CPM boss Prakash Karat’s latest exposition on Indo-US relations has at least one merit. He makes it clear that Left opposition to the Indo-US nuclear deal is not about technical issues, but what he believes is a grand American design to “encircle” China by building a strategic partnership with India. Karat says the defence of international communism makes it CPM’s bounden duty to block any Indo-US cooperation now, or in the future. The acutely realist Chinese Communist Party, however, is quite adept at dealing with American power, with or without CPM’s solicitous solidarity.

Unlike the CPM, which has never gone beyond a verbal war against imperialism, the CCP fought a real war, with thousands of casualties, against the US in Korea in the early fifties. Twenty years later, Mao’s China was in alliance with Washington against Russian communist brothers. During the last six decades, Beijing has been closer to Washington on a more sustained basis than New Delhi has ever been. China’s annual trade surplus with the US today is larger than India’s total exports to the world. Karat’s proposition that India is about to substitute for Pakistan as America’s most valued ally is even more ridiculous. One wonders how New Delhi can replace Islamabad in the US war against Al-Qaida and the Taliban on the frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is beyond Karat’s simplistic schema to explain why Pakistan has enjoyed such good relations with both Washington and Beijing, even in the worst period of Sino-US confrontation during the fifties and sixties.

In Karat’s fervid political imagination, India is a helpless object, incapable of standing up to its own interests. History, however, informs us the Congress party has read the world situation right more often than the communists. When India invented non-alignment at the very beginning of the Cold War, our communists said there could be no third way between the East and the West and criticised Jawaharlal Nehru for being a “running dog of the imperialists”. When China invaded India in 1962, the CPM leaders said it was Nehru who was the aggressor. When Pakistan attacked Kashmir in 1965, the CPM said the Indian “bourgeois landlord state” had gone to war to divert attention from domestic crises. It is a pity that India’s new self-confidence as one of the world’s largest economies has not influenced CPM’s carefully cultivated paranoia at all. Karat’s internationalist inanities would have been inconsequential, but for the fact that the Congress has allowed him a veto over the pursuit of national interest.