MAC10 <baj@avconslts.net> wrote in message news:<10aeusf61b6dleb@corp.supernews.com>...
By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page B07
Will Yoda frequent Wehrkunde no more?
You got to believe me when I say foreigners don't know much about
Indian politics.
That question is code for this scribe's personal and disappointed
reaction to the defeat of Atal Bihari Vajpayee's coalition government in
India just as it threatened to become an important U.S. partner and a
major player in global economics and politics. I'll decrypt that
knee-jerk reaction at the end, after setting the larger scene.
Positive outcomes -- integrating India into the global economy or
improving New Delhi's relations with Washington, for example -- may
still be attained under the new coalition government to be run by the
Congress Party. But the prospects for either are less promising than
they would have been under Vajpayee, who was President Bush's most
unlikely strategic partner abroad.
There is one obvious conclusion to draw from the results of last week's
balloting in the world's largest democracy: Uncle Sam's coattails do not
stretch to foreign political leaders this year. Incumbents abroad with
an American connection gain no advantage by brandishing it before
voters. They may even pay a price for getting too close to the Bush
White House.
No -they (relations with the US) mean nothing to the electorate.
Britain's Tony Blair already pays that price within his Labor Party,
even as he presides over a robust economy. In Spain, Jose Maria Aznar's
conservatives fell in March despite a strong economic record. Now
Vajpayee's Hindu nationalist party and its regional allies, which
steered India to impressive growth rates, must hand over power to the
once-discredited leftist groups led by Sonia Gandhi.
But larger -- and smaller -- forces than Bush's unpopularity abroad are
at work as electorates oust or rail unrelentingly at leaders who have
mastered the economics of globalization while seeming to neglect the
little folk back home.
Since Vajpayee was never given a majority, the question of him losing
a majority does not arise. His pre-poll allies lost badly, and his
party didn't fare as well as most expected. The communists made
impressive gains, and mostly at the expense of the congress party
which they are now supporting from the outside.
I think of this as the distemper of our times: Electorates may be
punishing today's leaders for failing to deliver on the past decade's
overblown promises of globalization -- or at least for failing to
mitigate the negative consequences in citizens' lives of the greater
flow of goods, labor, technology, capital and culture across porous
national borders.
Vajpayee delivered well on many counts and it is just that people
expected more than what he delivered. Whether this is defeat for him
depends on whether the incumbent can survive for another 5 yrs.
Looking at the start that it has had, 5 months looks like a long
period for a naive politician that Sonia Gandhi is.
This may well be the key battleground state of mind in the United States
on Nov. 2. And the European Union's ambitious enlargement to 25 members
sets up its own national days of reckoning on this score.
An initial report by the Reuters news agency called the defeat "a
resounding rejection" of Vajpayee's market reform program "by the
disaffected rural poor who feel excluded from India's economic boom."
Yes -they were left out of the party and want the incumbent to better
address the have-nots' aspirations.
Other factors count as well. Ideologues in Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) attributed the rural losses to the prime minister's efforts
to make peace with Pakistan and a de-emphasis of Hindu nationalism.
No. Neither peace nor war with Pakistan makes a difference to
electoral results.
And a diplomatic blunder by the Bush administration may have also
contributed to Vajpayee's surprise ouster. Secretary of State Colin
Powell's visit to the Asian subcontinent in March, while little noticed
in the United States, left many Indians feeling that Vajpayee had been
deliberately stiffed and humiliated by the Bush administration.
It didn't. Americans' opinions is of no relevance/consequence to the
balance of power in the sub-continent which is very much in India's
favour. They tried their best during the cold war -without much
success.
Powell was feted in New Delhi and then traveled to Islamabad, where he
stunned the Indians by announcing without warning that the United States
would soon take the symbolically important step of designating Pakistan
as a "major non-NATO ally." That sparked a diplomatic protest and a
furor in the Indian press.
All paid for by the establishment.
Administration insiders say Powell was not deceitful. Instead he was
mousetrapped by the clever Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, into
prematurely announcing a policy step that had not received a final green
light in Washington and to which Powell had attached little importance.
India's initial reaction and now its election show how wrong the
secretary of state got that.
As if Powell could have made a difference to what 300 million think of
their candidate(s).
It was not the Bush administration's closeness to Vajpayee that hurt him
as much as its failure to deliver anything to compensate for the Indian
leader's surprising support for U.S. bases in Central Asia, missile
defense and other previously neuralgic subjects. This failure to reward
friends is devastating. Tony Blair may have thoughts on this subject.
Which brings me to Yoda. A personal regret is that the BJP defeat
removes from office the wise and patient Brajesh Mishra, Vajpayee's
national security adviser, who was key in implementing India's belated
but rapid opening to the world.
I don't know how wise & patient Brajesh Mishra is. But if I were to
quote Panchjanya (RSS mouthpiece), his father kidnapped and raped a
muslim girl during riots that followed partition in 1947.
Mishra was one of the first important Asian security officials to be
invited to speak at the annual Munich Conference on National Security,
also known as the Wehrkunde conference, about five years ago. In our
chats there and elsewhere since, his gravelly voice, gentle manners,
wise words and shining pate reminded me of the Yoda character in "Star
Wars." But this time the force was not with him, nor with his boss.
Looks like a misunderstanding on part of the author on who is who in
Indian politics.
regards
-kamal
.
