Check the PM

Daredevil

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Check the PM

Under Manmohan Singh, India risks becoming a US cheerleader in the UN Security Council, warns N.V.Subramanian.


2 March 2011
: While India's foreign policy mostly has been prime minister-driven, the dangers emanating from that are more now than perhaps anytime before.

The opposition which has got the UPA government in the dock on corruption and rising prices has neglected the increasing pro-US tilt of prime minister Manmohan Singh. It must act before it is too late.

Although Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, P.V.Narasimha Rao and A.B.Vajpayee, to name the country's most significant prime ministers, made seminal foreign-policy decisions, their successes/ setbacks were determined/ contained by two factors.

Because all of them were consummate politicians, intimately aware of the needs of their country, and cognizant of their limits, their decisions came out of deep understanding. Their risks usually were well-considered.

Also, India was barely rising in most of their collective tenures except perhaps in the last years of Vajpayee's term. The capacity of India to impact the world and to be impacted in turn was much less than it is now, when the stakes have grown, and when this country and China are admired/ dreaded in the same breath.

The present trouble is that Manmohan Singh is the weakest prime minister at a time when India is strongest since Independence. This contradiction is well-known and has been explained before.

For example, India's rise is strictly on account of its entrepreneurial genius, for which no government, least of all the UPA administration, can take credit. Indeed, corruption and uncontrolled inflation are denting this rise.

The reasons for Manmohan Singh's weakness are also well-advertized. He has no political base of his own and it is principally for this reason that he was selected by Sonia Gandhi for prime-ministership.

The disastrous fallouts of his weak prime-ministership are all too evident now to bear repetition.

Because he has no say in domestic affairs, Manmohan Singh was given some compensatory liberty in foreign policy-making. Since the PM is uniformly mocked and scorned in domestic political circles (forget the opposition, even Congress heavyweights poke fun at him), he pines for adulation abroad.

Some adulation genuinely comes for his international standing as an economist (although that has taken a knocking with absent solutions for India's rising inflation and peaking supply deficits). But a lot is flattery that Manmohan Singh is unable to discern and reject.

The Punjabi baley-baley-let-us-bhangra act would not move Pranab Mukherjee, for instance. But the Pakistan prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, succeeded with that and landed Manmohan Singh in a major foreign-policy embarrassment with their Sharm-el-Sheikh joint statement. To Manmohan Singh's ignominy, the Congress party dissociated from his statement.

Alongwith the Pakistanis, the Americans have realized Manmohan Singh's weakness for flattery. Apparently, the PM cannot get over his "indebtedness" to president Barack Obama for addressing Parliament, where he lectured India against trucking with the Burmese dictatorship, forgetting the shameful US record in the Middle East, where the chickens are coming home to roost.

A politician would be immune to flattery. Foreign flattery never worked with Indira Gandhi, Narasimha Rao or Vajpayee, who adroitly sidestepped American pressure to deploy troops in Iraq and to sign the CTBT after the 1998 test.

On the other hand, Manmohan Singh bends to please the Americans.

For instance, defence circles are shocked and outraged in the manner American companies, especially Boeing, are squeezing the government for fighter-jet, military helicopter, howitzer and other deals. In some cases, pressure directly is coming from the PMO.

While the Union defence minister, A.K.Anthony, is personally clean, he is tolerating rampant corruption among his officers. Secret product files and trial reports are leaking from Anthony's ministry. For some reason, the opposition has turned a blind eye to all this.

What specially worries this writer in the gamut of Indo-US relations are two areas: Pakistan and the UN Security Council. On Pakistan and particularly the Bombay-carnage investigations, the US is willing to sell Indian interests down the Indus.

According to press reports, in return for Raymond Davis, the US will give sovereign immunity to the ISI chief, Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, in the New York trial initiated by relatives of victims of the Bombay carnage.

This is of a piece with scandalous US actions related to David Coleman Headley, the Lashkar-e-Toiba scout for the Bombay carnage.

And under US pressure, India reengages Pakistan which obstructs credible court trial of the Pakistani Bombay-carnage terrorists.

The second issue relates to India's two-year UN Security Council stint which is presumably the launching pad for eventual permanent membership. This writer fears that India under Manmohan Singh will be unable to resist US pressure to support in the UNSC its reckless interventionist actions abroad.

