The Defeat of Evil

The Advani Karat Pact

Paritranaya sadhunam vinashaya cha dushkritam
Dharma sansthapanarthaya sambahvami yuge yuge

(Gita 4:8)

(For the upliftment of the good and virtuous
For the destruction of evil
For the re-establishment of natural law
I will come in every age)

So the BJP and the Left and the casteist Mayawati have been defeated conclusively; time to take stock of why they did what they did. A bit of history will help understand what happened.

On August 23, 1939, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin entered into a secret agreement with Germany’s Adolf Hitler. It was the ultimate act of appeasement because Stalin felt that would focus Hitler's attention on Western Europe. On July 8 2008, Prakash Karat made a not-so-secret pact with L K Advani, whose naked ambition is to become India’s Prime Minister.

Karat is a diehard Stalinist, who is enjoying his place under India's democratic sun. Most people believe he gets his marching orders from the mandarins in Beijing. Because the Left is what it is, he remained unchallenged until the Speaker of the House, Somnath Chatterjee, called his bluff with support from the more flexible members of the CPM. He defied Karat and stayed on as Speaker and was quick to call "The Ayes have it" on the voice vote after the debate, rudely disrupted by BJP thugs, over the confidence vote called by the Prime Minister.

Then there’s Advani, who for all the years he’s been in politics, comes off as an amateur actor seeking a role in the major play of governance. For many years he served as the home minister and forced his way into being the deputy prime minister of the clueless Atal Vajpayee. For all the darts, deserved or not, hurled at the current home minister, Shivraj Patil, Advani was clearly the most incompetent incumbent.

On his watch as home minister and deputy prime minister, terrorists were freed and flown by external affairs minister Jaswant Singh in an abject surrender to the world’s worst thugs, the Taliban of Afghanistan. Under his watch also, Islamic terrorists attacked Parliament House with a view to taking Indian lawmakers hostage. And on and on the story goes. There were so many terrorist incidents, including the attack on the Akshardham temple in Gujarat, under his dispensation that when he gets up in Parliament to attack this government for being soft on terrorism, he comes off sounding like a hypocrite.

Remember, this man is so desperate that he has become discombobulated. He went to his native province of Sindh in Pakistan and was so "moved" that he lost all sense of bearing; he ended up calling Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, a secular leader. He forgot that Jinnah led the Muslim League and asked for a Pakistan as a home for the Muslims of British India. Jinnah's intractable stand caused the Partition and a loss of millions of lives and the largest transfer of populations the world has ever known to this day.

Sadly, Advani and his family were among the victims of Jinnah’s communal calculations. But then Jinnah was personally suave and secular and used the communal divide just to grab power. Advani understands that; he took out his rath yatra in the 1980s that left thousands dead in it‘s wake. Like Jinnah, Advani has cynically manipulated communal divisions in India in his no-holds-barred pursuit of power.

Between the ideologue Karat and the incompetent Advani, our country is being held hostage today. They have come together to try and topple India’s most liberal and reformist government. This is not the first time that India’s Hindu nationalists and communists have come together. They colluded in 1977 to support the Janata Party government of Morarji Desai and then in 1980 to support V P Singh, the feudal thakur who managed through sheer deviousness to become the prime minister for a few months.

Both experiments ended in disaster. Who can forget Madhu Dandavate, the finance minister in V P Singh’s ill-starred government? A man of great integrity, Dandavate was nevertheless an inexperienced person with no sense of the importance of his position. His first comment on assuming office in 1989, “The coffers are empty,” set the stage for the rapid decline of India into bankruptcy. The man who presided over the mortgage of India’s gold reserves to the Bank of England was Yashwant Sinha, an equally incompetent bureaucrat who served as finance minister after Dandavate. Sinha is today a leading light of the BJP, partly because he is among the few articulate people in the saffron combine.

