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Madeleine and Bill and the Attila-the-Hen school of foreign policy

Margaret Thatcher used to be called Attila the Hen; that epithet is appropriate for Madeleine Albright these days. This pugnacious woman has always been unparliamentary in her speech, but she has exceeded all diplomatic decorum in her reactions to and comments on India's nuke tests and the aftermath. Someone should have her wash her mouth out with soap!

It is ironic in and of itself that Albright, whose own life was disrupted by the actions of expansionist, dangerous states, should now be the main apologist for another, evil, expansionist, dangerous state. For, she was a refugee from a Czechoslovakia that experienced twin violations -- the Nazi invasion of the Sudetenland, and the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring.

But now, Madame Albright is chief among the acolytes of the Chinese strongman, Jiang Zemin. The Communists have this picturesque but mystifying term, "imperialistic running dog," to skewer collaborators of the US. I have always wondered why it was a running dog, would a walking dog be less wicked? Does Albright now qualify to be a "commie running dog?"

Albright becoming a commie fellow-traveller is really startling; for her father, Franz Korbel, a Czech diplomat, was known for his unbending anti-Communist views. So much so that as the chief of a UN committee on Jammu & Kashmir, Korbel was very anti-India, primarily because of his perception of an Indo-Soviet nexus. Albright has, perhaps because of this, always taken a pro-Pakistani stand. But pro-Communist?

The question of the hour is, are Albright's attitude and demeanour towards India a reflection of her boss Bill Clinton's views, or is she simply prejudiced? I used to think that Clinton had a generally benign or neutral attitude towards India and that the previous insufferable Yank woman India had to deal with, that notorious Indophobe Robin Raphel, was merely an aberration.

I am no longer so sure. What explains the Chinese hold over Clinton? Pictures in incriminating positions, as they say? Couldn't possibly be about his sexual indiscretions -- what more could he have done than what is already known? It must be something more dangerous and damaging -- I personally think the smoking gun of the Chinese campaign contributions and the nexus with their army will eventually lead to serious revelations.

The immediate provocation for this line of thought is the churlishness shown by the US recently in denying visas to R Chidambaram of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, as well as the declaration of a number of Indian researchers in the US as personae non grata. As far as I can tell, this is unprecedented -- even at the height of the Cold War, scientific interchanges continued between the Soviets and the Americans.

The US appears to be targeting India's semiconductor capability: because the researchers are all in devices or ceramics. India is currently not a major player in this area; therefore, India would be vulnerable to a potential American embargo in CPUs and other chips. Furthermore, chips are an important ingredient in information warfare -- Trojan horse programmes can be triggered remotely to snoop or damage.

I conclude there is a deliberate message in the US act. I am a conspiracy theorist, and therefore I see potentially ominous signs. Extrapolating, I see two possible outcomes, neither of which is very palatable. The first is the rogue-state hypothesis, and the second is the constitutional-coup hypothesis.

The American media has stopped just short of calling India a 'rogue state' partly because it would be laughable -- India has not ever threatened any other state, nor proliferated weapons of mass destruction (by the way, the US has, and therefore it would be a 'rogue state' by their own definition, but that irony, too, is lost, alas, on the ever-so-sanctimonious Americans.)

The general conceit amongst the US media and the self-proclaimed experts who have crawled out of the woodwork has been that India could only develop its nuclear capability because America innocently gave away its know-how to India. But in fact, nuclear technology is well-understood; a clever graduate student even put the plans for a bomb on the Internet a few years ago.

One Gary Milhollin, of the Wisconsin Arms Control Project (apparently not aimed at controlling American arms, however) held forth about how it was IBM and Digital that unwittingly gave India the computing power to build the bomb. Furthermore that A P J Abdul Kalam once witnessed a nuclear explosion while he spent three months visiting the US -- clearly implying that he learned to build a bomb then. Fast learner, that Abdul Kalam, I tell you!

Milhollin chose not to mention that India has indigenously developed several supercomputers -- Param, Anurag, and Flosolver, for example -- as a direct response to American embargoes of Cray supercomputers. Gary, old boy, Indians too know how to build computers -- Yanks have no monopoly on technical skills. After all, about 20% of the people in Silicon Valley computer companies are Indians.

The rogue-state hypothesis therefore runs along the following lines -- the US has decided that India is an enemy; conveniently, Indians are not white, so the barely-hidden racism that fuels a lot of American thinking can come to the fore -- these brown guys need to be taught a lesson. Obviously, this has grave implications for Indian nationals in the US. Indian-Americans may be targeted for systematic discrimination both by the lumpen proletariat and by the US government.

