On your Marx

As they savour the sweet, sweet taste of victory, good neighbourliness must be farthest from the minds of the victors in Tamil Nadu, Assam and West Bengal. But real life has a curious way of intruding into celebratory moments.

Jayalalitha’s Sasikala had once upon a time fled to Malaysia — curiously, the same country Vajpayee’s visiting these days — to escape from the rigours of the court pronouncing judgements in the corruption cases against her as well. The reason Sasikala couldn’t be summoned back from Kuala Lumpur was the same given to the CBI when it asked for Ottavio Quatrochhi a few months ago: that there is no extradition treaty between Malaysia and India and neither of these good people have committed crimes in that country. Meanwhile, Jayalalitha’s southern neighbour, Sri Lanka, must be breathing a double-headed sigh with ‘Amma’ in the chief minister’s seat in Chennai. The AIADMK itself is virulently anti-LTTE, even as the PMK (earlier with the DMK combine and now with ‘Amma’) makes pro-Prabhakaran speeches as well as fetes his father at most available opportunities.

Then there’s West Bengal and Assam, where the Left Front and the Congress, respectively, have swept to power, and whose visions of Bangladesh will have a long-term impact on the Centre’s policy on that country. For example, it took a non-Congress government at the Centre in 1996 (led by Deve Gowda with I.K. Gujral as his foreign minister) to sign the Ganga water agreement — but not without the blessing of then chief minister Jyoti Basu. Meanwhile, the buzz is that Buddhadeb Bhattacharya is keen to turn around the deliberate mindlessness that has bred anomie and alienation and invite foreign capital to reinvent the home state. On your Marx, get set!

Brothers Hindujas

Is the timing of the attack on the Brothers Hindujas and Principal Secretary Brajesh Mishra significant? Its no secret in the Foreign office that a number of Indian diplomats in various European capitals have over the years gotten to know the Hindujas quite well, or shall we say the Hindujas have made it their business to get to know key diplomats well. Besides London, for example, Geneva has been an interesting hunting ground and before they were formally chargesheeted, the Brothers often flew in to New Delhi to meet friends in high places.

Meanwhile, an old Hinduja aide has been quoted in one of the British papers as saying that the real reason the Brothers were invited by the Blairs to meet them in June 1998 (in Pokharan’s aftermath) was that Labour could get an entry into the NRI elite.

Weighty Armitage

Richard Armitage, US deputy secretary of state, wasn’t as lucky in Tokyo — Koizumi’s new foreign minister Tanaka didn’t have time to see him — where he had stopped over just before he flew into a hot, hot reception in New Delhi last week.

But Armitage, 56, clearly is a colourful character in a capital used to having its own way. Armitage continues to be a keen weight-lifter (averaging a 100 kilos), and as an assistant secretary for defense during the Reagan years, was an acknowledged CIA operative involved in the Iran-Contra affair (he was even named in the Oliver North trial).

His reputation cost him the assistant secretary of state when Bush Sr. became President in 1989, but later worked with him as an ambassador to the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union. As Bush’s adviser to the Jordanian government during the Gulf War, Armitage was closely associated with Colin Powell, who calls him his ‘white son’.

If India and the US continue with their ‘strategic dialogue’ and if the Americans continue with the tradition of appointing their deputy secretary of state as their interlocutor, this will be the man for the job. Luckily, there are too many ifs in this story.

Earlier Columns