T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: Panchatantra and the Congress

LINE & LENGTH

As both were dying, the frog asked the scorpion why. "Because," it replied, "it is in my nature to sting."

A few days ago I was at a lunch meeting, at which some very distinguished, senior but former Indian diplomats were present. The subject was, obviously, the Indo-US nuclear deal. While most of those present were favourably inclined towards it, some thought it was a bad idea.

When I asked them why, two categories of objectors emerged. One lot was worried about the nitty-gritty of the agreement itself, largely about the stability of fuel supplies for the reactors. The other lot was generally anti-American. (But interestingly no one talked of future testing, etc.)

I asked the latter group to give some examples of when cooperation with the US had actually hurt India or when the US had given us advice that had harmed us. It became clear that none of them, not even the pro-deal types, had thought of looking at the relationship in this way.

I then gave two examples of US advice that had benefited India in ways that went well beyond the transient stuff that diplomats like to complain about. One was the mid-1960s advice on the Green Revolution, which liberated us from famines; the other was the advice on financial liberalisation, which eventually liberated us from foreign exchange shortages. If India holds its own today, it is because we don't have a rice bowl in one hand and a tin cup in the other.

Then someone said that the only instance he could cite of US advice harming us was when it asked Nehru not to use the air force against China in 1962. Another long pause and then came a second example: when Clinton told Narasimha Rao not to test the nuclear weapon.

Two examples in 60 years, is what we have for our innate anti-Americanism? Is there something wrong with us or with America?

Later, things became clearer. The mistake that we have been making, I think, is in looking at the India-US relationship purely and only in foreign policy terms, as if domestic politics has never mattered at all when in fact it has always mattered.

But if you suspend this longstanding myth that our domestic politics has nothing to do with our foreign policy, you get a reasonably good explanation for India's anti-Americanism, which has been cleverly exploited first by the USSR and now by China, always through their agents here.

The key fact is this: Indian policy towards the US has always "" and I advisedly don't say mostly "" been driven, at its core, solely by domestic political considerations, or even worse, personal predilections of the prime minister of the time.

There is no space here to fully document all the facts but two examples should suffice. Nehru's anti-Americanism was largely the result of his having got annoyed that the US accorded Liyaquat Ali Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan in 1949, exactly the same treatment as was given to him. I say this on good authority: S Gopal's biography of Nehru.

Indira Gandhi's antipathy was largely driven by something only she knew about at the time: the fact she had personally negotiated the devaluation of 1966, just two months after she took over as PM, and which had boomeranged. This is also on good authority: Volume 2 of the RBI's history. But she did not turn overtly anti-US till the 1969 Congress party split reduced her government to a minority one dependent on the CPI (the pro-China CPM was a runt then and India turned pro-USSR).

The latest instance of foreign policy being determined by domestic political considerations has, of course, been the scuppering of the nuclear deal. So in that sense, nothing has changed.

It seems clear that if the exigencies of economics require that we ally with the US but the exigencies of politics require that we don't, it is the latter that will win every time. It is this basic weakness of Indian politics that the Communists have exploited on two of the three occasions that a government has depended on them for support.

The challenge for America, which needs India as much India needs it, is to ensure that the anti-Americanism that characterises all healthy democracies from Britain in the West to Korea and Japan in the East is limited only to rhetoric, and doesn't translate into self-punishing action or non-action. The difference between India and the rest of America's democratic allies is that for them economic interests drive politics but for India, it is the other way around. Even the French, when push comes to shove, put their economic interests first. During the Iraq affair, they huffed and puffed but business remained as it was.

India too had begun to do this and with excellent results "" until the Congress made the fatal mistake of going into an embrace with the Communists. When one looks at its predicament now, one can only recall the story of the frog and scorpion from the Panchatantra.

Having piggybacked on the frog to cross a river in spate, the scorpion fatally stung the frog. As both were dying, the frog asked the scorpion why. "Because" it replied, "it is in my nature to sting."