The comrades and BJP are putting India in danger

So the cat is finally out of the bag! A regional party of Kerala [Images] and Bengal now wants to rule the country, run our foreign policy for the benefit of their 'fatherland' and get more Indian soldiers killed by jihadis by denying our army technology and help from Israel.

In one sense the transparently dishonest Communists are dead right: The nuke deal is NOT about the nuclear issue at all. It is a means to an end. The end being Indo-US strategic partnership for the next 40 years! This is essentially an adjustment that both countries are making to the emerging situation in the 21st century. It is true that right till the end of last century Indo-US relations bordered on cold to lukewarm. Who can forget the dispatch of the USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal in 1971!

But in the same breath we must also acknowledge that after the August 1971 Treaty of Peace and Friendship with the erstwhile Soviet Union, we had a virtual alliance with that country. On the other hand, for nearly 20 years, from the 1972 Shanghai Declaration by Nixon and Chou En-lai right till 1992, the US and China were in a similar quasi alliance. Much of China's spectacular progress is owed to the massive inflow of American capital and technology, both denied to India.

The end of the Soviet Union ushered in new global equations. The US now fears the rise of China and its likely domination of Asia, and sees a powerful India as a natural counterweight to Chinese power. On the other hand China has emerged as the biggest arms supplier to Pakistan, India's perpetual thorn, and much of that country's missiles directed at us are supplied by them. In this case there is a convergence of interests between the US and India.

This author was told nearly seven years ago by a very senior American analyst that the US would make sure that India becomes a superpower. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared so openly last year. But the various American laws dealing with nuclear proliferation were an obstacle to American transfer of technology to India. The 123 (Ek, do, teen) deal is a means to get over those obstacles. But the strong non-proliferation lobby in the US put spokes in the deal. To satisfy them some cosmetic measures had to be put in the deal to make it acceptable to them as well as the larger Nuclear Suppliers Group.

The Ek, do, teen deal reminds one of the famous Bollywood song of the same words that launched Madhuri Dixit's [Images] career; in similar vein the nuke deal is just the beginning of a long and durable strategic partnership between the two countries. In the 1970s and 1980s most Indians supported friendship with the Soviet Union, not on any ideological grounds but due to the fact that our interests coincided. Now they coincide with the Americans'. Any Indian with India's interest at heart would support this deal.

Curiously, the Indo-US deal is being opposed not just by the Communists in India but also by Pakistan, China and Al Qaeda [Images]; the latter has just issued a warning to India. It is indeed a shame on the Communists that they are on the same side as India's enemies.

Anyone even briefly aware of the Indian Communists' past will not be surprised at this behaviour. In 1941, during World War II, an 'Imperialist War' suddenly became a People's War once Nazi Germany [Images] attacked the Soviet Union. Closer to our time, in 1962 a faction of the Communist party (now under the name of CPI-M) broke away from the parent body that was pro-Soviet Union, due to the split in Communist movement worldwide. Indian Communists have had a pro-Soviet faction and pro-China faction, but no pro-India faction.

The CPI-M to this day refuses to accept that China was the aggressor in 1962 and had no sympathy for our jawans who died fighting the Chinese. Various documents including the Henderson Brooks Report clearly bring out the anti-national role of the Communists. Like the jihadi dream of worldwide 'Khilafat', the Indian Communists are also still wedded to 'Comintern' or the Communist International.

Public memory is short, but it was these very Communists who were in the forefront of the denunciation of the nuclear tests carried out by India in May 1998! For them to now cry foul over the curb on testing is, as I said earlier, transparently dishonest.

Much of the opposition to the deal is centred round the issue of nuclear testing. Not a word is uttered about the unfettered right India has to keep increasing its stockpile and research, none of which has been restricted. It needs to be reiterated that at present no country is carrying out open testing of new weapons. If our scientists are satisfied that they can do it in the lab using computers etc, there is no reason to disbelieve them. If and when China or some other country resumes testing, India is still free to follow.

