A DIFFICULT YEAR: THIS ONE
By Bhabani Sen Gupta
2009 is poised to be a difficult year of change in India and much of the world. The
recession in the United States and Europe seems will regress to a depression despite the
laboured optimism of the news media and political handlers of global affairs. Even though Asian economies have proved to be robust, pains of the shrinking economies have hit China
as well as India, and it will get worse before getting better. The deeply fragmented
political party system will face a parliamentary election in April ( or May, at the
latest), and though another coalition regime will be ruling the country, what it will
exactly be, and how durable or brittle will it turn out are at this time agonizing, if
willfully muted, anxieties. On top of all these, the international landscape will change
when the new president of the United States, Barak Hussein Obama, activates his
focus on Afghanistan for his own version of War on Terror. The new theatre of
conflict and tensions will be the massive sprawl of territory covering Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Iran, and Central Asia . The ripples and waves of the coming conflicts
will not halt at the borders of India, but spill over our country.
Pakistan is a deeply fragmented state. It has at least three power centres. There
is a government at Islamabad. It is run by the Pakistan People’s Party. The office
of the chief executive is occupied by a man who even two years ago was nowhere
at the centre of power. Asaf Ali Zardari is president of Pakistan mostly because he
is the husband of the slaim Benazir Bhutto who fell to the bullets of an Islamic
fundamentalist sometime included in a loosely networked entity called Taliban.
The Army is perhaps a stronger power centre than the government at Islamabad. Its chief, General Kayani is a former chief of the ISI. The Army is the
50-year-old subsidiary ally of Washington---whoever is in power in the U.S. capital.
The third power centre in Pakistan is the loosely and informally federated Islamic
radical force called Taliban with allies in almost all Muslim countries except Central
Asia and North Africa.
When, in the mid-fifties of the 20th century, Pakistan avidly joined Baghdad
Pact and CENTO, two Cold War alliances sponsored by Washington to confront the
USSR in perhaps history’s longest globally waged ideological contest for the conquest of human minds and the earth’s resources. Pakistan was Great Britain’s
challenge of the Republic of India designed to be for ever committed to challenge
India’s aspirations as an emerging giant in the post-colonial world.
Around the middle of the 20th century, the United States of America took
over the hegemonic role of the guardian of post-colonial interests of the imperialist
powers of Europe---Britain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium. At the dawn of
the 21st century, America became the self-appointed the global hegemonic power
ready to war anywhere in the former colonies of Europe to affirm its leadership
of the planet. This great global coups d’etat went virtually unchallenged. The
formidable USSR had vanished for reasons that were never convincingly explained. Europe supinely acquiesced, even collaborated. Russia was prostrate, China engrossed in the travails of post-revolutio0nary reconstruction.
In one of those mystical ironies of fates of nations throughout history, the
American Empire passed to the grip of a tribe of evangelical neoconservative
utterly narcissist political mortals who, in the incredibly short span of eight
years, plunged the richest and techno-economically the foremost state into
the depths of an unprecedented dissolution of political and economic power
Now Barak Obama is seen as the Great Redeemer. Even with the best of
resources and luck, it will be hard for the first Black president of America
to meet even a portion of the huge hopes reposed on him not only by Americans
but also much of the global humanity. He will make mistakes.
It is a pity that the rulers of India were not turned on by what has come
to be turned as Obamamania. The prime minister allowed himself to be charmed
by George W Bush who, in his final hours in the White House, was able to cite
India along with a whisper of countries that “loved” him. The corporate
media in India that saw itself as a junior partner of the globalised supercapitalism
of an unilateralist pugilist America either failed to rise up to the epic Meaning
of Obama, or rooted for the signs of the new President repeating the old mistakes
of Washington. And predictively, un-named ‘sources’ in the Foreign Office
and PMO bristled at the very mention of Kashmir or NPT-CTBT by people close
to Obama as issues connected with Obama’s still-to-unfold attempts to fight and
overcome Terror in Afghanistan.
THE ECONOMY
Economically, 2009 will be a difficult year for Indians.
. India has not officially slipped into a financial meltdown, mainly because of
the nationalized banks headed by the State Bank of India, and also because inter-
national finance companies have to operate under limited franchise. But. thousands
of medium and small companies have closed down, thousands of others are
near the edge. Unemployment is turning massive. The flight of foreign capital has
weakened the financial spine of the economy, while the long-neglected farm sector
threatens adequate supply of foodgrains for the poorer segments of people.
