A Cabinet Secretary Looks Back

Title: A Cabinet Secretary Looks Back – From Poona to the Prime Minister’s Office
Author: B. G. Deshmukh
Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2004 (First)
ISBN: 9788172234744
Pages: 392

Bhalchandra Gopal Deshmukh was a 1951-batch IAS officer from Maharashtra who had served in his home state and Gujarat in the junior cadres and got promoted as Chief Secretary of Maharashtra. In the meantime, he was intermittently deputed to central government where he took up various assignments. He was posted as Cabinet Secretary in 1986 and appointed as Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister in 1989. He served three prime ministers in his career – Rajiv Gandhi and those who followed him, such as V P Singh and Chandrashekhar – until he retired from service in 1990. Deshmukh has written several books on his tenure in the government and this book is one of them. The parts which attract the readers’ attention is from his assuming the post of Cabinet Secretary. The period 1986-90 was noted for tremendous political upheavals in India and abroad, such as the Bofors scandal, Ram Janmabhumi issue, insurrection in Sri Lanka, heightened militancy in Punjab and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. The book presents a closer picture on some of these issues but unfortunately, it does not further clarify any of them.

Deshmukh declares at the outset that it is not his intention or objective to expose any sensational facts or to expose skeletons in the cupboard. If you get discouraged at this and decide not to read any further, you’ll not be much mistaken. The narrative is so lacklustre and neutered. His only aim is to motivate the young generation to join the civil service because the experience is ‘fascinating and self-satisfying’. The author seems to be a status-quo man with not much innovative ideas to transform or improve. He openly confesses that ‘it is impossible to remove corruption but people are happy if it is controlled and reduced’ (p.135). However, the book uncovers the pettiness of a few personalities, the most notable being V K Krishna Menon, who was the defence minister in Nehru’s cabinet. Our author was due for promotion as deputy secretary and his name was sent to the defence ministry of which Menon was the head. At that time, he was pissed with the finance minister C D Deshmukh who had raked up the jeep corruption scandal against Menon. He stoutly refused to accept the author declaring ‘I don’t want a Deshmukh in my ministry’ (p.52), referring to his namesake who was Menon’s bete noire. There are glimpses of the miserable license raj in the book which was introduced by Nehru and Indira and was stifling India’s industrial growth. We read about a chief minister finalizing the list of who should get cars. Remember that all of them had paid the full price out of their pockets but could not get delivery of the vehicle because the government was determining the number of vehicles to be produced in a given month. There were restrictions on private industrialists to set up plants with their own money. Government sometimes refused to grant licenses, according to the claims of their competitors on the plea that they’d lose market share if the new plant came through! Altogether, the system was planned to work in a way as to maximise corruption. 

Having served in the highest echelons of Indian bureaucracy including the home department, the hollowness and obvious duplicity in his assessment of the communal situation in some trouble spots in North India are to be attributed to political correctness rather than naivety. He believes economic parameters to be the cause of communal unrest in Moradabad and Aligarh. He says that Muslim workers did not earn fair wages while Hindu financiers and traders reaped the real profits. See the deceitful comparison? He does not say whether Hindu workers earned fair wages or Muslim financiers reaped profits. All this sophistry is to avoid pointing out the real cause of communal clashes – fanaticism. Further, he opines that Muslim youth were not properly educated and faced unemployment which led them to antisocial activities that ultimately turned into communal trouble (p.106). He does not stop to think for a moment whether it was one of the causes that drove Muslims into a sordid orgy of violence in 1985 following the Supreme Court’s verdict forcing a little-known man named Mohammed Ahmed Khan to pay alimony to his divorced ex-wife Shah Bano Begum. That’s why readers reach the conclusion that duplicity and selective amnesia are prerequisites to secularism of the Indian variety. Quite naturally, Deshmukh justifies the 1975-77 Emergency with the remark that ‘if some progress had to be made, gentle force is required to enforce discipline among staff and make citizens accept their responsibility’ (p.84). He has a very low opinion of the military top brass, especially General Sundarji who is accused of canvassing for the post of field marshal for himself. Exposing an unrealistic and fanciful mindset, the author advocates for a cut in defence spending through effective foreign policy which can develop friendship with our enemies that would substitute for the shortage of funds to buy arms (p.167). This is a strange comment from a Cabinet Secretary and it is fortunate that the government was sane enough to consign this idea to the dustbin. There is a section in the book that exposes the blatant intervention the executive made on the prerogative of the Election Commission of India. Rajiv Gandhi decided in October 1989 that national elections should be held on 22nd, 24th and 26th of the following month. The author himself conveyed this information to Peri Shastri, the election commissioner, who was very agitated at first at this shameless appropriation of the Commission’s authority, but later fell in line (p.213).

