In threatening the government that he will not “countenance” its vote against Iran’s nuclear proliferation at the International Atomic Energy Agency last week, CPM General Secretary Prakash Karat commits three egregious errors. The least offensive one is his selective choice of facts in describing the Iranian nuclear imbroglio. While thundering in defence of Iran’s right to develop nuclear energy under the NPT, the CPM conveniently ignores the most important fact. That Iran was caught cheating in its secret pursuit of an undeclared nuclear enrichment programme, which would have given it the capacity to produce atomic weapons. If Iran was only interested in peaceful nuclear energy, it could have developed the enrichment programme in the open. Karat refuses to address the primary question of Iran’s nuclear weapon ambition. Equally invidious has been the CPM’s attempt to create new “facts” by blaming Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for a considered and collective decision of the Congress leadership. Second, while giving a clean chit to Iran, Karat has nothing but contempt for India’s own effort to gain access to atomic energy through the Indo-US nuclear pact, which he calls “a mess of pottage”. This is not surprising. While the CPM supported Soviet and Chinese nuclear weapons (they were progressive, you see), it consistently opposed India’s nuclear programme, including the May 1998 tests. With India now poised to break out of its nuclear isolation, the CPM wants to destroy India’s long-standing diplomatic effort to regain access to international nuclear energy cooperation. That the CPM has been so far out of the mainstream on national security issues brings us to the third and worst error on Karat’s part. Forget the irony in the Communists — who much like American cold warriors derided Jawaharlal Nehru’s non-alignment as immoral — today speaking in the name of an “independent” foreign policy. That political gall is nothing in comparison to Karat’s audacity in trying to dictate foreign policy terms to the Congress, which has led the nation for much of its life since independence. However, the real question is whether the Congress leadership has the courage to state that it does not need lessons from the Left in either patriotism or diplomacy. If the Congress does not quickly call Karat’s bluff in economic and foreign policy issues, the credibility of the UPA government will be in tatters.
