April 28, 2008	Monday	Rabi-us-Sani 21, 1429

Archives Write to Mr. Jawed Naqvi

Jawed Naqvi

WHEN Iran’s President Ahmedinejad makes a brief stopover in Delhi this week he won’t have much time for vacuous pleasantries. At the first opportunity he should ask Prime Minister Manmohan Singh if the Indian leader has made up his mind about where the money is going to come from for the multi-billion dollar gas pipeline everyone is making so much noise about. For all the talk between the oil ministers of India and Pakistan in Islamabad last week about the “progress” on the IPI project someone should find out from Dr Singh if he has resolved the doubts he had expressed very starkly about raising finances for it in the face of American opposition.

Only if there is a positive and unambiguous answer from the man who had virtually poured cold water on the very feasibility of the Iran-Pakistan-India project can we conclude that all sides are finally sincerely involved in it. Else the oil ministers’ meeting in Islamabad would come across merely as a cover for a potentially disastrous deal on the so-called TAPI project involving Turkmenistan and Afghanistan instead of Iran. TAPI would take us directly into an American-led war in Afghanistan. IPI requires all stakeholders to confront the United States. Is Dr Singh ready to take a principled stand if that requires him to suspend his politically costly embrace of President Bush and his militarism?

It’s a problem. But Mr Ahmedinejad’s stopover would still offer the Indian government other possibilities. It has already given the Congress party an opportunity to assert a foreign policy whereby it is at least seen to be standing up to US hectoring on the visit. Then there is the global economic crisis rooted in America’s mishandling of its own credit and fiscal policies, not to forget the ruinous wars it is engaged in.

The slump in America’s fortunes has shaken the ground on which Finance Minister P. Chidambaram had tabled an ambitious budget on Feb 29. “The growth rate will be 8.7 per cent - although I am confident that we will maintain the average of 8.8 per cent. The drivers of growth continue to be ‘services’ and ‘manufacturing’, which are estimated to grow at 10.7 per cent and 9.4 per cent, respectively,” Mr Chidambaram had declared. Now he is coping with soaring food prices, high petrol subsidies and a wider unrelenting inflation looking ready to stay here. There is no prescription in the neo-con arsenal to dispel the gathering. Naturally the knives are out for the prime minister, and Gandhi-Nehru scion Rahul Gandhi had to personally step in to save the day for him.

Even if Mr Ahmedinejad may not be inclined to bail out Dr Singh for the two votes he ordered to be cast against Iran at the IAEA, the Iranian leader could yet help the Congress party regain its political composure. This can be done without communal politics. For Iran, not without the nudging of certain corporate supporters of the Congress, had once made the foolish mistake of offering a communally tinged support for Rajiv Gandhi. Then foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati’s undiplomatic overture was made in a pre-arranged interview with an Indian correspondent in which Tehran offered its support for Mr Gandhi’s electoral campaign in 1989. He lost the race by a fair margin.

Today if we see a flip flop in India on ties with Iran the reason possibly lies with three leaders who were in Prime Minister Singh’s cabinet when he took over in May four years ago. Messrs Natwar Singh, Arjun Singh and Mani Shankar Aiyer could be broadly identified as anti-imperialist Nehruvians. Natwar Singh was first to be sidelined and then expelled over corruption charges. He was last seen flirting with the BJP such was his bitterness at the orchestrated expulsion. Then Mani Shankar Aiyer, perhaps the most outspoken critic of the double scourge of communalism and his own government’s neo-con economic wizardry, was insulted in stages. They first took away the petroleum ministry portfolio from him and later divested him of the sports ministry too.

Arjun Singh somehow managed to survive the ever-consolidating assault from within the increasingly rightist Congress, his popularity with the minorities holding him in good stead in an election year. The three formed the left-leaning back-up arrangement for the Congress behemoth. But the main challenger to the prime minister’s job, if ever there was a vacancy, was not anyone from among the three but from Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee. He has long fancied himself as a suitable candidate for the top job. Mr Mukherjee’s electoral chances in the next fray would depend on the goodwill and support from the Left Front. Naturally his statement on Mr Ahmedinejad’s visit was the most clear-throated plea for India to be left alone to conduct its ties with Tehran.

When US State Department spokesman Tom Casey on Monday expressed the hope that India would ask the visiting president to suspend Iran’s uranium enrichment activities, Mr Mukherjee told parliament: “We are suggesting to the US, do not take upon yourself the task of determining whether Iran is manufacturing nuclear weapons or not. Let the IAEA decide.” India’s foreign ministry spokesman too said that India and Iran did not need guidance on how to conduct their bilateral relations. It would be interesting to see how the spokesman Mr Navtej Sarna handles the fallout from the bold, if welcome, Indian reaction when he soon takes up his new job as Delhi’s envoy to Israel. In any case India should not forget how Iran had bailed it out at the United Nations Human Rights Commission’s annual session in Geneva in 1994. As former Iran hand at the Indian foreign ministry, Mr M. Bhadrakumar has observed that though “Persians may find it to be in bad taste to be blunt and forthright on such delicate issues as trust and betrayal” they would not easily let it pass either.

“The Kashmir valley was burning witnessing some of the bloodiest violence in its unhappy history. The country itself was panting and heaving from the bloodletting of communal violence hidden mediaeval passions were tearing it apart,” recalled Mr Bhadrakumar. “Internationally too, the climate was uncertain. Boris Yeltsin’s Russia was lurching toward the West in drunken stupor, and there was a big question mark as to the availability of a ‘Soviet’ veto if the Kashmir file ever again got reopened in the UN’s business dealings.”

Technically, if the UNHRC in Geneva adopted a resolution condemning India for grave human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir, a pathway would have opened for any of India’s detractors (not only Pakistan) for referral of the ‘Kashmir problem’ to the UN in New York. It was then that prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao sent the ailing foreign minister Dinesh Singh to plead with Iran for help.

The assessment in the foreign policy establishment in Delhi at that time was that in the event of the Kashmir resolution coming up in Geneva, it had a strong possibility of getting adopted. The draft resolution enjoyed the support of the 54 member states of the Organisation of Islamic conference. At India’s behest, Iran aborted the OIC move by proclaiming that India and Pakistan were its friends and it would not be proper for anyone to take the issue between its friends to be pontificated upon by anyone else.

President Ahmedinejad’s visit is taking place in an election year when Prime Minister Singh’s foreign policy and economic prescriptions are unravelling at the seams. It is also coming at a time when India’s political morality would be tested should a daily verbal charge by the United States and Israel turn into a military assault on Iran. By holding the key to the way the standoff plays out in the Gulf, President Ahmedinejad in fact controls the electoral fortunes of the United States and also of India. A war will almost certainly deepen India’s economic crisis and worsen the prospects for its government to return to power. It’s time for the Congress party to understand this.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com