Tthe external sector of the economy is causing concern. Foreign
currency assets have begun to deplete. The exchange rate front is approaching a
critical situation. The value of the rupee has fallen, and is likely to fall further.
Exports have been hit, some tariffs have been raised. At the end of March 2008,
foreign exchange reserves stood at $310 billion. It declined to $ 245.9 billion at
the end of December. The Economic and Political Weekly, in its issue of December
20, reported that in 8-9 months India has lost foreign exchange assets amounting to
$63 b. The outlook for 09 is cheerless. The Satyam scandal, its ramifications coming
out in seemingly carefully handled exposure, shows the greedy, ugly face of the
first generation feudal-capitalists thriving on the internet revolution.
The offer recently made by China to a number of countries to use the Chinese
currency for trade ( Japan too has done the same) is said to be under close scrutiny.
Delhi. China is India’s second largest trade partner. The recent agreement between
Japan, China and South Korea to use their own currencies for mutual trade has
caught Indian attention without capturing its imagination. The ,
the decline of the US Dollar is expected to continue. The rupee is weaker than the
yuan, much weaker than the yen. The fear in New Delhi is that prices will start rising
in March-April. The state governments have collectively asked the Centre to pump
Rs 20,000 crore into their depleted exchequer ; the Centre’s own budget deficit will
certainly be much larger than anticipated..
Neighborhood
“W e envy China’s neighborhood. Japan is world’s number two economic
power. Despite the cold political relationship, Japan has outsourced a lot of
industrial products to China. In 2008, political relations had been ‘normalised’
after a much publicized state visit to Japan by the president of China, Hu Jintai.
If the two-year-old recession in Japan gets more acute, Tokyo will expand its
trade with China, and, with South Korea, and China, set up a economically
powerful regional co-operation block, which may be joined by Russia.” This is how
Foreign Secretary Menon compared India’s and China’s neighbourhoods while talking recently to a newspaper reporter.
The Chinese leadership has been quietly pushing the concept of
an Asian NATO which cannot be launched without Japan’s participation.
The China-SouthKorea-Japan trade-financing accord is a step in the
direction of an ASIANATO. Russia will be glad to join it. ASEAN is already
the best-working regional block after NATO. China-ASEAN trade burgeons year-
to-year.. Vietnam and China keep their political relations low, probably by mutual
consent, for neither Beijing nor Hanoi wishes to create a ‘ Socialist Bloc ( with
the addition of Cambodia and Laos).in Asia. However Vietnam , Malaysia and Indonesia import considerable quantities of China’s industrial products.China’s own
economy has started to shrink. If China’s imports slide significantly, the entire
economy of Asia will bend down perceptibly.
“India does not have a neighbor that can be compared with the neighbors of
China in the north-east as well as south-east. India’s South Asian neighbors are
poor---economically, politically and resource-wise. India’s neighbors hardly nourish
India’s democratic polity. The first republican regime in Nepal has formally notified
to India its determination to get the India-Nepal treaty of the 1950s re-written. New Delhi cannot refuse to renegotiate the unequal treaty. At the same time, there are fears
in New Delhi that loosened from the advantage-India ties of the treaty, Nepal, with
its Left-led government, may not get closer to China. Nepal as well as Bangladesh
have asked China for substantial financial aid Both nations tend to see India as the
Big Brother with vested geopolitical interests. Pakistan is China’s all-weather friend,
an image that has not been tarnished by China’s recent refusal to come to the
rescue of Pakistan’s tottering economy, compelling Islamabad to fall in the embrace
of the World Bank.
After the gruesome terrorist attack in Mumbai on November 26, the Indian
media, television v as well as print, began to clamour for punitive action against Pakistan. The UPA government, trying to cover up big gaps in its counter-terrorism
apparatus, raised its rhetoric demanding that the non-effective government of
Asaf Ali Zardari dismantle the numerous jihadi-Islamic training centres in
Pakistan. The excessive zest of India’s corporate media for punitive measures
against Pakistan gave the Pakistani Army and ISI an opportunity to rekindle Pakistan’s anti-India rhetoric, and, this, in turn, raised the reciprocal rhetoric
of the Indian government. However, apart from some troops movement
to the border by both sides, which alarmed the Bush administration whose
focus was on escalating the NATO military role in Afghanistan, South Asia
has been spared a fourth India-Pakistan conflict, though the
the fledgling ‘peace process’ remained frozen with little chance of resumption before the Lok Sabha election. Indeed, both Congress and BJP will use tensions
with Pakistan’s patronage of Islamic terrorists for election purposes.