The most malicious example of American racism against someone defined as an enemy was, of course, the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II. And some of these people were in fact third generation Americans with practically no ties to Japan. But, of course, they were yellow people, and so America rounded a large number of them up and stuck them in concentration camps in Arizona and so forth. Astonishingly, they did this not only to Japanese-Americans, but they even got Peru to allow them to jail Japanese-Peruvians!

Note that they didn't do this to German-Americans, although the US was also at war with Germany. Note also that they felt compelled to nuke only Japan, and not Germany. Naturally, Germans being white people deserve some respect, but non-whites don't. Similarly, the Native American was considered vermin, and hunted down with a bounty on the head of each killed. Ah, for those simpler times of the manifest destiny of the white man to rule!

Indians have also felt the severe brunt of racism in the US in the early parts of the century. Indians who immigrated to the US -- many were Sikh farmers -- were forced into statelessness and right-lessness. It is a rather ignoble tale: to oppress Chinese migrants, US Congress passed a law that only Caucasians were eligible for US citizenship. Whereupon Indians applied for, and got, US citizenship on the grounds that they were, technically speaking, Caucasian.

Not so fast, cried the racists. They went to court and modified the law so that only white Caucasians could be citizens. The Indians were duly stripped of their citizenship. The only right they had was to work and die -- they were not allowed to own property, marry white women, or bring Indian women to America. This, incidentally, led to a number of these Indians marrying Mexican/Chicano women, who were held in equal contempt by whites -- with the result that there are quite a few Sikh/Catholic Indian/Mexicans around.

America may be gearing up to do unpleasant things to Indian nationals (resident and non-resident aliens both) and US citizens of Indian origin. The Indian-American population, noticeably apathetic, better do some soul-searching and lobbying at this point because if they don't, their comfortable lives may be on the line. I noticed that the Indian government has hired a big PR firm, with Stephen Solarz, formerly India's best friend in the US Congress, as the account manager. This is good, but I cannot believe Indian-Americans let him be defeated in 1996!

Once whipped to a fever pitch by an orchestrated media campaign, average Americans have no compunctions about the sufferings of innocent civilians of other nations -- as has been seen in the case of Iraq, and formerly of Vietnam -- due to American policy. Before the average couch potato becomes convinced India is a 'rogue state,' Indian-Americans should get their act together.

The other scenario is of a thinly-disguised constitutional coup in India. I wouldn't necessarily support the BJP-led government in India, except that the alternatives are so execrable! Besides, I follow a neo-liberal's consistent policy of supporting the government on foreign affairs. I also think that after fifty years of one flawed ideology, it is time to give the other guys a chance. I don't think another Nehru dynasty raj is the answer. Americans may think differently.

Once again, there seems to be precedent. The Nehru dynasty may have colluded with Americans, or so it appears. It is alleged that in 1959 the E M S Namboodiripad government in Kerala was booted out of office with the active connivance of the CIA. Although EMS had a majority in the assembly, the excuse was that the law-and-order situation in Kerala had deteriorated to the extent that it was, regrettably, necessary to use Article 356 of the Constitution. The first pernicious use of 356.

I have no great love for the Marxists either (as must be obvious to anyone who reads my columns), but this incident gives me pause. Reactionary elements in Kerala were incited and inflamed, presumably with CIA funding; they took to the streets in a euphemistically-named vimochana samaram, struggle for liberation. Indira Gandhi was Nehru's point person on Kerala; she advised Nehru to topple EMS.

Today, the vultures are encircling the besieged BJP-led government at the center, and sure enough there is another Nehru dynasty woman, the new Madame Gandhi, who would gain from a fallen government. What might be the quid pro quo for covert American support? No prizes for guessing NPT, CTBT, FMCT, capping and rollback of the nuclear and missile programmes.

Clinton's coded message about "responsible" previous governments, and James Rubin's plaintive concession that "we expected them [the Indians] to think like us" -- that is, look out for American interests -- now begin to take on sinister implications. Now, to be fair, am I saying that Sonia Gandhi would sell India down the river? No, I am not suggesting that she will, but as geostrategists, this is another permutation we need to consider.

America has, of course, had a history of getting rid of inconvenient governments through means fair and foul. Although we have come to think of the CIA as a bunch of bumbling idiots, the truth is that they have been, and will continue to be, able to make things happen. I feel a little bad about raising the tired old CIA bogeyman, but as Intel's Andy Grove says, only the paranoid survive.

We are also seeing a classic good guy-bad guy scenario, familiar to viewers of NYPD Blue etc.: Attila-the-Hen rants and raves and makes mafioso-like threats ("I hear you have a good pair of knees. Would you like to keep them that way?") Then along comes very reasonable Strobe Talbott. Naturally, Indians would rather deal with Talbott. But we neo-liberals are with the poet who said, "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!" especially when said 'Greeks' make curious 'courtesy visits' to Opposition leaders.

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