The author had a close official relationship with Rajiv Gandhi and he closely watched how Indira Gandhi functioned as the prime minister. As a result, this book provides some shocking revelations about the administrative tenures of the mother-son duo. Indira handled her state chief ministers like puppets. Vasant Rao Naik in Maharashtra was asked to step down after she promoted his rivals in the party to create trouble. The reason for this disgraceful act was that he was getting popular with good agricultural reforms. Naik resigned in February 1975. Under Indira’s tenure, corruption became more rampant and refined. The system of the party claiming a good cut in all major contracts, especially with foreign supplies, was well established (p.174). This was claimed to be proved in the HDW submarine case where the German company paid 10 per cent commission to Indian agents in buying submarines for the Indian navy. The author was informed that Indira was very annoyed with the agent as he did not pass on the promised amount from the commission to the Congress party and she refused to meet him on her next visit to the UK (p.203). This leads him to lament that ‘as cabinet secretary, I was aware of the widespread corruption in the central bureaucracy, but I could not do much in the atmosphere then prevailing when political corruption was overwhelming’ (p.153). Rajiv Gandhi had far more integrity in this regard, but he faltered in other areas. Rajiv’s inexperience and immaturity in administration and political matters created acute problems. He reshuffled the council of ministers 22 times in a space of 39 months and there was a virtual merry-go-round in some of the ministries. He was more inclined towards suave advisors and officials who came from public schools, could speak and write good English and had a gloss both in appearance and presentation. He was impressed with short-term results and impatient when an officer tried to explain a long-term strategy that was bound to be slower. There was another face of Rajiv than the gentle and calm one he wished to project. He had little respect for some opposition chief ministers such as NTR, Karunanidhi and Devilal and used to fight with them in NDC meetings. He did not show necessary respect and consideration in parliamentary proceedings. He was unwilling to attend parliamentary sessions unless absolutely necessary (p.175).

In the final section of the book, Deshmukh reminisces about his time with V. P. Singh and Chandrashekhar as the principal secretary to the prime minister. Regarding Singh, he observes that he implemented Mandal Commission recommendations to split Hindu votes and crush the BJP whose support he loathed to accept and with whom he did not share a public platform in the election campaign. This same frame of mind regarding assuming power at any cost afflicted Chandrashekhar too. His overarching ambition to become the prime minister made him cast away his scruples and morality and take the help of Rajiv Gandhi whom he heartily disliked, if not detested. As a private person, he was a gem of a man, but his ambition turned him into a typical Indian politician. The author also handled the Kashmir issue and bemoans the pathetic situation created by Article 370 of the Indian Constitution – which conferred special rights to Jammu and Kashmir – without identifying the root cause which was the article itself that was finally scrapped in 2019. He notes that refugees from Pakistan who arrived in Kashmir during Partition could not be granted citizenship due to the special status of the state and displays impotent rage at the government’s helplessness!

