As it so often does, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has made pronouncements which are India's despair and its enemy's delight. Thus its general secretary, Mr Harkishan Singh Surjeet, whom neither age seems to wither nor experience make wise, stated on Tuesday that the country "should have made a fresh study" of the situation created by General Pervez Musharraf's address to the people of Pakistan on Sunday instead of going ahead with its diplomatic offensive "which was planned under different circumstances" The underlying implication that the address was most positive and has significantly altered the matrix of India-Pakistan relations, will doubtless thrill Pakistan's apologists who now demand that New Delhi respond by immediately holding talks with Islamabad.
Its breathtaking faith in the Pakistani President's sincerity, however, overlooks past experience of Islamabad's duplicity and treachery which explains the Government's position of not holding talks with it until there is evidence of its abandonment of cross-border terrorism as an instrument of state policy. The CPI(M)'s stand, which clearly undermines the Government's position, is, however, hardly surprising. Its refusal to participate in the all-party delegations, which the Government is planning to send to Muslim countries to explain its position regarding its current stand-off with Pakistan, predates Tuesday's press conference in which Mr Surjeet released the party's resolutions for its 17th Congress, The reason, as explained by Mr Prakash Karat, a member the party's politburo on Tuesday, was the lack of a common brief. "Our party", he said, "is for demobilisation of troops and creating the atmosphere for de-escalating tensions."
The CPI(M)-which wits feel should
be renamed as Confusion Party of India (Musharraf)-is clearly unable to
see that the root cause of the tension is not the recent mobilisation of
troops by India but the cross-border terrorism Pakistan has been unleashing
on this country for over two decades. Such myopia, again, is not surprising.
A draft resolution for its 17th Congress severely criticises the Vajpayee
government "for its shameful record in downgrading India's status as an
independent and major non-aligned country." It fails to recongise that
the non-aligned movement, like the former Soviet Union, is dead and that,
far from losing its status as an independent country, India stands taller
in the world than ever before following its emergence as a nuclear power
under the Vajpayee government. No only that, it has, through deft diplomacy
and military mobilisation, contributed to a situation in which General
Musharraf was compelled to come out with Sunday's address. The CPI(M)'s
failure to appreciate all this is hardly surprising. Immediately after
1947, the undivided Communist Party of India of which it is a progeny,
had claimed that India's was a sham independence. One might have dismissed
the CPI(M)'s statements as amusing examples of ossified thinking rooted
in outdated ideological premises, had the country not been passing through
challenging times. In the present situation, its chronic inability to appreciate
the national interest, dating back to its failure to condemn the Chinese
aggression of 1962, calls for trenchant criticism.