PRIME Minister Manmohan Singh has done wonderful things for India without winning an election to the Lok Sabha, a reference to just one he ever contested. Now that he has clinched the eight-column, banner-headlined nuclear deal, as displayed exclusively in Indian newspapers, he might want to test his supposedly soaring popularity with the masses whose welfare his spin doctors say he is riveted to.
Last month, Congress party president Sonia Gandhi encouragingly indicated that Mr Singh would be her preferred prime ministerial candidate in the next elections that may be held before the year is out. There could be no better news for Indian democracy.
Indian people may finally get to have a say in Mr Singh`s dazzling career from a teacher to a bureaucrat and finally to the top job, which he achieved with ease and without ever troubling the ordinary voter.
Mr Singh should not be deterred by the occasional difficult question he may encounter in his electoral campaign. There could be the odd cynic disguised as a voter, not atypical for India, who may want to tease him about a link between the nuclear waiver he won for India in Vienna and the ordinary people`s daily ordeal. The linkages would vary say between his adopted state of Assam from where, of all the places, he continues to be nominated to the Rajya Sabha, and Vidarbha in Maharashtra, site of the country`s perennial rural distress.
The Assam voter is currently coping with one of the angrier assaults the Brahmaputra river otherwise routinely makes on the state. The flood-ravaged populous and poor state of Bihar may not be an ideal place either to pitch an electoral tent.
The news from Vidarbha is more tormenting though. Mr Singh would remember he recently released billions of dollars to alleviate rural distress in the form of loan waivers for small farmers caught in the enticing web of a market economy he advocates. Recently Mr Singh`s understudy, Mr Rahul Gandhi, travelled to Vidarbha and told parliament movingly about his meeting there with two women whose debt-ridden husbands had committed suicide.
On August 31, as the Indian media contingent and senior officials were flying to Vienna in anticipation of the magical nuclear waiver, a small news item on PTI tickers announced the death of nine more farmers who had killed themselves in Vidarbha.
The PTI dispatch gave a telling context to the story. “The relentless suicides of Vidarbha farmers have further intensified during the last three days as nine more suicides of farmers have been reported during the Pola festival from different parts of the region.”
“Relentless” is the word used by PTI. It quoted sources in the Vidarbha Janandolan Samiti as stressing that the dead farmers had belonged to Dalit and tribal families who were saddled with debt and experiencing acute financial crisis.
“The credit starved local cooperative banks failed to give fresh crop loans to the farmers even as Finance Minister P. Chidambaram claimed that loans are being distributed to all the distressed and debt-ridden farmers,” the agency added.
Of course Mr Manmohan Singh could always dismiss the poser as a far-fetched attempt to link two apparently unrelated events — a high-profile nuclear deal, which is claimed to have anointed India as a legitimate nuclear power without requiring it to sign the NPT, and the PTI story, which reflected the picture of relentless misery.
The question someone may ask Mr Singh is, if farmers are still killing themselves after the grandiose loan waiver then what are the reasons to believe that a nuclear waiver offers a panacea for India`s complex woes.
If the Vienna deal was needed to alleviate India`s poverty by making inexpensive and clean energy available to the masses, as Mr Gandhi tried to have us believe when he cited the examples of the two women he met in Vidarbha, it should be snowing in Delhi. A typical small farmer, the kind Mr Gandhi met, cannot afford even two units of electricity with his daily income.
Moreover, any voter can spring the obvious question at Mr Singh Since when has the United States begun to arm-twist the international community to help India tend to its poor? And talking of debt, US Ambassador David Mulford, who had worked closely with Mr Singh on the domestic and international aspects of the waiver, is better known among world economists as the person who single-handedly led Argentina into a financial trap (and handed a bonanza to Wall Street) with his debt-swap package for the Latin American country.
What was the hurry to do the deal in the fading hours of the Bush presidency? The deal has clear bipartisan support in US Congress. It has bipartisan critics too. It is illogical to insist that the new president or the new Congress would shun it.
In any case, after Vienna, the implications are that even if the US Congress fails to pass it, India could start importing uranium and nuclear technology from others. It seems to have been extremely philanthropic and selfless exercise by the United States.
Some potential voter might ask Mr Singh about this. And what was the drama over Chinese support or the lack of it for the deal?
We are given to understand by the Indian media and Indian officials that President Bush somehow arm-twisted Chinese President Hu Jintao into relenting. If that is even remotely true it is a bigger story than any other of the Bush presidency — that the president of the United States successfully bullied the president of China so that Mr Singh could tend to the country`s problems of poverty alleviation.
On the other hand, if we go by the standard analyst`s account and believe that the deal is meant to shore up India as an American surrogate against China then it would be an even greater wonder — India`s big neighbour got browbeaten into making a concession that would help bring Beijing`s own doom.
Banner headlines declared that after the Vienna endorsement India was now a legitimate member of the elite nuclear club. Aren`t we missing out something here? If India has broken through the nuclear apartheid has it ended apartheid for others?
If we go by this view, North Korea, Pakistan and Israel remain the pariahs and India has reincarnated into a higher rank as a nuclear power. We can perhaps understand some of this claim, particularly with regard to Pakistan and North Korea.
If Barack Obama wins the race he has already signalled how he would most probably treat Pakistan. North Korea is in a perpetual doghouse. But, Israel? It`s a nuclear power with probably more bombs than India, Pakistan and North Korea put together. Does it need a nuclear waiver?
Will anyone of the 45 member NSG deny it a waiver should it seek one, citing the Indian example?
Why is it difficult to accept that India is hardly ever likely to get the proximity with the United States that Israel has? For, countries like Israel, even if they are perceived as global villains, do not depend on contrived waivers for their salvation. Their clout lies deep within their own reality. That`s not how India defines its prowess. After it “passed the test” at the IAEA vote against Iran, India can at best replace Pakistan as the eastern flank of the US war machinery guarding the oil-rich Gulf. For carrying out a similar duty the Shah`s Iran had erupted into a violent revolution. Mr Manmohan Singh can expect to find that the Indian voter may be plotting a similar change, but with the offer of a secular and democratic alternative. It`s time the prime minister got a feel of real Indian democracy which has been otherwise doing all right, frequently prolonged power outages notwithstanding.
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