July 26, 2008

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his overseas mentor, US President George W. Bush, can heave a big sigh of relief and they have already done so by exchanging warm compliments following the trust vote in the Lok Sabha on July 22. The PM and his government won it quite convincingly—of the 541 members 275 voted for the government, 256 against it and there were 10 abstentions; as many as 14 Opposition MPs [five BJP, one BD, one TDP, one JD(S), two MDMK, one TRS, one MPF, one NLP] voted for the (…)

By taking summary action against Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee, a 10-term party MP who was elected the presiding officer of the Lower House of Parliament in June 2004, the CPM has once again exposed its undemocratic functioning. On the face of it what party General Secretary Prakash Karat has said is unexceptionable. A Speaker cannot be from the Opposition, and the CPM and its three Left partners became part of the Opposition once they communicated to the President, on July 9, their (…)

A recent newspaper editorial says:
It always takes political courage to stake one’s government on a matter of conviction.
This is most surprising. All public policies must be based on facts—here facts about the Hyde Act and the 123 Agreement. A phrase repeated ad nauseam by the deal’s protagonists has been: it is in the “national interest”. Is it? I am afraid not. Why? Because of the nature, scope, content, intent, and detailed provisions of Hyde and the 123.
The Hyde Act (…)

Unbelievable horse-trading is going on in the corridors of power in Delhi on an issue—the nuclear deal—which, according to both sides of the divide, is a matter of national interest. It must not be lost sight of that the agreement with the IAEA is only the first step to formalising the agreement with the USA and that is the real intent of what is going on today. The debate today is lost in the technicalities of the agreement with the IAEA or the contradictions between the Hyde Act and the (…)

The British East India Company came to India for trade and commerce and lived to rule the country for a century. The irony of the nuclear deal is the same party, the Congress, which spearheaded our freedom movement, is falling to the imperialist trap and inviting the Bush-led US Administration to do business again in India by our economist-turned Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh. The credibility and intention of Dr Singh may be unquestionable but apparently he is ill-advised.
Dr (…)

I may be accused of ever having written a good word about L.K. Advani, the leader and now projected prime ministerial candidate of the Hindu-Rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party.
Now is the time to make amends.
In an elaborate interview given to the redoubtable N.Ram of The Hindu (July 12, 2008)—easily the most literate of India’s premier English dailies—Advani has rightly pointed out that, in contrast to the current UPA regime, the NDA under Vajpayees’ premiership desisted from (…)

1. Introduction
By imposing colonialism and imperialism, the British deprived of India’s ‘economic identity’. During the freedom struggle, great leaders like Dadabhai Naoroji, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and many others thought about an ‘economic identity’ for India. However, the privilege of constituting and implementing it mainly went to Pandit Nehru. The ‘economic architecture’ of post-independent India was largely Nehruvian. Nevertheless, in the (new) globalisation1 era, the (…)

The text of the Indo-US nuclear deal, which is titled “Agreement for Cooperation Between the Government of India and the Government of the United States of America Concerning Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy” (also known as the 123 Agreement) and which was released on August 3, 2007, is totally silent on the issue of nuclear disarmament. This is wholly contradictory to the explicit assurance made by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in his statement before Parliament in response to the (…)

As I write these words the news of the Left withdrawing support from the UPA Government has just started to pour in. Presumably, it has not come as a surprise to anyone. It had been in the offing for quite some time now. But obviously the political temperatures are bound to go up with various political pundits and players rushing to announce their own recipes for the coming parliamentary elections. With the economy on a downward spiral—symbolically made worse in the public imagination by the (…)

Since the signing of the Indo-US nuclear deal, the bilateral agreement has attracted serious scrutiny from various sources. The most recent source of contention surfaced on July 9, 2008, when the India-specific Safeguards Agreement was made public. This document—the first of three steps India must take to operationalise the 123 Agreement—drew a deafening response from nuclear analysts in India and the United States. Although statements were issued by the Indian and American governments, the (…)