'Dissembling on Duplicity'-Menon on Rubin.
{Source: The Hindustan Times [Sunday Edition]-New Delhi,India.}
Dissembling on duplicity
(N.C.MENON on US response to nuclear tests)
In the cruellest of all political hoaxes, those who matter in the Clinton administration have proved that they do not possess the stuff they are accusing India ad nauseum of not having-honesty.
How else does one explain State Department spokesman James Rubin's firing a broadside at India for engaging "in a campaign of duplicity" with regard to its nuclear programme? The charge came on May 14, three days after India set off its series of nuclear tests. There was apparently no sense of deception until then. The new stick used to beat India was clearly an afterthought.
Rubin referred to a score of meetings between Indian and American delegations at which, he claimed, India had never mentioned the possibility of imminent tests, and had, in fact, talked about a several-month review of its nuclear option. When the charges began to be thrown about with wild abandon, New Delhi was forced to give up its polite, diplomatic silence to refute the allegations: India had never given any such assurances. On the contrary, it had been pointed out that the right to exercise the nuclear option was not negotiable. And that had been the policy of successive governments. In any case, why on earth should India tell Big Brother about its impending plans? There are hundreds of American officials here whose primary task is to conceal strategic secrets. Should all of them be accused of indulging in deception? Or is it the arrogant stance of the Clinton administration that what is sauce for the American gander is not sauce for the Indian goose? Besides, where was the deception? On May 4, a week before the tests, K. C. Pant, Chairman of India's National Security Council task force, made an unequivocal statement that India should have a credible nuclear deterrence. Was that not clear enough? Or did Rubin want Pant to spell out the latitude and longitude and the exact moment of the planned test series? Give us a break.
Well, perhaps it is futile to blame Rubin. He is, after all, an ardent follower of his master's voice-in this case, the voice of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who is known to be a hawk in any situation where anyone looks America in the eye. Mrs Albright plainly subscribes to the Dullesian view that "if you are not with us, you are against us." However, in deference to the proclivities of her boss in the Oval Office, Secretary Albright can be very selective in her outrage. When intelligence reports started coming in from America's own agents that China was helping Pakistan in its nuclear weaponisation programme, neither the President nor Mrs Albright displayed undue concern. What was of primary importance was China's massive market. And the strategy of choice was to "engage" with Beijing in an attempt to make it a global partner. Every important American official is aware that Islamabad and Beijing are in nexus against New Delhi. But for the Clinton administration. the issue has been like sex in the Victorian era: Everyone knows about it, but no one talks about it.
The vehemence bordering on vitriol so evident in the official US reaction to India's test series is clearly born out of a variety of frustrations; at India being too big and too populous to be pushed around; at the mistaken notion that the tests by India will have a domino effect, and last, but not the least, the frustration that America's much-wonted intelligence and surveillance systems were caught with their pants embarrassingly down.
There is thus an attempt to justify the intelligence failure by claiming that India had deliberately tried to deceive. Having started down that road, the Clinton administration has had to continue its spin. An attempt has been made to convince an unsuspecting American public that the tests have raised a great deal of tension in the region, and that India and Pakistan might be at each other's throats at any moment. The fact is that most of the fallout from India's tests seems to be not in New Delhi or Islamabad, but in Washington. The US feels that anything India does has to fit into the India-Pakistan mould, that India's strategic requirements should be limited by the South Asian matrix. Washington conveniently forgets that, like China, India is also a massive country, representing one-sixth of humanity. What is missing generally in American foreign policy and specifically in its nuclear policy is a sense of context. The Clinton administration has become so excessively obsessed with its lone superpower role that it has lost touch with the political reality around the globe. In its response to India's tests, the urgent and the expedient are driving out the important and the desirable.
