Rahul’s yankee rap

Congress vice president's anti-America attack on Modi flies in the face of his family's and world history. It'll find few takers outside of JNU.

File photo of Congress President Rahul Gandhi at MP election rally | PTI

What justifies this second successive National Interest on the return of Rahul is not the substantive impact he has made yet. That will be tested in months to come if he sticks it out. But it is some of what he has been saying, or specifically the one thing he said in his first Parliament speech, if it was spoken in seriousness.

Mocking Modi for his by now infamous “suit-boot” or his army of sycophants and Internet supporters celebrating Obama’s compliments to him in Time magazine is fair game in parliamentary politics. But he went on to say that the Americans only praise foreign leaders who are their clients. He named Gorbachev, who, he said, helped America by dismantling the Soviet Empire. In his short statement to the cameras outside, he added Boris Yeltsin too in the list of US presidents’ favourites because he privatised Russian industry. Several questions arise from this epochal flourish back in time.

From where, for example, has Rahul been learning history? Does he really believe what he is saying, and if he doesn’t, could it be that he is not conscious that he is the leader of India’s second largest party and will be taken much more seriously than a K.K. Tiwari or Kalpnath Rai of the past and a Mani Shankar Aiyar of today? If so, he needs to return to Thich Nhat Hanh, this time to learn Mindfulness. Does he really believe Mikhail Gorbachev was an American lackey and a traitor and not a global statesman who ended the unjust and unsustainable war in Afghanistan and also let the colonised Soviet “republics” regain their freedom? Similarly, does he also believe that Yeltsin, who we know drank too much vodka, was also an American agent? Or let’s ask even more brutally: does Rahul Gandhi believe the fall of the Berlin Wall was a good thing or not? Was it a giant step for mankind and freedom, or capitulation of the more virtuous bloc in the Cold War, to India’s detriment?

 

The reason I ask that question so rhetorically is I am astounded its implications are not being appreciated, probably because his statements, by themselves, are seen as rhetoric. Even if he rues the decline of the Soviet Empire, he should reflect on the contribution of Leonid Brezhnev. He invaded Afghanistan and, according to many fine historians, including Niall Ferguson, destroyed Soviet power.

Blaming and attacking America, whether directly or as the foreign hand, is an old and tested manoeuvre of the Congress whenever caught in a crisis. This happened in 1969-71, then again in the months leading up to and during the Emergency when assassinations of Chile’s Salvador Allende and Bangladesh’s Sheikh Mujibur Rahman were invoked to build the larger, darker story of a CIA-American threat. It was in early years of that period that the brilliantly funny MP, Piloo Mody (a founder of the Swatantra Party), once appeared in Parliament with a badge reading, “I am a CIA agent”, and had everybody in splits. But the return of the Great Satan in 2015, as we complete 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and with Angela Merkel, from the old Iron Curtain East, well into her third term as Chancellor of a reunited Germany that is now the unchallenged captain of European economy?

Or we can look at history from another point of view: India-US relations. I had the opportunity last week to moderate a conversation between a select audience of the capital’s media and intellectuals and four top US State Department officials, led by Under Secretary (American equivalent for our foreign secretary) for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman. She said, at one point, that for the most part India-US relations have been very good and robust through our history. That left me thinking.

Jawaharlal Nehru was by no means anti-American. In fact, the declassified account of his conversations with President Eisenhower, then locked in the Korean War and furious with China, are so statesmanlike that all those constituting today’s abuse-Nehru industry should speed-read them, particularly the prescient line he speaks suggesting that seeds of destruction lie within the ideology of Communism. Even after the Americans drew Pakistan into their Cold War military alliances, India did not lean on the Soviet Bloc. Almost all our armaments were bought from Britain and France. It was Krishna Menon who pushed Nehru towards the Soviet Union. Yet, in the 1962 (China) and 1965 (Pakistan) wars, almost all our military hardware was from the West. The war with China made Nehru return to USA and along with materiel and training came the first and last US military mission in India. Menon threw in domestic manufacture as a chip to win the argument for Soviet MiGs over a US equivalent, but when the 1965 war broke out, the first MiG squadron was still forming, with just nine planes.