The author led a clean career without any adverse reflection or irregularity. In fact, he boasts about this in a contented way that the only conviction he faced was for a traffic violation of sounding the horn in an area where it was banned. The book contains an account of what the author knows about the Bofors scam and concludes that neither Rajiv Gandhi nor any member of his family received any portion of the kickbacks. There are no private or personal anecdotes in the book. His marital status would have remained an enigma had a photo of the author and his wife with the chief minister’s family been not included. There are separate chapters on Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab. Reading the dull passages, readers feel that the author never took up any challenging job, always bowing to senior bureaucrats or politicians and feeling contented for even minor accomplishments. His career remained shuttling between the central and state administrations in New Delhi and Mumbai respectively. The book is designed with a bit too much bureaucratic perspective. Transfers and postings of secretaries after a change in administration are given undue prominence.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Autumn of the Matriarch

Title: Autumn of the Matriarch – Indira Gandhi’s Final Term in Office
Author: Diego Maiorano
Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2015 (First)
ISBN: 9789351774709
Pages: 261

Just as Margaret Thatcher is called the ‘Iron Lady of UK’, Indira Gandhi more than deserve the epithet ‘the Iron Lady of India’. In fact, the five major policy changes she had initiated – termination of privy purses, bank nationalization, Bangladesh war, the Emergency and Operation Blue Star – ended up with far more consequences for India than what Thatcher had made in her tenure for her nation. Most books and articles on Indira Gandhi concentrate on the Emergency and how she stifled free speech and put democracy on ventilator for eighteen gruelling months. This book concentrates on the final five years in her office which she won by sweeping the polls in 1980 which, in a sense, was an indication that the populace had forgiven her for the excesses of the Emergency. The research for the book is part of a PhD scholarship of the University of Torino, Italy, granted to the author. Diego Maiorano is a research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. He has written several articles on Indian politics and society. He was associated with very prestigious academic institutions where his main topic of interest was contemporary Indian history and politics.

It feels like Maiorano have no exposure to India other than academic or personal interactions with the prominent personalities who had a role to play during the period under discussion. This brings in a refreshingly neutral feel to the narrative while exhibiting a few glimpses here and there of the ‘white man’s disdain’ of India and its society. A primer on Indian politics after 1947 is condensed into a brief section which covers Indira Gandhi’s ascent to power. This was different from that of her father and first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. A combination of genuine popularity with the party’s remarkable ability to extract votes in exchange of patronage distribution ensured the Congress’ dominance over India’s political system in the first two decades after independence. However, after Indira became prime minister, corruption was institutionalized in the early-1970s. Industrialists factored in the cost of ‘donations’ to Congress party as any other cost involved in an investment. Indira was riddled with a sense of insecurity right from her childhood, which made her look at her rivals – whether in politics or party – with unease and hostility. She destroyed her own powerful party leaders who could eventually turn into enemies. State chief ministers were handpicked and nominated by her. With the suspension of internal party elections in 1972, she controlled the key positions in the party apparatus. Loyalty to the Gandhi family was an essential pre-requisite to guarantee a plum position in the party as well as the state.

The early-1970s was a restive period both in terms and national and global politics. The oil shock had set in motion a huge inflation. In Nehru era, higher education had received a disproportionate amount of resources as compared to primary and secondary education. This led to high enrolment of students in colleges. Employment for these became a problem and large scale student protests erupted everywhere. The quality of Indian democracy had steadily deteriorated since Indira came to power and the Emergency was only just another nail in the process. Indira destroyed her own party as an instrument for information gathering at the local level and was not aware of the resentment brewing in the countryside in 1977. She lost the election and was even jailed for misuse of power. However, the internal dissensions in the Janata party was unmanageable. Everyone wished to have a slice of power and had no compunction to backstab anyone who obstructed their way. Within two years, the Janata experiment failed and the party exploded into several fragments. Hence in the 1980 election, Indira and her party was the only alternative to chaos. She offered stability in the face of the disastrous economic and social situation brought on by the mismanagement of her adversaries. The electors bought her argument and she swept the polls. Her modus operandi remained the same as before. Most of her colleagues in the Cabinet were long on loyalty and short on original thinking and administrative ability.