The communists and the communalists joined forces in opposing the government over the nuclear deal. The communists’ objection is bigoted; they hate the US; the communalists’ opposition is purely opportunistic because they would rather have done the deal. Who can forget Jaswant Singh strutting around the place, dropping names: “My friend Strobe.” A senior British executive told me that he was struck by the number of times this obstreperous BJP minister dropped the name in a 15-minute conversation.

This is why, despite the desperate 11^th-hour drama of dubious BJP MPs smuggling currency into Parliament House, the Advani Karat pact was defeated convincingly on July 22. They are the forces of darkness and India has already awoken to that Tagorean heaven of freedom, “where the mind is without fear and the head held high.”

copyright rajiv desai 2008

The Fall of India’s Berlin Wall

Comrades Sent Packing

"Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last." (Martin Luther King).

Prakash Karat cuts a sorry figure today. His ideological posturing has cost the Left dearly. In 2004, his predecessor, Harkishan Singh Surjeet offered the UPA support and enabled the Congress-led coalition to form the government. In 2005, Karat replaced Surjeet and almost immediately the relationship between the Congress and the Left turned sour.

The dogmatic new general secretary unveiled a new era of hectoring the Congress and pushing an unreconstructed ideology that survives only in Jawaharlal Nehru University. Elsewhere in the world, the communists have been pushed to the fringes after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Between April 2005, when Karat replaced Surjeet, and Tuesday July 8, 2008, when he foolishly withdrew support to the UPA, the Indian Left enjoyed more influence over the Indian government than Israel has over various US governments. And they blew it.

Karat’s obduracy has painted the Left out of the reckoning. Beijing’s mandarins cannot be very pleased. This is abundantly clear from foreign secretary Menon’s statement that China will support the Indian application to the Nuclear Suppliers Group. His dour, immature brinkmanship cost the Left its invaluable influence over government policy. The current crisis is of Karat’s making; it has rocked the India story that the world believes is crucial both in geopolitics as well as in international economics.

What the commissars don’t understand is that the entire world in banking on India’s emergence from a regional to a global power. US President George W Bush was among the first to grasp the importance of the transformation. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says, the whole world is rooting for India to emerge from its poverty and its Third World victim mindset. Should India succeed, it will set an example for poor countries. It did that in the 1940s when the Indian National Congress won independence from Britain and presided over a relatively smooth transfer of power.

India’s economic transformation will send a more powerful signal to the world than China’s phenomenal growth. The only other large nation that succeeded in wiping out mass poverty is the United States more than two centuries ago. Sure, China has lifted more people out of poverty than India; at the same time, it has clamped down on political opposition. “An iron fist in a velvet glove,” a Chinese-American scholar once called it.

What China lacks is soft power. That’s what the Olympics exercise is all about. The fact is that without the fuzzier aspects of power, it will always be an outsider wanting in to the world milieu. On the other hand, between cricket, Bollywood, the increasingly competitive and aggressive business community and the English-speaking, highly accomplished emigrant community in the West, India has more global influence than China.

The charge that India’s communists are a Chinese fifth column is not lightly made. Many in the highest levels of government believe it to be true. Any rational explanation of Karat’s latest move must factor it in. If, we give Karat and his commissars the benefit of the doubt, the only conclusion left to draw is that they are irresponsible and dogmatic. Any which way, they do not deserve to have a veto on government policy. Either as Quislings or as juvenile ideologues, they should be banished to the fringes from whence they sprang.

So Karat has now wrought his masterpiece of absurd theatre. It reminds me of a scene from the acclaimed film, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” With the forces of the law closing in on them, the duo found themselves at the edge of a cliff with a river flowing furiously below. They had no option but to jump. Sundance was hesitant because he couldn’t swim. Butch told him not to worry “because the fall will kill you anyway.”

That’s the fate of the Left today. They have pulled the plug and find they are the ones who will be flushed down the drain. The Congress is a mighty political player with over a century’s experience. It ran circles around the juvenile commissars and emerged triumphant.

from the times of india july 14 2008