jeypore
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THE world dodged a bullet when India's Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, was re-elected so decisively. It's not just that the election itself was so successful and that Singh won, though there can hardly be a friend of India anywhere who does not rejoice at the electoral success of the former Cambridge economics don who now enjoys the world's greatest democratic mandate.
But we dodged a security bullet as well. Indian and US intelligence agencies have concluded that the part of the Pakistani state that lent some support to the terrorists who attacked Mumbai last November, did so for a very specific reason, internal to Pakistan. The Pakistani military was so desperate to escape US pressure to fight the Taliban in their northwest that they wanted to provoke a limited Indian military reaction. This would have justified abandoning the fight against the Taliban and rushing troops back to the Indian border.
The relevant intelligence agencies, including our own, further conclude that a further Pakistan-originated terrorist outrage after Mumbai would have virtually forced an Indian military response of some kind, even just a strike at terrorist training facilities in Pakistan. Only the measured, moderate, mature leadership of Singh and his senior colleagues kept India calm in the face of the Mumbai outrage.
Now that Singh's authority is massively enhanced, the dynamics have changed. One of the few good elements in the regional geo-strategic equation that we can rely on is steadiness in Indian policy.
Singh stands now as one of the greatest statesmen in Asian history. As finance minister in 1991, Singh put India on the path of economic reform and liberalisation. Even in the face of the global financial crisis, India's economy will grow by better than 6 per cent this year. It will be, after China, the second fastest growing large economy in the world. Singh's political achievement is extraordinary, all the more so because he is a leader who, until he was catapulted into the prime ministership, was a respected technocrat but not regarded as a first-division practitioner of the political arts. He is the first Indian PM to serve a full term and win re-election since 1961. He has brilliantly expanded India's centre, marginalising both its Left and its Right.
Singh leads a Government of the notionally Centre Left Congress Party. He was hamstrung these past five years by having to rely on communist coalition allies, although with characteristic Indian originality, Indian communists sometimes favour free market economic reform. In the broad, though, the communists retarded Singh's economic reform. And they are bitterly anti-American, so they fiercely resisted his nuclear agreement with the US. However, Singh engaged in a fairly expensive round of welfare measures designed to share the wealth from India's boom growth with the rural poor. It may have offended economic purists but it marginalised the Left, which was smashed to bits in this election.
Singh was almost equally devastating in his impact on the Centre Right Hindu chauvinists, the Bharatiya Janata Party, the main Opposition party. The BJP took an opportunistic position against the US nuclear deal, so in a sense they were attacking Singh from the left on a national security/energy security matter. Malcolm Turnbull, pay attention here. This tore the BJP apart.
As Pramit Chaudhry, senior editor of the Hindustan Times, and one of India's most brilliant security and economic analysts, explains it, the BJP is a lot like the US Republicans at themoment, lost and in search of anidentity.
"The BJP has two wings," Pramit tells me, "the small-town, cultural conservative, upper-caste Hindu wing, which basically is horrified by all manifestations of modernity. It can't bear to see women drinking and the like. And the big-city, business modernisers, who claim to speak for the new India, and couldn't care less about women drinking or such issues. These two wings basically have nothing incommon."
It drove the BJP's big-city supporters nuts to find the BJP on the same side of the US nuclear deal - that is, opposing it - as the Indian communists and indeed Pakistan. The BJP lost every big city in India except Bangalore.
The nuclear deal, which Singh campaigned for magnificently over four years, and which often seemed extremely unlikely to get up in either India or the US, also established beyond doubt Singh's personal leadership credentials.
The Rudd Government must swiftly take advantage of the new situation in India. Singh's Government will be stronger on economic reform, though it is unlikely to move at dizzying speed. But Singh has identified energy and education as the two great blocks to Indian development. The nuclear deal addresses energy, but there will be much more liberalisation in the energy sector to come. It's also likely that foreign universities will ultimately be allowedto establish campuses in India, both of which are obvious opportunities for Australia.
Rudd had planned to go to India in January, but Singh had a heart attack. Both Rudd and Foreign Minister Stephen Smith are determined to put India in the front rank of Australia's foreign relations. Rudd is sure to visit India soon.
There is a good deal of growth and development in the Australia-India relationship that can go ahead even without Australia agreeing to sell India uranium. But if Canberra wants to move the India relationship to the next level of strategic engagement, that will be necessary.
Tim Flannery, with whom this column is not always in perfect agreement, has pointed out that if you are concerned about greenhouse gases it is bizarre to export coal to India but not uranium, and thereby delay India's move to cleaner energy sources.
Moreover, the whole world is beating a path to India's door right now. The only real play Canberra has at a genuinely strategic relationship with New Delhi is to become a critical energy supplier, and that means uranium. Further, with the long-running insurgency in Sri Lanka solved at last, India will lead an accelerating process of South Asian regional economic integration (Pakistan excepted).
We need as intimate as possible a relationship with India across all policy fronts: the economy, security, global governance structures, pandemic and health issues, cultural exchange, everything you can imagine. There is a Labor Party federal conference in June and uranium policy won't be changed before then. But surely a government as sensible and pragmatic as Rudd's will make the leap on uranium some time in the next year or two at the latest.
