Killing the N-deal - India’s Loss Is China’s Gain

Amulya Ganguli
The Statesman, 23 October

There is a saying in Bengali, pagoler go badhey ananda. It means that a mad man rejoices at the killing of a cow. The Left's killing of the nuclear deal can be said to fall into this category. From their point of view, however, the comrades have succeeded in delivering a near-fatal blow to India’s development, as Sonia Gandhi claimed she did not quite say in Haryana. But those reared on Marxist tomes will recall Lenin’s emphasis on electricity. The phrase, “Communism is Soviet power plus electrification”, was a cornerstone of the Bolshevik dictator’s new economic policy, which, incidentally, wasn’t quite communistic. Although “soviet power” was not on Manmohan Singh’s agenda, he was also crafting his economic policy on the basis of electricity, mainly nuclear power. As the Prime Minister has pointed out, India’s present high growth rate cannot be maintained without a heavy investment in nuclear power. Even Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has realized this need. Hence, his favourable observations on nuclear power.

Sources of energy

However, as the chairman and managing director of the Nuclear Power Corporation, S.K.Jain, has pointed out, “without the 123 Agreement, we will have to scale down our nuclear power programme as we will not have access to global sources of nuclear fuel”. So, the Left has hit where it hurts India the most. Apparently drawing inspiration from Dear Leader Kim Jong Il’s concept of juche or self-reliance, the Left would like the public sector to step into this field with greater vigour. It also wants India to continue to use conventional sources of energy and not depend on the American manufacturers of nuclear reactors. But such an initiative, recalling the halcyon days of “socialism” when the public sector occupied the “commanding heights of the economy”, cannot but also revive memories of the snail-paced Hindu rate of growth.

But an ideological preference for the public sector is perhaps not the only factor behind the Left’s intense opposition to the N-deal. Its objectives are a lot more wide-ranging. First and foremost is its aversion towards any sign of proximity to the US. It is this distaste for anything to do with America and its guiding philosophy of capitalism, which was behind all the moves of the communists against economic reforms before it launched its tirade against the N-deal. It was this attitude which made Jyoti Basu describe Montek Singh Ahluwalia as a World Bank man in the early days of the UPA.

At that time, however, the comrades were acting relatively cautiously, presumably because they did not want to create too much trouble for the government so soon after it had assumed power. Their focus, therefore, was on comparatively less controversial issues like disinvestment ~ and that, too, of only the navratnas. And, while they also blocked financial sector and labour reforms, privatization of Kolkata and Chennai airports (M Karunanidhi is another self-proclaimed “socialist”), FDI in retail, foreign universities, etc., their resistance lacked the shrillness which they subsequently displayed on the N-deal.

The reason perhaps was that although capitalism was slowly replacing “socialism”, America itself was still at a distance despite the arrival of McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken. The commissars, therefore, could be said to be gradually, even if reluctantly, coming to terms with the reality of the post-Soviet world where the market (and “socialism with Chinese characteristics”) was supplanting Marx. Considering that AK Gopalan Bhavan had once ordered Alimuddin Street not to let Warner Brothers build a multiplex in Kolkata lest such a decision should affect the prospects of the SFI in Delhi University students union elections (!), one could say that the red brigade was maturing.

But that would have been a case of speaking too soon. As the N-deal affair has shown, the Left remains exactly where it was ~ in the Cold War period. Not only that, it is probably still a remnant of the 1948-49 yeh azadi jhooti hai brigade, which wanted to undermine the Indian state as it was supposed to be a handmaiden of the imperialist world.

Now, the key word is neo-imperialism, and it is to keep India out of the clutches of this evil group that the comrades have donned their battle gear. In the process, they do not seem to mind if they weaken India, as their predecessors in the Telengana uprising wanted to do, and their fellow travellers, the Naxalities, are still frenetically trying to do.

Theoretically, therefore, nothing seems to have changed for the Left although it is functioning in the open unlike the underground Naxalites. Otherwise, they can be said to be acting in accordance with the plan with which they assumed power in the Sixties in a “bourgeois” system ~ to wreck it from within. The scuttling of the N-deal will go some distance in achieving this objective by stalling India’s development. This is almost a mandatory first step for the communists if they want to establish their cherished “people’s democracy”, for they cannot function in a developed country, as the examples of Europe and the two Americas show. The communists seem to have a vested interest in poverty. If you banish poverty, you banish communism.

Left’s worry

It is because of India’s steady advancement in reducing the number of people below the poverty line from 54.9 per cent in 1973-74 to 21.8 (according to one estimate) and 27.5 (according to another), which must be disconcerting for the Left. Since the signing of the N-deal would give a further boost to the present high growth rates, the poverty levels were bound to come down further. But that might not have been the Left’s only worry. It would have also signalled India’s emergence as a major regional power ~ something which would not please China.

As it is, Indian democracy is a constant reminder to China (and the world) of its Tiananmen Square-style totalitarianism. In recent years, this stigma has been partly mitigated by China’s economic growth, enabling it to host the Olympics. But if India now catches up with China in the economic field, the Middle Kingdom will have a great deal to worry about.

Although a senior member of the Communist Party of China, Ai Ping, said recently that “we will not use our party-to-party relations with the CPI or CPI(M) to oppose” the N-deal since it is “an internal affair of India”, he could not have been unaware of the efforts of the Indian commissars to scuttle the deal. The People’s Daily of Beijing had earlier noted that “the India-US civilian nuclear energy agreement actually demonstrates its (India’s) dream to become a big power”. But thanks to our own comrades, this dream may not be fulfilled, much to China’s and Pakistan’s relief.

(The writer is a former Assistant Editor, The Statesman.)