India to face Pak's plight if N-deal is through: Karat

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Asserting the Left would continue to oppose the Indo-US nuclear deal, CPI-M General Secretary Prakash Karat on Tuesday warned that if the pact was operationalised, India would have to face the same fate of Pakistan which ended up as a "junior unequal" strategic parter of the US.

"The ultimate aim of the deal was to bind India as a junior, unequal strategic partner of the US to serve its interests in the region just as Pakistan," Karat said while inaugurating a one-day seminar on the Indo-US nuclear deal organised by the AKG Research and Study Centre here.

Referring to a media report of the Pakistan military chief being summoned to an American warship in Indian Ocean for discussions by the US Joint Chief of Staff, the CPI-M leader said India would also have to undergo such plights if the deal was operationalised.

"There is an elected civilian government in Pakistan. But that government has no say in matters like this. This is the plight India should not get into. That is why we were carrying forward our struggle against the deal," he said.
  
If the deal got materialised overcoming several stumbling blocks on its way, it would mean the end of a non-aligned and independent foreign policy pursued by the country, he said.
    
Holding that returns from the deal were rather limited compared to huge strategic, political and economic costs involved, the Marxist leader said the pact would also jeopardise the country's domestic self-reliant nuclear energy programme.

In an hour-long speech, Karat said the problems India faced from the NSG countries to get a waiver exposed the "hollowness of the claim" that it was going to be a clean, beneficial deal for the country.
    
Referring to the government's claim that it was keen on getting a clean waiver from the NSG, he said "there is no walking away for the government. There is only walking in. We have no illusions. There is nothing clean from the beginning. The whole argument (of UPA Government) was unclear from the beginning. Now that the government was aware that the clean waiver was not possible, it was approaching the issue as a "question of wording."
    
Accusing the UPA Government of having gone back on its assurances to the Left, Karat said the ruling coalition appeared even afraid of facing Parliament, backtracking on its word of convening the Monsoon session in August.
    
Though the government had survived the trust vote, it was a "tainted vote" resulting in deep erosion of its credibility and legitimacy, he charged.
    
The Left was confident that whatever manoeuvres the government attempted, they would have to go to people before being able to operationalise the deal, Karat said.
    
"Finally, the nuclear deal will be decided by the people of India, and, it will be a decision democratically taken," he said.

The government, in its eagerness to clinch the deal, had virtually jeopardised the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project by repeatedly excusing itself from meetings planned by Iran to discuss the matter, Karat accused.
    
At the root of the whole deal was the US plan to convert India into its military partner to serve as a countervail to China and secure other aims like isolating and imposing sanctions on Iran, he said.
    
The deal was also part of the strategy of the neo conservative ruling circle in America to push market-oriented economic ideology, imperilling the sovereignty and self reliance of India.
    
If the country allowed the US to achieve these goals, it would have to give up all the vestiges of Non-Alignment and independent foreign policy, which it had preserved for the last six decades despite the vicissitudes through which it had passed, Karat said.
    
Lambasting the UPA government for holding joint naval exercises with the US and its strategic allies, Karat said his party would organise protests across the west coast from Kerala to Maharashtra.

In his presentation, former diplomat M K Bhadrakumar said that from the US perspective, India's induction as a partner would fill a critical gap in the web of partnerships NATO had been weaving.
   
The network woven by NATO currently comes upto the Persian Gulf region and Central Asia and was poised to reach the Asia-Pacific region in the near future, he said.
   
In turn, it would pave the way for deployment of US missile defence system in India as part of an arc of countries allied to the US in the Baltic and Central Europe, Turkey, Israel, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, Bhadrakumar said.
    
T Jayaraman of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, former Vice-chancellor of Kerala University Dr B Ekbal and Dr R V G Menon presented papers on various aspects and implications of the deal.
    
State Education Minister M A Baby presided over the seminar. The presentations were followed by an interactive session.