Then comes the first half of the 1980s which is the area of focus of this book. The pyramidal system of corruption that had come into being in the early-1970s scaled newer heights. Many chief ministers were removed because their incompetence and corruption had become too much even by the prevailing permissive standards. The party high command continuously intervened in provincial affairs and direct involvement of central ministers in the administration of a state became quite common. They were haughty towards local leaders as exemplified in Andhra where Rajiv Gandhi’s chiding of state chief minister T. Anjaiah provoked N T Rama Rao to float a regional party to restore ‘Telugu pride’. Law and order situation severely deteriorated in the early-1980s. Punjab and Assam erupted into violence. The irony was that the rebel sponsored by Congress as a counterweight to Akali Dal in Punjab, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, turned a Frankenstein that ultimately led to the assassination of Indira herself. High-handed tactics employed in removing Farooq Abdullah in Kashmir might have had a role in fomenting militancy. The personalist conception of the Congress party became clear when following Sanjay Gandhi’s death, his brother Rajiv was inducted into politics. From that moment on, dynastic succession became the universally accepted rule, not only in Congress, but in most other parties too. A whiff of fresh air was also felt on the economic side. Indira took a radical departure from the past as she gave up efforts to bring about social changes through land reforms, progressive direct taxation, measures to restrict conspicuous consumption and control over monopoly. Seeds of liberalization were thus sown in this term.

Maiorano presents a closer picture of the socio-economic transformation Indira Gandhi was attempting to bring about. She tried desperately to woo the middle class. The party proclaimed her as a strong leader the country invariably needed. It also tried to substantiate the modernisation dream of the middle class and to stimulate its sense of national pride. Then she promoted the interests of the upper castes (p.121). The book alleges that the RSS actively supported Indira in her final years. Its workers campaigned for Congress and refused to support BJP (p.134). The author claims that her political message on the country’s unity was in many ways identical to that of the Hindu right-wing. The support of big businesses and kickbacks on foreign contracts ensured a huge availability of funds for the prime minister’s party (p.136). The author observes that the Punjab problem was completely avoidable and easily manageable if Indira had negotiated with those parties who did not share her own political objectives. To break Akali unity, Zail Singh and Sanjay Gandhi financed and promoted a hard-line preacher Bhindranwale who in fact campaigned for Congress in three constituencies in the 1980 elections. He was arrested for the murder of Lala Jagat Narayan but ignominiously released soon after, because the Delhi Gurdwara management committee threatened to withdraw support of the Congress in Delhi.

The book focusses on the somewhat irrevocable damage Indira Gandhi had inflicted on democratic institutions of India. The judiciary strenuously fought for its independence and eventually resisted to a large extent the attacks of the executive. Indira superseded the seniority of three judges and appointed A N Ray as the Chief Justice of India in 1973. All the three judges promptly resigned in protest. However, the parliament and the president surrendered without fighting. The author remarks humorously that the bureaucracy split into three groups – ‘the wives’ (those officers who are attached to only one party), ‘the nuns’ (officers who remain unattached to any party) and ‘the prostitutes’ (who attach themselves to whichever party is in power and switch when there is a change of government), the share of the last being quite high (p.167). Indira left behind three destructive legacies – she institutionalized corruption as a key feature of India’s polity; entry of criminals into politics which was started and legitimized by Sanjay Gandhi (p.211); and state institutions became a vehicle for pursuing personal and partisan ends coupled with the institutionalization of dynastic politics. The book concludes that Indira left behind a divided nation, though not in the physical sense of disintegration. India’s social fabric was badly cracked in the mid-1980s.

The author’s unfamiliarity to India is almost tangible in the narrative as he relies solely on newspaper reports and personal interviews. This is accentuated by lack of comparison to modern Indian politics which he seems not to have followed in detail. At some points, the coverage is totally dependent on interviews with some of the prominent figures held a quarter century after the incident. It feels like the opinions they expressed are taken at face value. Indira’s attempts to subjugate India’s institutions for personal domination is a self-professed recurring theme in the book. Maiorano focusses only on politics and leaves out the economic aspects of her rule. This is a great drawback as her U-turn from the socialist path is not sufficiently elaborated. It is true that the author has provided some coverage on this topic and remarks that the government’s focus shifted from the rural poor to the urban middle class in the 1980s. Indira’s encounter with the judiciary is also only glimpsed at. This may be because the most dramatic period of the tussle happened before the Emergency. The lack of coverage on the personal aspects of the prime minister such as her itinerary in the final weeks and the repercussions in the country after Operation Blue Star are glaring. Written from a typical European perspective, the author trivializes the aftereffects of illegal immigration from Bangladesh into India’s northeast, specifically Assam. For the Assamese middle class, he says, what was at stake was control over the state institutions which in turn were the key to the allocation of most middle class jobs (p.114). The grave Assamese concerns over the takeover of their state by illegal Bangladeshi Muslims goes above the author’s head probably because he was not aware of the deeply religious nature of India’s partition and how the district of Sylhet was taken away from Assam to merge with Pakistan because the Muslims had by then become a numerical majority in the district as a result of unchecked immigration.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Conscience Network