Afghanistan
Afghanistan is perhaps the most important issue on India’s foreign
policy agenda at the beginning of 2009. Barak Obama spoke of a surge of American military involvement during the
election campaign. In its last few weeks, the Bush administration started
shifting American troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, and laid bare its
strategic as well as tactical thinking on how to bring the “Greater Middle
East” under American overlordship and turn it into a zone of peace under
entrenched American patronage.
However, Hilary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, told
Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 14 during confirmation hearing
that the Obama administration would put diplomacy “front and centre” in the realm
of foreign policy. In the first weeks of January, several leading American
political personalities and civil-military seniors visited Islamabad ( some of them
New Delhi too) including Senators Kerry and John MaCcain, to ensure that
the divided power establishment in Islamabad did not use the rising tensions with
India to divert the military focus from Afghanistan to the border with India.
Obama maintained studied silence on Afghanistan after getting elected to the White
House. At the time of writing, he is about to appoint a special envoy to look into
the geopolitical as well as military-diplomatic demands of a major war against Al
Queda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Hilary Clinton appeared to be picking up John Holbrooke, president of Asia Society, New York, and a key diplomatic player in President Bill Clinton’s Balkan strategies, as special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan’
Afghanistan and Pakistan are going to be the testing region for Obama’s
statesmanship. The current mood in Washington DC is decidedly against working
with Hamid Karzai as president of Afghanistan. He is seen as a weak leader and
and too much of a Pushtun nationalist to play an American role in a crucial global
hotspot. India, on the other hand, has invested heavily in building non-military
infrastructure as well as schools and hospitals in Afghanistan. Karzai was hosted
in New Delhi in the third week of January. It is unclear if Obama would wait
for the Afghan people to chose new leader or extend a second term to Karzai in
national elections in August. Obama has indicated that he would triple non-military
aid to Pakistan provided Islamabad did more, much more, to destroy the Taliban
bases in the disturbed, indeed anarchic, mountainous expanse of sturdy Pushtuns
who fight their own wars against any intruder on their tribal preserves. The Pakistan
Army which created the Taliban duding the decade of Zia ul-Huq’s military rule, will
play hide and seek with the Obama administration.
In the weeks immediately before Obama’s inauguration,
leaders of the Indian government maintained a posture of studied caution about
the new administration’s diplomatic thrusts in Afghanistan. There was articulated concern about indications that Obama might bring the Kashmir dispute on the
agenda of his diplomacy in the north-west Asian region comprising Pakistan and
Afghanistan. Also whether the Democratic non-proliferation agenda would not
make the state department pressure India to sign the CTBT agreement before it implements the India-U.S, civil nuclear deal.
General Election
Politically, the Great Event of 2009 will be the Lok Sabha election to be held
between April or May.. Both main political parties, Congress and BJP, have
limited voter appeal, both are obligated to form coalitions with regional parties
which, on their turfs, face challenges from other regional parties. No single
party has won even 160 seats in elections since 2000. The Congress won 157
seats in 2004.
The four elections to state assemblies held in the Hindi belt---Delhi,
Rajasthan. Madhya Pradesh and Chhatisgarh--- did not change the basic
character of Indian politics, namely, fragmentation of political parties and
stability of coalition government in New Delhi led by either the Congress or
BJP or---hypothetically,------ a third force without either of the two leading
parties. The Congress will have to work very hard to get back to power
after the coming poll. An economic decline and a war-inclining media-fuelled
public mood will likely help BJP rather than Congress.
At the state level, manipulation rather than ideology or organization seems
to be driving party politics. In the largest state, Uttar Pradesh (UP), political power
shuttles between the two main caste-based parties, the Samajwadi (Socialist) Party
mainly driven by Other Backward Classes or OBCs or Bahujana Samaj Party (BSP)
mainly mabilising Dalits ( former Untouchables). In Tamil Nadu, the non-Brahmin
Tamils are split between DMK and AIDMK, both offsprings of the first Dravida
party created by a man named Annadurai. Peninsular India, commonly called The
South, has gone out of the reach of the Congress party except for Andhra Pradesh.