It is the political reality today that it is the US that is interested in India becoming China's equal in the military nuclear field. This not so bizarre as it sounds since enough material is available to show that in 1964, when China first tested its nuclear weapons, it was the US that unsuccessfully urged India to go nuclear!

It is thanks to American technology and help through Israel that for the first time the Indian armed forces have an edge over the terrorists. Now the Communists want us to break these relations and get Indian soldiers killed by the terrorists in Kashmir.

But the attitude of the main opposition the BJP takes the cake. The nuke deal is a culmination of the process began by A B Vajpayee and Jaswant Singh. Their opposition to the deal smacks of short-term opportunism to bring down the government by hook or by crook. It is a classic case of opposition for the sake of opposition.

India, facing Chinese encirclement on the sea and a rapidly Talibanising Pakistan in the west, needs American technology to defend against rogue missile attacks. By jeopardising the India-US partnership, the comrades and the BJP are putting the country's security in danger.

'China's interest is our interest' - The current opposition of the leftist parties -- particularly, the Communist Party of India-Marxist -- to the agreement (the so-called 123 agreement) with the US on civil nuclear co-operation and to India's developing strategic relations with the US takes one's mind back to the days before the visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao to India in November last year.

A Chinese company had won a contract for the construction of a gas pipeline from the Godavari area in Andhra Pradesh. It wanted to bring about 1,000 Chinese engineers to work in the project. The ministry of home affairs and the Intelligence Bureau of the Government of India were not clearing the issue of visas to the Chinese engineers. They asked a number of inconvenient questions as to why it was necessary for the Chinese company to bring in so many of their engineers when unemployed Indian engineers were available.

There was also a paper prepared by the National Security Council Secretariat of the Prime Minister's Office suggesting that proposals for foreign investments in sensitive sectors such as telecommunications from China, Pakistan and Bangladesh should be subjected to a special security vetting.

Sitaram Yechury of the CPI-M, allegedly at the instance of the Chinese embassy in New Delhi, raised a big hue and cry about it and literally forced the Government of India to order the issue of visas to the Chinese engineers and to drop the proposal for a special security vetting for Chinese investment proposals in sensitive sectors.

After Hu's visit was over, Times Now television news channel had invited me to participate in a discussion on the visit. Arnab Goswami of the channel anchored the discussions. D Raja, CPI's member of the Rajya Sabha, participated in the discussions from Delhi. I told Raja: "It is surprising that you pressurised the government to issue visas to 1000 Chinese engineers. You were not bothered about Indian engineers not getting these jobs. If a US company had wanted to bring 1000 American engineers, would you have urged the government to issue visas to them?"

Raja told me: "Mr Raman, you are an eminent person. You should not mislead people by raising such scenarios."

For the last two months, the Chinese authorities have been expressing their concern over reports that India has joined hands with the US, Japan [Images] and Australia to counter the growing Chinese naval power in the region and that the forthcoming naval exercise in the Bay of Bengal involving the navies of these countries plus Singapore is the beginning of this project to counter Chinese naval power and presence in the Bay of Bengal/Indian Ocean region.

It is not without significance that the vigorous campaign of the leftist parties -- particularly of the CPI-M -- against the recently concluded Indo-US agreement on civil nuclear co-operation and against the growing strategic interactions between India and the US in particular has coincided with the beginning of the Chinese campaign against the so-called quadrilateral strategic interaction involving India, Japan, the US and Australia and the naval exercise with the additional involvement of the Singapore navy.

The leftists' campaign against India's relations with the US reflects more China's concerns and interests than those of India. ...After joining the IB in 1967, I went on a visit to Kolkata. Those were the days of China's Cultural Revolution. The Marxists were not yet in power in West Bengal, but were very active. As I was travelling in a taxi from the Dum Dum airport to downtown, I saw the following slogan painted by the Marxists on the walls everywhere: 'China's chairman is our chairman'.

The present day Indian Marxists don't say this, but they do believe that 'China's interest is our Interest'. It is this belief which is behind their present campaign against the Government of India. Their hidden motive should be exposed.

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