God awful

Over 100 MPs but not one sane voice and a sinister design 8212; that8217;s how the Congress must view the Left-Samajwadi Party joint venture on Iran. The ruling party8217;s response must match this reality: the Congress8217;s best and only option is to ask Prakash Karat and Mulayam Singh Yadav to back off. It will be for Karat and not for the Congress to decide what price should be paid for ideological 8220;deviation8221;.

But there8217;s something more dangerous in the Left-SP enterprise than the implied political threat to the UPA. That danger is the virtually explicit communalisation of foreign policy. For Karat to talk of Lucknow being close to Tehran is breathtakingly irresponsible. That this was said in the presence of invited Shia clergy and that a part of the argument is based on the alleged 8220;feelings8221; of India8217;s Shia population show not only how little the Left understands but also how little it cares. Do these drum beaters of secularism know that once programmed, a communal virus always wipes out the bulk of sanity from the polity8217;s hard disk? That reformatting is, at the least, terribly painful? Rajiv Gandhi appeased Muslim communalists with Shah Bano and their Hindu counterparts with the Ayodhya shilanyas. From Shah Bano to Imrana and from Ayodhya to Gujarat 8212; the Rajiv created pathogens are still with us. Now, if foreign policy gets a 8216;Muslim8217; angle and, therefore, demands are raised for a 8216;Hindu angle8217; 8212; why forget Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, animists 8212; we8217;ll court revanchism at home and ridicule abroad. No ridicule from the Iranians, of course. They are quite happy to have de facto unpaid lobbyists in India. Happier still since the SP has joined the Left in the great revolutionary battle against America.

Would that the Left persuade Mulayam to do something less grand 8212; like implementing VAT, which was designed after all by Bengal8217;s Marxist finance minister. The BJP, though VAT-blind, must be chuffed by the Left8217;s discovery of religion in foreign policy. That is one thing for the Congress to think about. The point for the ruling party, however, is not just survival of the government but survival, in the face of the Lucknow charter, of some fundamental tenets of governance.