Basics and Brajesh

You have to read a lot between the lines of Brajesh Mishra’s answers on nuclear deal questions — this paper carried a story on Thursday based on his ‘Walk the Talk’ appearance. You have to read the lines themselves carefully. Canny policy wonk that he is, this is not surprising. Some things, however, are fairly clear. Were the Congress to demit power, whenever that happens, without the nuclear deal signed and sealed and if the BJP comes back to power, the latter will finish the job, American political mood and momentum permitting. It can be reasonably interpreted that Mishra is not insistent that the 123 document be reopened for extensive modifications. This is not as shockingly surprising as it may seem to those listening only to political cacophony. The US-India Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP) was signed when the NDA was in power. That was a very major foreign policy document. The UPA didn’t reopen it. Nuclear deal politics may have become a very ugly beast. But the possibility of policy continuity lives inside it. This has discomfiting implications for the Congress. As these columns have argued before in other contexts, the glory can be another party’s after the Congress has done the hard work.

Mishra’s answers also indicate opportunities missed by the Congress by not talking to the BJP more. This has been a Congress problem. On pension reforms, for example, it has waited for minute quasi-concessions from the Left and not forged an issue-based parliamentary deal with the BJP. On the nuclear deal, pro forma approaches were made and documents shared. But there was never ever any indication that the Congress seriously wanted to engage the BJP in the sense of two big national parties deliberating on a major national issue. The Congress can point to many things BJP leaders have said on the deal to argue that such an engagement would have been futile. But that may be — deliberately? — missing the point that in politics, substance is often critically dependent on form.

Not that the BJP’s substance on the deal wasn’t stunningly counter-intuitive. The party has never convinced anyone why it took the position it did and officially still does. Whether there were intra-party rivalries that trumped responsible politics. And what domestic political constituency did the party have in mind when taking an almost absurdly maximalist oppositional position on the deal. It is common to say the nuclear deal is hard to understand. Nuclear deal politics is probably a harder puzzle.