Strengthen Team India | The Australian
But we dodged a security bullet as well. Indian and US intelligence agencies have concluded that the part of the Pakistani state that lent some support to the terrorists who attacked Mumbai last November, did so for a very specific reason, internal to Pakistan. The Pakistani military was so desperate to escape US pressure to fight the Taliban in their northwest that they wanted to provoke a limited Indian military reaction. This would have justified abandoning the fight against the Taliban and rushing troops back to the Indian border.
The relevant intelligence agencies, including our own, further conclude that a further Pakistan-originated terrorist outrage after Mumbai would have virtually forced an Indian military response of some kind, even just a strike at terrorist training facilities in Pakistan. Only the measured, moderate, mature leadership of Singh and his senior colleagues kept India calm in the face of the Mumbai outrage.
Now that Singh's authority is massively enhanced, the dynamics have changed. One of the few good elements in the regional geo-strategic equation that we can rely on is steadiness in Indian policy.
Singh stands now as one of the greatest statesmen in Asian history. As finance minister in 1991, Singh put India on the path of economic reform and liberalisation. Even in the face of the global financial crisis, India's economy will grow by better than 6 per cent this year. It will be, after China, the second fastest growing large economy in the world. Singh's political achievement is extraordinary, all the more so because he is a leader who, until he was catapulted into the prime ministership, was a respected technocrat but not regarded as a first-division practitioner of the political arts. He is the first Indian PM to serve a full term and win re-election since 1961. He has brilliantly expanded India's centre, marginalising both its Left and its Right.
Singh leads a Government of the notionally Centre Left Congress Party. He was hamstrung these past five years by having to rely on communist coalition allies, although with characteristic Indian originality, Indian communists sometimes favour free market economic reform. In the broad, though, the communists retarded Singh's economic reform. And they are bitterly anti-American, so they fiercely resisted his nuclear agreement with the US. However, Singh engaged in a fairly expensive round of welfare measures designed to share the wealth from India's boom growth with the rural poor. It may have offended economic purists but it marginalised the Left, which was smashed to bits in this election.
Singh was almost equally devastating in his impact on the Centre Right Hindu chauvinists, the Bharatiya Janata Party, the main Opposition party. The BJP took an opportunistic position against the US nuclear deal, so in a sense they were attacking Singh from the left on a national security/energy security matter. Malcolm Turnbull, pay attention here. This tore the BJP apart.
As Pramit Chaudhry, senior editor of the Hindustan Times, and one of India's most brilliant security and economic analysts, explains it, the BJP is a lot like the US Republicans at themoment, lost and in search of anidentity.
"The BJP has two wings," Pramit tells me, "the small-town, cultural conservative, upper-caste Hindu wing, which basically is horrified by all manifestations of modernity. It can't bear to see women drinking and the like. And the big-city, business modernisers, who claim to speak for the new India, and couldn't care less about women drinking or such issues. These two wings basically have nothing incommon."
It drove the BJP's big-city supporters nuts to find the BJP on the same side of the US nuclear deal - that is, opposing it - as the Indian communists and indeed Pakistan. The BJP lost every big city in India except Bangalore.
The nuclear deal, which Singh campaigned for magnificently over four years, and which often seemed extremely unlikely to get up in either India or the US, also established beyond doubt Singh's personal leadership credentials.
The Rudd Government must swiftly take advantage of the new situation in India. Singh's Government will be stronger on economic reform, though it is unlikely to move at dizzying speed. But Singh has identified energy and education as the two great blocks to Indian development. The nuclear deal addresses energy, but there will be much more liberalisation in the energy sector to come. It's also likely that foreign universities will ultimately be allowedto establish campuses in India, both of which are obvious opportunities for Australia.
Rudd had planned to go to India in January, but Singh had a heart attack. Both Rudd and Foreign Minister Stephen Smith are determined to put India in the front rank of Australia's foreign relations. Rudd is sure to visit India soon.
There is a good deal of growth and development in the Australia-India relationship that can go ahead even without Australia agreeing to sell India uranium. But if Canberra wants to move the India relationship to the next level of strategic engagement, that will be necessary.
Tim Flannery, with whom this column is not always in perfect agreement, has pointed out that if you are concerned about greenhouse gases it is bizarre to export coal to India but not uranium, and thereby delay India's move to cleaner energy sources.
Moreover, the whole world is beating a path to India's door right now. The only real play Canberra has at a genuinely strategic relationship with New Delhi is to become a critical energy supplier, and that means uranium. Further, with the long-running insurgency in Sri Lanka solved at last, India will lead an accelerating process of South Asian regional economic integration (Pakistan excepted).
We need as intimate as possible a relationship with India across all policy fronts: the economy, security, global governance structures, pandemic and health issues, cultural exchange, everything you can imagine. There is a Labor Party federal conference in June and uranium policy won't be changed before then. But surely a government as sensible and pragmatic as Rudd's will make the leap on uranium some time in the next year or two at the latest.
Strengthen Team India | The Australian
