Column

There is mounting concern in the government that French President Nicolas Sarkozy may cancel his forthcoming visit to India and we’ll be left without a VIP guest at our 2008 Republic Day parade.

Nothing is official about it yet but French interlocutors have been dropping dark hints that Sarkozy feels there’s not much point in coming after India cancelled the multi-crore Eurocopter deal.

France had expected to ink the contract during Sarkozy’s trip, giving a boost to the bilateral relationship and a fillip to its open support for India’s entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

Instead, a fresh tender will be floated amid whispers in power corridors that the government wants to give the contract to an American company for its Bell helicopters.

The scrapping of an important defence deal has soured the mood in Paris, which feels that the US is running away with India’s burgeoning arms market although France was the first country to support the 1998 nuclear test.

Similarly, Moscow is also burning up over Washington’s aggressive courting of India’s defence establishment. Russian ire spilled out in the denial of protocol niceties to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and two of his senior ministers.

In chasing the American dream spun by US President George Bush, we seem to be treading on an awful lot of toes, many of them belonging to traditional friends. Has this government’s foreign policy landed us in a diplomatic soup?

The Left has clear reservations on this score and doesn’t make any bones about it. But it’s not quite ready to push the government over the edge, yet.

Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell Prakash Karat that the CPM’s in-house television channel, Kairali, was recording his sabre-rattling address to his Delhi state unit cadres last week.

Consequently, he was shown on air, threatening to pull down the government unless it suspends talks with the IAEA after the Gujarat polls. It took much fire-fighting to pull Karat out of that hole.

While leaders went around issuing desperate denials about an ultimatum, Kairali was pulled up for letting down the party by airing what were not supposed to be in-camera proceedings.

Obviously, there was a communication gap somewhere, showing that the Marxists are not as infallible as they pretend.

TAILPIECE
A little known nugget of information about BJP leader Arun Jaitley surfaced when the party was scrambling to send off Narendra Modi’s explanation to the Election Commission on his Sohrabuddin speech.

Jaitley may be GenNext and all that, but he doesn’t know how to use a computer. Like most lawyers of repute, he dictates and a stenographer takes it down, keys it into the computer and hands over a printout for his approval and signature.

That fateful night, as the BJP was racing to meet the EC deadline of 11am. the next morning, the stenographer had called it a day and gone home. Jaitley was in a soup.

Vital corrections had to be made to the draft. It took several hours to locate the stenographer. Dawn was breaking by the time the he was found, the reply redone, approved and readied for Modi’s signature.

While a BJP worker was rushed with the document to hunt down the CM, who was out campaigning, an application was filed with the EC in New Delhi for a deadline extension till the evening.

The reply made it to the EC just before 5 pm. Not only is Jaitley computer-illiterate, a friend confided that he doesn’t know how to SMS either!

Email: a_jerath@dnaindia.net