The Indian Left's true colours
THE debate in the Indian parliament on whether or not to go through with the Indo-US nuclear deal that Dr. Manmohan Singh's government had signed with the US in July 2007, saw the worst in Indian democracy, but also, towards its end, the best.
During the run-up to the vote the air was thick in Delhi with allegations that MPs votes were being bought. No one needed proof to believe these rumours because it had already happened in a previous confidence vote, faced by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, in 1993. But no one doubted it also because, in the sixty and more years since India adopted democracy and the simple majority voting system, a combination of the two had created something unique in the annals of democracy, a central parliament with as many as 60 stable political parties,each commanding a large chunk of the vote in its home state.
In the nearly two decades since the Congress party lost its absolute majority in parliament, and coalition governments became the order of the day, buying the support of the smaller parties has become normal. All that the trust vote of July 22 did was to raise the price to levels never seen before.
What shocked and dismayed Indians was not the manifest corruption -- so graphically displayed when three MPs of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party walked into parliament waving fistfuls of money and hollering that they had been bribed. It was the fact that the ruling UPA alliance had been forced into asking for a trust vote on an issue that deeply affected the national interest.
The need for the nuclear treaty had been discussed so completely threadbare in the media and the parliament that the Left Front's sudden turnabout in July last year caught the government by surprise. To put it in a nutshell, India needed both nuclear power in vast quantities and a removal of the ban on access to dual-use technologies, if it was to sustain its eight to nine percent rate of growth.
In power alone, the arithmetic is unambiguous. India's current power generating capacity of around 180,000 MW is short of its needs by at last 30,000 MW. Even after allowing for increases in energy efficiency, for long-term growth rate of eight percent it will have to double its generating capacity every ten years. By 2028, therefore it will have to add around 630,000 MW of power generating capacity, of which all but around 50,000 MW will necessarily have to be thermal-based. India does have to meet this need, but most definitely not enough to add yet another 600,000 MW between 2028 and 2038.
Availability apart, as Dr. Manmohan Singh pointed out at the G-8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan this amount of additional CO2 would have a disastrous effect on global warming and the atmosphere.
The damage that India has sustained from the technology ban is more insidious but no less serious. Scientists are exceptionally poor communicators, which is why few laymen are aware of the price India has paid for being shut out for forty years ago. But the consistent denial of small but crucial bits of proprietary technology is what lies behind the 20 year delay in indigenising the original (and now obsolete) CANDU nuclear power generation technology obtained from Canada, the consistent failure of its defence research laboratories to complete the development of new weapons systems until these systems have themselves become obsolete, its failure to develop an aeronautics industry, and most glaringly, its failure to develop the Kaveri engines for a now all-but-forgotten light fighter aircraft that would have been state-of-the-art in the late eighties. It had also slowed down almost interminably the program to develop fast breeder reactors that would use thorium as a raw material and eventually produce more fuel than they used.
But none of this made the slightest dent on either Prakash Karat, the general secretary of the Left Front, or on L.K. Advani, the leader of the BJP and, arguably, the prime minister in waiting, should the Congress-led UPA lose its majority. For both of them, all that mattered was getting the Congress out of power. Nothing was sacred, and as for the national interest, it had altogether ceased to exist.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that as the vote on July 22 approached, more and more Indians began to ask themselves whether the price of remaining a democracy -- at least the kind of democracy India had -- was not too high.
But on Tuesday, hours before the end of the two-day debate and the vote that followed, something wonderful began to happen. It began with a speech given by Rahul Gandhi, son of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. In it, he asked the members of parliament to stop thinking of themselves as members of various parties and to think of the issue before the house purely in terms of the national interest.
In the hours that followed, a succession of MPs, all of them young and a majority of them Muslim, took the floor to support the deal, and all of them specifically cited the national interest. "We have strong reservations about the impact of Indo-US nuclear deal on foreign policy aspects,"said Asaduddin Owaisi, of the Hyderabad-based Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen. "But for us the top priority is to stop the Bharatiya Janata Party and L.K. Advani from coming to power." Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti from Kashmir were even more explicit. While they expressed strong reservations about US foreign policy, they asserted that the national interest demanded that the deal go through.
As these and other MPs -- young, and often belonging to tiny hill states in the North-East, spoke their minds, the discomfiture of the BJP and the Left grew more and more visible. In the end the trust motion was carried, 275 to 256, largely because as many as eight MPs from the BJP defied their party whip, and Somnath Chatterjee, the speaker of the house, refused to step down and join his colleagues from the Left in the voting.
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