In this last bastion of Congress power, the ruling party will find it hard to get
re-elected if the Satyam scandal hurts its image beyong a certain point.
In the North-East, the main states -------Bihar, Orissa, Assam and West Bengal—
have gone out of the Congress reach. The party’s ability to lead a coalition regime
in New Delhi rests on its vast countrywide, but largely moribund, organization and its historic image of
builder and leader of the independence movement and its inheritance of the
charisma of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. In other words, its past glories
rather than its current performance and its future promise.
Election specialist academics and journalists have built the theory that
the voters vote differently in electing local assemblies and the Lok Sabha. This
theory is based on sharply different outcomes of state and national elections.
The absence of party based elections to Panchayats and Zila Parishads
( village to district councils) may have created space for the theory to endure.
The Congress will most likely go into the poll floating the coalition that
has been in power since the election of 2004, with one major change: The SP of
Uttar Pradesh will be its most important partner and Mayawati, of BSP ( also of
UP) its principal rival. .
Political parties other than those of the Left Front are not committed
to ideologies ( the BJP, of course, has a strong Hindu orientation which is religious
rather than ideological) None of them observes inner-party democracy.
. Parties are run by their founder leaders or leaders chosen by
founders. Take the BSP; its founder-leader, the late Kanshi Ram, handed the baton
to its current leader, Ms Mayawati, who rules the party like a dictator. The DMK
leader in Tamil Nadu, K Karunanidhi chose his son K Stalin in 2008 as his successor.
Political families now control political parties in the entire country outside the
three small-state space occupied by the Left Front. The example set by the Congress
party is now emulated by almost all the rest outside the ideological Left.
If the Congress party cannot win 150 seats in the next Lok Sabha on its
own, there will probably be a vigorous effort to build a Third Front. Initiatives would probably come from some of the partners of the UPA coalition, notably the Nationalist Congress party led by Sharad Pawarr of Maharashtra, which has
11 members in the Lok Sabha . or SP, which has 37, or even the BSP with 17. ////
By Bhabani Sen Gupta
2009 is poised to be a difficult year of change in India and much of the world. The
recession in the United States and Europe seems will regress to a depression despite the
laboured optimism of the news media and political handlers of global affairs. Even though Asian economies have proved to be robust, pains of the shrinking economies have hit China
as well as India, and it will get worse before getting better. The deeply fragmented
political party system will face a parliamentary election in April ( or May, at the
latest), and though another coalition regime will be ruling the country, what it will
exactly be, and how durable or brittle will it turn out are at this time agonizing, if
willfully muted, anxieties. On top of all these, the international landscape will change
when the new president of the United States, Barak Hussein Obama, activates his
focus on Afghanistan for his own version of War on Terror. The new theatre of
conflict and tensions will be the massive sprawl of territory covering Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Iran, and Central Asia . The ripples and waves of the coming conflicts
will not halt at the borders of India, but spill over our country.
Pakistan is a deeply fragmented state. It has at least three power centres. There
is a government at Islamabad. It is run by the Pakistan People’s Party. The office
of the chief executive is occupied by a man who even two years ago was nowhere
at the centre of power. Asaf Ali Zardari is president of Pakistan mostly because he
is the husband of the slaim Benazir Bhutto who fell to the bullets of an Islamic
fundamentalist sometime included in a loosely networked entity called Taliban.
The Army is perhaps a stronger power centre than the government at Islamabad. Its chief, General Kayani is a former chief of the ISI. The Army is the
50-year-old subsidiary ally of Washington---whoever is in power in the U.S. capital.
The third power centre in Pakistan is the loosely and informally federated Islamic
radical force called Taliban with allies in almost all Muslim countries except Central
Asia and North Africa.
When, in the mid-fifties of the 20th century, Pakistan avidly joined Baghdad
Pact and CENTO, two Cold War alliances sponsored by Washington to confront the
USSR in perhaps history’s longest globally waged ideological contest for the conquest of human minds and the earth’s resources. Pakistan was Great Britain’s
challenge of the Republic of India designed to be for ever committed to challenge
India’s aspirations as an emerging giant in the post-colonial world.