Title: The Conscience Network – A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship
Author: Sugata Srinivasaraju
Publisher: Vintage, 2025 (First)
ISBN: 9780670096787
Pages: 554

If you are in the habit of judging a book by its cover, this one would look like another run-of-the-mill product on Emergency for which there is no dearth. It describes the organisation and the methods through which Indians in the US – staying there for study or employment – resisted the Emergency declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in India in Jun 1975 to Mar 1977. The organisation followed a path independent of Cold War leanings and was guided by nonviolent Gandhian action. It recounts a nearly forgotten story of resistance to the Emergency, its manner of construction, its philosophy and pursuance which is fascinating and a compelling read. This story is put together by a string of individuals in the USA. The role of Gandhians and Socialists and the networks they ingeniously made possible in the US to fight the Emergency have been underplayed and unrecorded and this book claims to endeavour a correction on this aspect. Sugata Srinivasaraju is an independent journalist, author and columnist who has written for nearly three decades at the intersection of politics, culture and contemporary history. In the past, he has edited newspapers and run television channels and digital news platforms. He has four other books to his credit.

The business of the 1970s Emergency is still an unfinished business in India because the Congress party, which declared the Emergency and suspended democracy in this country for 21 months, have still not owned up the culpability nor regretted it. In other words, Congress still has not accepted the mistake of Emergency. In Jan 1978, Indira Gandhi herself took the entire responsibility for all the mistakes and excesses committed, but she caveated it by saying she did what she did to save the nation. In Mar 2021, Rahul Gandhi admitted that the Emergency was a mistake, but again qualified it by saying that the Congress at no point had attempted to capture India’s institutional framework. This was a plain lie because the Emergency saw the worst corruption and capture of India’s institutions. Raju observes that it was the dynastic succession of the Congress party that prevents it from fully owning up and regretting the Emergency which should have elicited an unqualified apology in any other civilized context. In fact, the political dynasty itself was a product of the Emergency. This book does not cover the excesses committed during that dreadful period in India where tens of thousands of innocent people were imprisoned for no reason and without trial. The repressive measures adopted by the Indira regime against overseas Indians who were part of the resistance movement such as revocation of their scholarships or impounding of passports are described in good detail. The book also indicates that Nehru had also exploited this provision in the Constitution for his political expediency. Nehru imposed the Emergency in 1962 during the China invasion and did not lift it for many months even after the ceasefire. It was also misused to repress citizens for innocuous and unconnected acts after labelling them as anti-nationals (p.150).

Even though the book is fairly huge at 554 pages, it is eminently readable and a pleasant experience. The resistance movement in the US was powered by a few individuals – S R Hiremath, his wife Mavis Sigwalt, Ravi Chopra, Anand Kumar, P K Mehta and Shrikumar Poddar. The first two chapters describe their backgrounds and how they ended up in America. It also discusses the political situation in India and the US in the 1970s. Jayaprakash Narayan (hereafter JP) started a movement called Citizens for Democracy (CFD) to fight the rot in economic and social spheres in India under Indira Gandhi. The expatriates created another organisation to mirror it and named it Indians for Democracy (IFD) which consolidated support and spearheaded the resistance program in the US. Despite the contradictions in the ideologies of the IFD constituents, the organisation firmly decided to adopt the Gandhian model and were not caught up in petty streams of power games back home. Amidst all the currents and undercurrents of ideology circulating around IFD, it remained steadfast to Gandhian ideals and methods. It could build support among pacifists, Quakers and the enlightened civil society of America only because Gandhi and his non-violent methods had cast a total spell in those circles. Noted Quaker leaders like Horace Alexander who had enjoyed a warm friendship with Gandhi and Nehru, intervened on behalf of the protestors and sent fact-finding teams to India. Indira allowed herself to be interviewed by them but nothing much came out of these meetings. The western press saw JP as another Gandhi-like figure and his was another freedom movement to rid India from corruption and dictatorship. There was a Cold War angle too, as JP was fighting Indira, who was a bosom friend of Moscow.

