Congress’s choice

First, the “how” question. The BJP and the CPM have given no indication that they might reconsider their opposition to the nuclear initiative. If the BJP has been trapped by rank opportunism, the CPM is blindsided by its moribund ideology. The risks and rewards of going ahead with the nuclear initiative belong entirely to the Congress.

That the BJP’s opposition to the nuclear deal is bereft of all principle is no secret. We now have it from the horse’s mouth. The former US deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott, who negotiated the nuclear question with the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Government during 1998-2000, suggests the BJP might have grabbed any nuclear deal from the Clinton administration similar to the one on offer today for the Congress-led government from President George W. Bush. (See Op-Ed Page.) Talbott says the “BJP would have been astonished given what they knew about our position on the issues involved”.

If the BJP was unprepared to put the national interest above the egotism of its leaders, who were sour that the Congress was taking credit for an initiative they had launched, the CPM’s very definition of national interest has always been out of sync with that of the national mainstream.

Unlike the Congress, which laid the foundation for a nuclear weapons programme and exercised the option in the late 1980s and the BJP which conducted the tests in May 1998 and declared India a nuclear weapon power, the CPM has consistently opposed India’s nuclear weapons programme. For the party, the communist nukes in Russia and China were ideologically kosher, but the Indian nukes were “impure”. The communists were the only major national political formation that denounced India’s nuclear tests in May 1998.

... contd.