The Soviet Union made a more forceful entry in the subcontinent by hosting Tashkent talks and brokering the agreement following that war. But still, the US was the dominant player in Indian development, and seeds of Green Revolution were being sown with its help even as its PL-480 helped along our ship-to-mouth survival. Right through the sixties, American Peace Corps volunteers were welcome in India.

This began to shift as Indira Gandhi lurched leftward 1971 onwards, and soon gains of the Green Revolution were also reducing the need for food aid. The only time India’s US relationship became really hostile was in the run-up to the 1971 war with the Nixon-Kissinger tilt away, and Indian response by signing a mutual strategic treaty with Moscow. Again, as post-war inflation and economic downturn resulted in widespread disenchantment with Indira, she swung hard to foreign (US) prop. This thawed much later as Janata Party came to power in 1977 and Jimmy Carter came on a state visit. But it was somewhat mixed up as this was also the phase when George Fernandes, as industry minister, threw out Coke and IBM. Many other American MNCs had already been nationalised. Net result was, the seventies was our most, and only, Americophobic decade. It was also the most xenophobic. The Orwellian FCRA (Foreign Contribution Regulation Act), which the current government is using to target NGOs it sees as hostile, was passed in 1976.

 

Anybody who has followed my work in the past decade knows my intellectual arguments and disagreements with Jairam Ramesh on economy and environmental activism, which I often saw as the worst of crony capitalism, exercised in reverse (using environmental laws to target corporates you didn’t like). But I will always envy him for having invented a devastating expression for this very Indian, anti-American hypocrisy: “Yankee go home, but take me with you.” I am only getting even with him now to quote his line to raise questions on his own boss, Rahul.

If praise by an American President is a black mark for an Indian prime minister, he will have to do some explaining to three generations of Nehru-Gandhis. Nehru was hailed as a global statesman by every American contemporary of his and enjoyed in the Western world a stature way above India’s. Indira was similarly hailed by all except Nixon and since then, particularly with the post-reform rise of India, Henry Kissinger has been apologising for that. Besides, latest revelations (Gary Bass’s The Blood Telegram and Srinath Raghavan’s 1971) tell you India’s strategic compulsions and the Nixon-Kissinger desperation to open up to China had left Indira no option. But, as I had argued in an earlier National Interest (‘It’s Manmohannomics, Manmohan’, June 5, 2004, http://goo.gl/7TR33w), it was she who tried to correct this 1980 onwards, with a meeting she sought with Ronald Reagan in Cancun in October 1981.

Subsequently, Rajiv Gandhi took this to another level, wowing the Congress with his stirring “I am young, I also have a dream” speech. Reagan adored him. It was in his tenure, in 1986, that Caspar Weinberger visited India, the first US secretary of defence to do so. Northrop’s F-20 Tigershark was offered to IAF. Talks to buy GE-404 engines that powered our indigenous frigates and LCA Tejas were initiated. It’s only when he was pushed to the wall after a series of mistakes, including mishandling of Bofors (I never saw any evidence, nor believe he made any money on it, he was just insincere in how he handled it) that he unleashed his “nani yaad dila denge” attack on America, which only aroused derision.

In fact, if Rahul asks the Congress’s formidable team of intellectuals to trawl archives, he will have a bunch of links in his smartphone laden with much more effusive praise for his ancestors from American presidents. He will also find that three successive Indian prime ministers, including Manmohan Singh, and their US counterparts have seen each other as strategic allies. Singh famously told George Bush publicly how deeply he was loved in India. This relationship has only grown post-1993. Even the BJP, which called the nuclear deal anti-national, is now carrying out a course-correction and calling it the centre-piece of India-US relations. Rahul may then regret having insinuated that Gorbachev and Yeltsin were traitors, and realise that today anti-Americanism doesn’t win elections outside of JNU.