 India's Manmohan Singh The Nuclear Obituary by Prem Shankar Jha. - With Obama likely to take over the White House, it's nuclear deal R. I. P.. It's official now. Barack Obama is going to be the Democrat candidate for the US presidency. What could that mean for America and what will it mean for us (India)? Across the world, the media is having a historic moment. What they are not discussing is why such a large section of the American population has cast centuries of prejudice aside and taken an unprecedented step.
The answer, almost certainly, is that they have done so because they find themselves in a situation they have never known before. Across the political spectrum, there is an all-pervasive fear in the country that the future is slipping out of control. This feeling can be traced back three decades to the onset of de-industrialisation in the '70s, as more and more industries and retail chains began to move and outsource their manufacturing operations to low-wage countries in Asia or south of the border to Mexico. But it has come to a head in the eight disastrous years of the Bush presidency.
That presidency is ending with America beset by a banking-cum-financial mess that will take years to untangle, and threatened by recession that several analysts predict will rival the Great Depression of the 1930s. The value of the dollar is plummeting, its vast middle class is fighting a losing battle to maintain its real income, and the poor face growing impoverishment and increased insecurity in their daily lives.
Americans have faced similar crises before, but what is distinctly new to them is the feeling that they are no longer trusted to act in the best interests of the world. The Iraq war has cost the hegemony that it had enjoyed since the Second World War. Surveys by the Pew Research Group have regularly charted this growing distrust. What makes it most galling is that this is concentrated in precisely the countries that America considers its closest allies.
For the first time since World War II, therefore Americans feel lost and no longer trust their leaders. That is why a young, one-term, 'black' senator has been able to come out of nowhere and in a sense 'steal' the primaries and probably the presidency, from Hillary Clinton. Hillary relentlessly emphasised her 'experience' and consensus- building capability - she therefore came to represent continuity in American politics when more and more Americans wanted a change of direction and rediscovery of national purpose.
That is what Obama is offering, Instead of getting a team of researchers to tell him what Americans want, he is shaping his electoral policy entirely from within himself and using his researchers to sound out the reactions. In his entire campaign, he has never ducked a difficult question, never pretended to be different things to different people.
What may be good news for America and most of the world is bad news for India. For if the Indo-US nuclear treaty was dying before, it is well and truly dead now. Obama has said with his characteristic bluntness that 'India has taken us to the cleaners'. As a result, even if the Manmohan Singh government musters the resolve to sign the safeguards agreement with the IAEA now, it is a safe bet that in the few months of the Bush administration that remain, no state department official will stick his or her neck out to push for a special meeting of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, much less exert American influence to make it lift the embargo on the supply of sensitive technology to India.
So the Left (party in India) has won, However, it's not the Congress (party in India), but India has lost, for we have gratuitously thrown away a chance that will not come our way again for many, many years, In retrospective, the bogey the Communists raised, that the nuclear treaty would enslave India to the US because of some clauses in the Hyde Act, and would further alienate Indian Muslims, is ridiculous. Despite the horrors inflicted on them in recent years, most Indian Muslims remain firmly wedded to their Indian identity. In economic if not political terms, the US is a declining power and not even Barack Obama can arrest its decline, Equally, even though India is sliding into recession now, no power on earth can stop it from growing at around 8 per cent a year over the next decade. Once US firms have begun to construct some of the 300,000 MW power plants that India will need, the inexorable logic of economics will tilt the political scales in India's favour just as they have done in favour of China. But the Indian Communists have made sure that the reigns of power will remain in the hands of 45 countries, of whom at least 40 have nothing to sell to India and envy its growth from the bottom of their hearts.
The tragic truth is that with friends like Prakash Karat, India does not need enemies.
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