Around the middle of the 20th century, the United States of America took
over the hegemonic role of the guardian of post-colonial interests of the imperialist
powers of Europe---Britain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium. At the dawn of
the 21st century, America became the self-appointed the global hegemonic power
ready to war anywhere in the former colonies of Europe to affirm its leadership
of the planet. This great global coups d’etat went virtually unchallenged. The
formidable USSR had vanished for reasons that were never convincingly explained. Europe supinely acquiesced, even collaborated. Russia was prostrate, China engrossed in the travails of post-revolutio0nary reconstruction.
In one of those mystical ironies of fates of nations throughout history, the
American Empire passed to the grip of a tribe of evangelical neoconservative
utterly narcissist political mortals who, in the incredibly short span of eight
years, plunged the richest and techno-economically the foremost state into
the depths of an unprecedented dissolution of political and economic power
Now Barak Obama is seen as the Great Redeemer. Even with the best of
resources and luck, it will be hard for the first Black president of America
to meet even a portion of the huge hopes reposed on him not only by Americans
but also much of the global humanity. He will make mistakes.
It is a pity that the rulers of India were not turned on by what has come
to be turned as Obamamania. The prime minister allowed himself to be charmed
by George W Bush who, in his final hours in the White House, was able to cite
India along with a whisper of countries that “loved” him. The corporate
media in India that saw itself as a junior partner of the globalised supercapitalism
of an unilateralist pugilist America either failed to rise up to the epic Meaning
of Obama, or rooted for the signs of the new President repeating the old mistakes
of Washington. And predictively, un-named ‘sources’ in the Foreign Office
and PMO bristled at the very mention of Kashmir or NPT-CTBT by people close
to Obama as issues connected with Obama’s still-to-unfold attempts to fight and
overcome Terror in Afghanistan.
THE ECONOMY
Economically, 2009 will be a difficult year for Indians.
. India has not officially slipped into a financial meltdown, mainly because of
the nationalized banks headed by the State Bank of India, and also because inter-
national finance companies have to operate under limited franchise. But. thousands
of medium and small companies have closed down, thousands of others are
near the edge. Unemployment is turning massive. The flight of foreign capital has
weakened the financial spine of the economy, while the long-neglected farm sector
threatens adequate supply of foodgrains for the poorer segments of people.
Tthe external sector of the economy is causing concern. Foreign
currency assets have begun to deplete. The exchange rate front is approaching a
critical situation. The value of the rupee has fallen, and is likely to fall further.
Exports have been hit, some tariffs have been raised. At the end of March 2008,
foreign exchange reserves stood at $310 billion. It declined to $ 245.9 billion at
the end of December. The Economic and Political Weekly, in its issue of December
20, reported that in 8-9 months India has lost foreign exchange assets amounting to
$63 b. The outlook for 09 is cheerless. The Satyam scandal, its ramifications coming
out in seemingly carefully handled exposure, shows the greedy, ugly face of the
first generation feudal-capitalists thriving on the internet revolution.
The offer recently made by China to a number of countries to use the Chinese
currency for trade ( Japan too has done the same) is said to be under close scrutiny.
Delhi. China is India’s second largest trade partner. The recent agreement between
Japan, China and South Korea to use their own currencies for mutual trade has
caught Indian attention without capturing its imagination. The ,
the decline of the US Dollar is expected to continue. The rupee is weaker than the
yuan, much weaker than the yen. The fear in New Delhi is that prices will start rising
in March-April. The state governments have collectively asked the Centre to pump
Rs 20,000 crore into their depleted exchequer ; the Centre’s own budget deficit will
certainly be much larger than anticipated..
Neighborhood
“W e envy China’s neighborhood. Japan is world’s number two economic
power. Despite the cold political relationship, Japan has outsourced a lot of
industrial products to China. In 2008, political relations had been ‘normalised’
after a much publicized state visit to Japan by the president of China, Hu Jintai.
If the two-year-old recession in Japan gets more acute, Tokyo will expand its
trade with China, and, with South Korea, and China, set up a economically
powerful regional co-operation block, which may be joined by Russia.” This is how
Foreign Secretary Menon compared India’s and China’s neighbourhoods while talking recently to a newspaper reporter.
The Chinese leadership has been quietly pushing the concept of
an Asian NATO which cannot be launched without Japan’s participation.
