosses. One we all know and denounce with perfect justification. The other is the United States. People of a certain age would remember the Richie Rich comics and dollar signs showing in the eyes of some of its greedy characters. Manmohan Singh is right out of such a comic book, except that he is a deadly serious compromiser.
For nearly twenty days, it now transpires, the ministry of external affairs was in a tizzy trying to arrange a lunch meeting for Manmohan Singh with president Barack Obama. There is nothing Manmohan Singh brings to the table, except ten years of failure, and Obama anyhow had a full calendar, and had just put behind the Syria mess, where Vladimir Putin had brilliantly upstaged him. Obama was not ready for a lunch with Manmohan Singh. He was plainly uninterested. There was to be a forty-five minute meeting and that was that.The foreign office got into a pleading game. The prime minister’s image would plummet without a lunch. Breaking bread with the American president would vastly improve his standing. The United States was unmoved.
And then the Indian side came up with offers to purchase more Hercules transporters, American attack and heavy-lift helicopters, and howitzers. The Americans began relenting.To crown the appeasement effort, India offered to dilute the Indian nuclear liability law to clear the way for American reactor manufacturers. As expected, a nationwide controversy has been triggered by this decision, reminiscent of the contentious Indo-US nuclear deal, but no one is questioning the Hercules and other acquisitions especially as a means to procure a lunch meeting with Barack Obama.
Would Manmohan Singh stoop so low? This is answered by his determination to pursue peace with Nawaz Sharief despite evidence of Pakistan’s growing inimicality as it sees new opportunities arising against India as the Americans leave Afghanistan. Manmohan Singh is ready and willing to ignore all this and extend a friendly hand to the enemy for a prize that is unbelievably meagre. He is desperate to visit his ancestral village of Gah in Pakistan’s Punjab one last time before demitting office.
The prime minister, all in all, has terribly lowered India, weakened it, and made it vulnerable.
Manmohan Singh is controlled by two bosses. One we all know and denounce with perfect justification. The other is the United States. People of a certain age would remember the Richie Rich comics and dollar signs showing in the eyes of some of its greedy characters. Manmohan Singh is right out of such a comic book, except that he is a deadly serious compromiser.
For nearly twenty days, it now transpires, the ministry of external affairs was in a tizzy trying to arrange a lunch meeting for Manmohan Singh with president Barack Obama. There is nothing Manmohan Singh brings to the table, except ten years of failure, and Obama anyhow had a full calendar, and had just put behind the Syria mess, where Vladimir Putin had brilliantly upstaged him. Obama was not ready for a lunch with Manmohan Singh. He was plainly uninterested. There was to be a forty-five minute meeting and that was that.The foreign office got into a pleading game. The prime minister’s image would plummet without a lunch. Breaking bread with the American president would vastly improve his standing. The United States was unmoved.
And then the Indian side came up with offers to purchase more Hercules transporters, American attack and heavy-lift helicopters, and howitzers. The Americans began relenting.To crown the appeasement effort, India offered to dilute the Indian nuclear liability law to clear the way for American reactor manufacturers. As expected, a nationwide controversy has been triggered by this decision, reminiscent of the contentious Indo-US nuclear deal, but no one is questioning the Hercules and other acquisitions especially as a means to procure a lunch meeting with Barack Obama.
Would Manmohan Singh stoop so low? This is answered by his determination to pursue peace with Nawaz Sharief despite evidence of Pakistan’s growing inimicality as it sees new opportunities arising against India as the Americans leave Afghanistan. Manmohan Singh is ready and willing to ignore all this and extend a friendly hand to the enemy for a prize that is unbelievably meagre. He is desperate to visit his ancestral village of Gah in Pakistan’s Punjab one last time before demitting office.
The prime minister, all in all, has terribly lowered India, weakened it, and made it vulnerable.
In this context, one is reminded of Leo Amery’s outburst against Neville Chamberlain, Hitler’s appeaser, after the failed Norway campaign. Echoing Oliver Cromwell, Amery said, “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”
Go, prime minister.
Spare the country further ignominy.
Go, prime minister.
Spare the country further ignominy.
N.V.Subramanian is Editor, www.newsinsight.net and writes on politics and strategic affairs. He has authored two novels, University of Love (Writers Workshop, Calcutta) and Courtesan of Storms (Har-Anand, Delhi).
Email: envysub@gmail.com
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