Divorce, UPA style

The divorce may be on the cards, but the timing for the formal split will be dependent not on the results of the joint UPA-Left committee — that will look anew at the nuclear deal — but on other issues. The new committee is simply a ploy to delay the formal divorce. Neither the Congress nor the Left want to part company before the Gujarat elections. The communists feel the secular forces should be united in the fight against Modi. The Congress is aware that the communists’ vote-share in Gujarat is practically non-existent, but it needs a feedback of the political mood in the state before calling for a national poll. A Left leader acknowledged privately, “We are waiting for the Gujarat poll results before we formally part company.” Although the Election Commission can call polls at any time between now and December, sources suggest that the commission will stick to the December deadline in order to complete all formalities before the crucial election.

Noteworthy info

THE CIA dispatches and ambassadorial telegrams which have been compiled by journalist Kalyani Shankar and used in her soon-to-be-released book on India and the US in the sixties are an eye-opener. The confidential notes are available to the public after the standard 30-year moratorium and kept in the Lyndon Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, where Shankar accessed them from. Then ambassador Chester Bowles was generally dead on the mark about events in India, whether it was predicting Nehru’s successor, the state of the prime minister’s health in his last days, or giving thumbnail sketches of important Congress leaders. The names of informers have been scratched out from Bowles’s messages, but it is obvious that they were ministers and senior Government functionaries. A memorandum from the CIA to the White House just before Indira Gandhi’s visit in 1966, when India was facing food shortages, reveals the cynicism of American foreign policy. The message states: “The slate has been wiped clean of previous commitments and India (is) coming to us asking for a new relationship on the terms we want.”

Unfriendly act?

SPEAKER Somnath Chatterjee feels that parliamentarians should form their own country-specific Indo-friendship groups and not lend their names to friendship societies in which commercial and private bodies are also associated. The speaker recently constituted several such friendship associations, including the Indo-US Friendship Association. The composition of this body has raised eyebrows. Chatterjee has appointed Yashwant Sinha of the BJP as chairperson of the group and Sitaram Yechury and Janardhan Reddy as vice-chairpersons. The first two have come out publicly against the Indo-US treaty in no uncertain terms. Yechury, in fact, has made no bones about the anti-US imperialism stance of his party.

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