The China-SouthKorea-Japan trade-financing accord is a step in the
direction of an ASIANATO. Russia will be glad to join it. ASEAN is already
the best-working regional block after NATO. China-ASEAN trade burgeons year-
to-year.. Vietnam and China keep their political relations low, probably by mutual
consent, for neither Beijing nor Hanoi wishes to create a ‘ Socialist Bloc ( with
the addition of Cambodia and Laos).in Asia. However Vietnam , Malaysia and Indonesia import considerable quantities of China’s industrial products.China’s own
economy has started to shrink. If China’s imports slide significantly, the entire
economy of Asia will bend down perceptibly.
“India does not have a neighbor that can be compared with the neighbors of
China in the north-east as well as south-east. India’s South Asian neighbors are
poor---economically, politically and resource-wise. India’s neighbors hardly nourish
India’s democratic polity. The first republican regime in Nepal has formally notified
to India its determination to get the India-Nepal treaty of the 1950s re-written. New Delhi cannot refuse to renegotiate the unequal treaty. At the same time, there are fears
in New Delhi that loosened from the advantage-India ties of the treaty, Nepal, with
its Left-led government, may not get closer to China. Nepal as well as Bangladesh
have asked China for substantial financial aid Both nations tend to see India as the
Big Brother with vested geopolitical interests. Pakistan is China’s all-weather friend,
an image that has not been tarnished by China’s recent refusal to come to the
rescue of Pakistan’s tottering economy, compelling Islamabad to fall in the embrace
of the World Bank.
After the gruesome terrorist attack in Mumbai on November 26, the Indian
media, television v as well as print, began to clamour for punitive action against Pakistan. The UPA government, trying to cover up big gaps in its counter-terrorism
apparatus, raised its rhetoric demanding that the non-effective government of
Asaf Ali Zardari dismantle the numerous jihadi-Islamic training centres in
Pakistan. The excessive zest of India’s corporate media for punitive measures
against Pakistan gave the Pakistani Army and ISI an opportunity to rekindle Pakistan’s anti-India rhetoric, and, this, in turn, raised the reciprocal rhetoric
of the Indian government. However, apart from some troops movement
to the border by both sides, which alarmed the Bush administration whose
focus was on escalating the NATO military role in Afghanistan, South Asia
has been spared a fourth India-Pakistan conflict, though the
the fledgling ‘peace process’ remained frozen with little chance of resumption before the Lok Sabha election. Indeed, both Congress and BJP will use tensions
with Pakistan’s patronage of Islamic terrorists for election purposes.
Afghanistan
Afghanistan is perhaps the most important issue on India’s foreign
policy agenda at the beginning of 2009. Barak Obama spoke of a surge of American military involvement during the
election campaign. In its last few weeks, the Bush administration started
shifting American troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, and laid bare its
strategic as well as tactical thinking on how to bring the “Greater Middle
East” under American overlordship and turn it into a zone of peace under
entrenched American patronage.
However, Hilary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, told
Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 14 during confirmation hearing
that the Obama administration would put diplomacy “front and centre” in the realm
of foreign policy. In the first weeks of January, several leading American
political personalities and civil-military seniors visited Islamabad ( some of them
New Delhi too) including Senators Kerry and John MaCcain, to ensure that
the divided power establishment in Islamabad did not use the rising tensions with
India to divert the military focus from Afghanistan to the border with India.
Obama maintained studied silence on Afghanistan after getting elected to the White
House. At the time of writing, he is about to appoint a special envoy to look into
the geopolitical as well as military-diplomatic demands of a major war against Al
Queda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Hilary Clinton appeared to be picking up John Holbrooke, president of Asia Society, New York, and a key diplomatic player in President Bill Clinton’s Balkan strategies, as special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan’
Afghanistan and Pakistan are going to be the testing region for Obama’s
statesmanship. The current mood in Washington DC is decidedly against working
with Hamid Karzai as president of Afghanistan. He is seen as a weak leader and
and too much of a Pushtun nationalist to play an American role in a crucial global
hotspot. India, on the other hand, has invested heavily in building non-military
infrastructure as well as schools and hospitals in Afghanistan. Karzai was hosted
in New Delhi in the third week of January. It is unclear if Obama would wait
for the Afghan people to chose new leader or extend a second term to Karzai in
national elections in August. Obama has indicated that he would triple non-military
aid to Pakistan provided Islamabad did more, much more, to destroy the Taliban
bases in the disturbed, indeed anarchic, mountainous expanse of sturdy Pushtuns
who fight their own wars against any intruder on their tribal preserves. The Pakistan
Army which created the Taliban duding the decade of Zia ul-Huq’s military rule, will
play hide and seek with the Obama administration.
