A blame game has been raging in the government after Obama’s Beijing shocker. It seems the government’s advance warning systems failed to alert decision makers about the possibility of a US-China “gangup” on South Asia. The buzz is that the PMO is upset with our diplomatic missions in Washington and Beijing, which missed signals that did not augur well for India. For instance, no one sounded an alarm when news broke about Richard Holbrooke’s trip to Beijing in the runup to Obama’s China visit. Now, what was Obama’s special representative for Af-Pak doing in a country outside his beat?
Obviously, he was doing the spadework to craft a role for China in the resolution of the Af-Pak tangle and in the process, help legitimise Beijing’s entry into the South Asia equation. The outcome of his trip was the inclusion of an offending para in the China-US joint statement, which spoke of the two countries joining hands to work for peace and stability in this region. Interestingly, former national security advisor Brajesh Mishra is believed to have alerted a key PMO aide to the significance of the Holbrooke visit. His warning was ignored.
* * *
Manmohan Singh’s efforts to reconcile opposing views in his government on the climate change debate have led to piquant situations. India was the only country to send a five-member team to the pre-COP meet in Copenhagen last week. The norm is three representatives per nation. The Indian team consisted of three officials, the PM’s special envoy on climate change, Shyam Saran, and environment minister Jairam Ramesh. That Saran and Ramesh don’t see eye to eye is no longer a secret. The latter wants India to junk its traditional position on climate change and join the western bandwagon while the former holds the official line. With the Copenhagen summit in December unlikely to yield results, the PM seems to have put Ramesh’s proposal on hold for the moment. Incidentally, Saran was a last-minute inclusion in the PM’s delegation to Washington. The decision came as a surprise because climate change discussions with the US were presumed to be the domain of Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia. For the past many days, Ahluwalia has been doing a video conference with his interlocutors in Washington to put together an MOU on climate change, to be signed during the PM’s US trip. It looks like this MOU may go the way of Ramesh’s proposals.
* * *
Cautious old timers in the Congress are wary of the gung-ho sentiments sweeping the party after the recent by-polls in Uttar Pradesh. True, the Congress won the Firozabad Lok Sabha seat. But what is worrying the elders is the poor performance in the assembly seats. Not only did the Congress lose the two sitting seats of Padrauna and Jhansi, it lost its deposit in six places. These aren’t good signals for a party that’s hoping to upset Mayawati’s applecart in the 2012 assembly elections. Obviously, it needs to do much more work on the ground before it can make a comeback in this critically important state.
* * *
Tailpiece
Harayana governor Jagannath Pahadia has caused much consternation and mirth in the state with an unsual request. He wants a bulletproof bedroom in the governor’s mansion. The state administration is not quite sure how to handle the request. You don’t usually turn down a governor. But how do you provide a bulletproof cover to a bedroom?
Comments