Meanwhile, the reaction in the US Congress, with a few honourable exceptions, is even more infuriatingly obnoxious. This is particularly true of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee headed by Jesse Helms, whose hoary concepts of geopolitical relationships have often embarrassed the administration, enraged America's allies. and jeopardised the very existence of the United Nations. At committee hearings, Senators sitting on raised platforms which they plainly misperceive as the Olympian heights, look down and pronounce on their victim of the day-usually a Third World nation which they exultingly excoriate with a supercilious air of superiority. They often seem to burst at the seams with their ludicrously inflated images of themselves, of America, and of the power America has been given by divine writ to run the rest of the world.
The honourable Senators do not seem to realise that global nuclear policy, cobbled together and constantly repaired by the US, is built on hypocrisy. America aided Britain in producing nuclear weapons and acquiesced when France followed suit. It looked conveniently the other way when Israel (still an undeclared nuclear weapon State) put together an atomic arsenal. When China exploded its own bomb, the US quietly co-opted Beijing into the nuclear club. And now, having tasted sin, the US and the other four nuclear powers (Russia, Britain France and China) demand that everyone else pledge nuclear chastity. They are in no position to cast a stone at India or anyone else.
How maturely has India reacted to the drumbeat of criticism in the US, both natural and trumped up? It must be admitted that the response by the Indian Embassy in Washington has been a lot more impeccable than in New Delhi, where euphoria over the impressive achievement led at times to jingoistic statements by those who ought to know better. There were some initial apprehensions in the Embassy about denial of access. Fortunately, these turned out to be baseless; Ambassador Naresh Chandra and second in command T. P. Srinivasan were able to meet a whole host of members of Congress, at first to stem the tide of anger and disquiet, and gradually to turn the tide of criticism into better perspectives of India's compulsions.
Ambassador Chandra also participated in an unprecedented number of television talk shows in which his reasoned arguments and air of quiet dignity won many converts to India's side. At one of the programmes, he was asked to react to a news story which painted a scenario in which Pakistan, worsted in conventional warfare, resorts to a low level nuclear blast over Mumbai, resulting in millions of deaths. "It makes good reading," the Ambassador commented. "But like the dramatic radio programme by Orson Welles based on H. G. Wells' tale of a Martian invasion, it is just interesting fiction." The Ambassador also pointed out that China had been able to derive a great deal of advantage from the US system that had been clamping down on India. The administration also appeared to be blind to the fact that there was a large segment of American public opinion which tended to view China as a current and potential adversary. In fact, American public opinion is definitely at variance with declared official policy. Judging by the hundreds of telephone calls, faxes and E-mail messages received at the Embassy, there was the recurrent theme that a democratic America should support a democratic India protecting itself against an axis between "red" China and a militarised Pakistan.
A word must also be said about American media reaction to the tests. It is a strange fact that the media here can be fiercely independent about domestic issues, aggressively going after everyone from the President down. But when it comes to US differences with third world countries, the media invariably tag along tamely with the official line. Almost without exception there were references in all the newspapers to the "Hindu" Government in India as the perpetrator of nuclear perfidy. That was akin to talking about the "Catholic" administration of Kennedy. The newsmen were obviously not aware of the fact that several of India's Presidents have been Muslim, that several of its top brass, senior journalists, film stars, popular singers and musicians are Muslim. The reference to the Hindu Government would have been taken as deliberately mischievous, but for the known fact that it was spawned by sheer ignorance.
Meanwhile, the realisation is gradually sinking in here that sanctions will not deter India from its nuclear path. Unlike South Korea and Taiwan, which were brazenly arm-twisted by the US on the nuclear issue, India had never been a US client. On the contrary, India maintains far closer relations to other nuclear powers such as Britain and Russia, with other European nations like Germany, oppose economic retaliation. The US is also beginning to realise that American firms will be the biggest losers in any regimen of unilateral sanctions, as European companies cheerfully pick up the extra business. Many analysts have pointed out that even strategically, antagonising India is a bad policy as it will damage relations with a nation that in the coming years could act as an important counterweight to China. |