In the weeks immediately before Obama’s inauguration,
leaders of the Indian government maintained a posture of studied caution about
the new administration’s diplomatic thrusts in Afghanistan. There was articulated concern about indications that Obama might bring the Kashmir dispute on the
agenda of his diplomacy in the north-west Asian region comprising Pakistan and
Afghanistan. Also whether the Democratic non-proliferation agenda would not
make the state department pressure India to sign the CTBT agreement before it implements the India-U.S, civil nuclear deal.
General Election
Politically, the Great Event of 2009 will be the Lok Sabha election to be held
between April or May.. Both main political parties, Congress and BJP, have
limited voter appeal, both are obligated to form coalitions with regional parties
which, on their turfs, face challenges from other regional parties. No single
party has won even 160 seats in elections since 2000. The Congress won 157
seats in 2004.
The four elections to state assemblies held in the Hindi belt---Delhi,
Rajasthan. Madhya Pradesh and Chhatisgarh--- did not change the basic
character of Indian politics, namely, fragmentation of political parties and
stability of coalition government in New Delhi led by either the Congress or
BJP or---hypothetically,------ a third force without either of the two leading
parties. The Congress will have to work very hard to get back to power
after the coming poll. An economic decline and a war-inclining media-fuelled
public mood will likely help BJP rather than Congress.
At the state level, manipulation rather than ideology or organization seems
to be driving party politics. In the largest state, Uttar Pradesh (UP), political power
shuttles between the two main caste-based parties, the Samajwadi (Socialist) Party
mainly driven by Other Backward Classes or OBCs or Bahujana Samaj Party (BSP)
mainly mabilising Dalits ( former Untouchables). In Tamil Nadu, the non-Brahmin
Tamils are split between DMK and AIDMK, both offsprings of the first Dravida
party created by a man named Annadurai. Peninsular India, commonly called The
South, has gone out of the reach of the Congress party except for Andhra Pradesh.
In this last bastion of Congress power, the ruling party will find it hard to get
re-elected if the Satyam scandal hurts its image beyong a certain point.
In the North-East, the main states -------Bihar, Orissa, Assam and West Bengal—
have gone out of the Congress reach. The party’s ability to lead a coalition regime
in New Delhi rests on its vast countrywide, but largely moribund, organization and its historic image of
builder and leader of the independence movement and its inheritance of the
charisma of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. In other words, its past glories
rather than its current performance and its future promise.
Election specialist academics and journalists have built the theory that
the voters vote differently in electing local assemblies and the Lok Sabha. This
theory is based on sharply different outcomes of state and national elections.
The absence of party based elections to Panchayats and Zila Parishads
( village to district councils) may have created space for the theory to endure.
The Congress will most likely go into the poll floating the coalition that
has been in power since the election of 2004, with one major change: The SP of
Uttar Pradesh will be its most important partner and Mayawati, of BSP ( also of
UP) its principal rival. .
Political parties other than those of the Left Front are not committed
to ideologies ( the BJP, of course, has a strong Hindu orientation which is religious
rather than ideological) None of them observes inner-party democracy.
. Parties are run by their founder leaders or leaders chosen by
founders. Take the BSP; its founder-leader, the late Kanshi Ram, handed the baton
to its current leader, Ms Mayawati, who rules the party like a dictator. The DMK
leader in Tamil Nadu, K Karunanidhi chose his son K Stalin in 2008 as his successor.
Political families now control political parties in the entire country outside the
three small-state space occupied by the Left Front. The example set by the Congress
party is now emulated by almost all the rest outside the ideological Left.
If the Congress party cannot win 150 seats in the next Lok Sabha on its
own, there will probably be a vigorous effort to build a Third Front. Initiatives would probably come from some of the partners of the UPA coalition, notably the Nationalist Congress party led by Sharad Pawarr of Maharashtra, which has
11 members in the Lok Sabha . or SP, which has 37, or even the BSP with 17. ////
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