Despite its disastrous experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US is gearing up for an invasion of Libya using its mad dictator's savagery as an excuse. Once foreign troops intervene, the Iraq story will repeat. Libyans will forget their immediate cause for a time, embrace ultra-nationalism, and turn against the occupiers. The Al-Qaeda will emerge strongly.

It is not possible for India to stop an insane invasion such as this. But in the UN Security Council, it must actively and vehemently resist it. France is already speaking out against an invasion.

The point of writing this is that the Indian opposition should wake up to the dangers of Manmohan Singh's unbridled pro-US policies and to restrain him in the UN Security Council.

On India's two-year UN Security Council record, much will ride. India's future lies in rising peacefully, and this has to be advertized in the UN Security Council for the entire world to see.

Manmohan Singh is not a politician. He does not have the sagacity of his prime-ministerial predecessors. On every foreign-policy step he seeks to take, Manmohan Singh should be examined, cautioned and checked, if necessary, by the opposition.

Much is at stake. Much can go horribly wrong.
 

Daredevil

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Guys,

check out for the articles written by this guy on the website I linked to the article. NV Subramanian writes very insightful articles on both national and foreign policy issues and seem to be quite neutral (neither pro-UPA or NDA).
 

Blackwater

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if India want to be be leader on world front or want UN sec council seat. India has to go by USA, no choice
 

Oracle

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if India want to be be leader on world front or want UN sec council seat. India has to go by USA, no choice
Patience if not inborn can be cultivated. So are many of our emotions. Leadership cannot be cultivated nor is someone born with it. Time demands it! And thus we had leaders like Netajii, V. Patel. We certainly do not need US to be a leader. Once, only once if we show Pakistan their place in this global order, will everything fall in place. I will reply to the main thread tomorrow.
 
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thakur_ritesh

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Pro-US tilt

The other day rage linked me up to a video on this russian (yuri bezmenov) who during the soviet union days was employed with the soviet embassy in new delhi who was to defect in 1970 and one thing I understood from the video was intelligence agencies buy over people by means of exploitation of their vulnerabilities or by way of ego messaging the opinion makers be they in the political setup, media, intellectuals, any and everyone is targeted who has influence and is heard (the process – slow poisoning of mind) and all this was being employed in the US with india quite literally a pithoo for them and IG their best disciple who ofcourse would demand her share of pie (IG an independent thinker, yeah right!). So was the kgb, and so would be the cia as well or possibly much more refined and interestingly I read an article on quite literally the same tactics used by the Chinese with diplomat staff stationed in their country who when they go back to their countries become good assets, help in passage of information and give the requisite spins to the policy making of a country.

I think the difference between the two would be, kgb didn't invest in the Indian opposition since there was nothing much to make of them and IG had then started acting as a dictator (thankfully Sanjay Gandhi was to show his true credentials much early with the old lady realizing her son's lunacy who was all ready to topple her and so she didn't bother continuing with the emergency much longer) but only after her downfall did they start to court the opposition but with cia they started with the bjp/nda and graduated to congress/upa and they would have by now made deep inroads amongst the two, and in here the only surviving hope remains the left but they in their anti US/anti capitalist stand see everything linked with the US and west as evil, so does one look up to?

Should only the PM be blamed? Is he not being influenced on taking certain stands from within the congress/corporate world/intellectuals, possibly the opposition also? Isn't the congress doing the same with the US what they did with the soviet union? If so, why didn't we have a problem with that? Has the opposition especially the bjp and nda not been bought over as well who have lost a voice on the US? Which politician ever thought about the country? All that ever happened was if the self interest was aligned with the country's interest that was portrayed as a huge victory for the country, even otherwise the same was portrayed even if that was later turn out to be completely anti india.

That said, today the US is in a position where they wholesomely exert tremendous clout on a lot of international bodies and it is through them we intend to scale all those heights which become important with having china as a neighbor. Good or bad, india will have to go the pro-US way for quite some time to come no matter if india gets ruled by the upa or the nda, my only hope and wish, india doesn't end up becoming their stooge and end up fighting their wars with china or at other places as happened with Pakistan.
 

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