When I find Marxists, Islamists, Hindutva’s ultra-nationalists and liberals of the bleeding-hearted sort in the same team, I instinctively head to the other side. So it is with the nuclear deal. I support it intuitively because the gang mentioned above oppose it. If you have been following its progress, you would have noticed that they oppose it on the grounds that the deal harms India’s national interest. Really? Does it harm India’s interest or the vested interests of those who oppose it? I have avoided writing on the nuclear deal so far because most of the stuff that has appeared in our own newspapers has been written by ‘experts’ and has been too convoluted and technical for this humble columnist to take issue with. If I write on the subject this week, it is because of an editorial that appeared in the Herald Tribune last Monday titled ‘A bad deal with India’. It urged the US Congress to reject the deal because it benefits India without the United States getting anything back: “The deal was deeply flawed from the start. And it has been made even worse by a newly negotiated companion agreement that lays out the technical details for nuclear commerce. Congress should reject the agreement and demand that the administration or its successor negotiate a new one that does not undermine efforts to restrain the spread of nuclear weapons.” How interesting that outside India the deal should be seen as heavily weighted in India’s favour. China and Pakistan, not known to have India’s national interest at heart, both oppose it openly and noisily. And writers in the western media routinely oppose it because it appears to allow India backdoor entry into the nuclear club without furthering the interests of non-proliferation. But inside India it is condemned as a sellout. Both our Marxist parties have opposed it from the start and last week when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said further changes were ‘non-negotiable’, the comrades started frothing at the mouth. Prakash Karat made threatening noises that were belligerent even by his own high standards and Gurudas Dasgupta of the CPI was reported in this newspaper as saying, “It’s the policy of the US to pit one country against the other. Here they are pitting China against India.” A revealing comment if ever there was one. Do our Marxists have India’s national interests in mind or are they protecting those of China? As for Hindutva’s warriors, their opposition is not worth analysing because it sounds too much as if it’s based on the gripe that they would have liked to have done the deal instead. Without going into how many more bombs the deal will allow us to make and how much spent fuel we can reprocess, may I say here that if the deal helps us into a closer military relationship with the United States, we benefit. If all we get is civilian nuclear technology to help us solve our desperate energy problems, then that is good enough as well. In more general terms, I believe that the deal brings to an end the paranoid anti-Americanism on which Indians of my generation were bred. We have more in common with the United States than with almost any other country in the world and rarely have we needed each other’s help more. We are both open, democratic societies under threat from a political ideology that promotes theocratic totalitarianism. Al Qaeda and its evil offshoots routinely announce in their hate-filled videos that idol-worshiping India is as much their enemy as the West. There have been enough jehadi attacks on Indian soil to prove that they mean business. The namby-pamby response of our government has shown time and time again that we are incapable of winning this war on our own. Then there is the problem that the war against Islamism is no longer about religion, it is about a political idea that is being forced down our gullet in South Asia. Afghanistan is in turmoil with the Taliban not just resurgent but in a position to take foreign hostages and get away with killing them. Pakistan is in turmoil with its own jehadis showing all signs that they no longer take orders from the general and Bangladesh has quietly become a jehadi den. In our own proudly secular land we see signs everywhere of a disturbing inflow of funds from mysterious foreign benefactors of the jehad. At no stage during Dr Manmohan Singh’s tenure has anyone noticed that he understands the danger and knows what to do about it. About the only success his government can claim to have notched up in foreign policy terms is the nuclear deal with the United States. It could be the beginning of a significant new moment in Indian history, a moment we should embrace.