Emergency was a heinous assault on our democracy and there is absolutely no doubt that it should have been avoided. Still, the role of the Opposition in fomenting violent protests which were encouraged to be verging on open rebellion is traditionally not examined seriously. This book also follows this paradigm. Probably if Indira Gandhi had restricted the arrests to some leaders and refrained from muzzling the media, she might’ve had a presentable case. This book describes some activities of the Opposition leaders which would make us think that they were exceeding the limits of democratic decency. JP’s exhortation of Sampoorna Kranti (total revolution) was an indirect call to arms, even though he later wriggled out of such interpretations. He has been making revolutionary utterances on a continuous basis for a year before the Emergency. In June 1974, he demanded closure of all schools and colleges in Bihar for a year. He encouraged a no-tax campaign to paralyse the government. In July 1974, he exhorted the police personnel in Bihar to be guided by their conscience rather than illegal orders from their superiors. In Oct 1974, he directed student volunteers to set up parallel, ‘revolutionary’ peoples’ governments. In the same month, he threatened to hold parallel elections in Bihar if the elected assembly was not dissolved. On June 25, 1975, he repeated the threats he had been using in Bihar in Delhi and the police scooped him out to jail on the same night. George Fernandes was a firebrand trade union leader who led a 20-day railway strike in May 1974. He asked the railway workers to realise their collective power. A 7-day strike by them would close down every thermal power plant in the country. 10-days’ strike would shut down every steel plant which would then take up to a year and considerable expenses to restart. Moreover, L N Mishra, who was the Union railway minister and a crony of Indira Gandhi, died in a bomb blast at the Samastipur railway platform in Bihar. The perpetrators were not found. In view of all these, the ethics of the Opposition protests should be re-examined by a neutral party now – at a distance of fifty years chronologically from those fateful incidents.

The book provides a good coverage of the activities of the Indians for Democracy (IFD) organisation in the US. Several times they marched to the Indian embassy or local consulates holding placards and raising slogans. Official propaganda meetings were intercepted and tough questions asked to the local or visiting dignitaries. They also organised a 200-mile walking procession to rouse awareness of India’s fall along a slippery slope to authoritarianism. With press censorship in full throttle in India, the only arena left for the counterargument to exist was the international stage, especially the US and the UK. However, the monotony and low-key of the protests turned even the ardent volunteers off. About seven months after they had begun, the program slowed down because they were only repeating the speeches and was far away from home. All of them had other regular and full-time academic and professional duties to attend to. The regime retaliated with brutal swiftness. Scholarships of several students who participated in the protests were revoked and several passports were impounded. Anand Kumar of Chicago had a tough time managing a year without financial support. When the Janata government came to power after the Emergency, his scholarship was restored with retrospective effect. The year 1976 was not like the previous year for the protestors in America. The Western press took a graver turn when the general elections scheduled for that year was indefinitely postponed. It was a kind of confirmation of dictatorship. Some Indian leaders escaped from India through adventurous means to reach the US. Their work on foreign soil are also catalogued in the book. Subramanian Swamy set up the Friends of India Society International (FISI) which had RSS links. IFD had an uneasy relationship with it due to its socialist bias, but they got on well in view of the common enemy who was browbeating both. Ram Jethmalani also escaped to the US and obtained political asylum there in 1976, becoming the first Indian to get asylum from the Indira regime.

We also read about some eminent individuals who either came in support of the Emergency or were not vocal enough in opposing it. Non-political scientists and other professionals were understandably reluctant to take the plunge which was sure to divert them away from their academic pursuits. However, the leaders of the IFD were also professionals or scientists, so there was no hard and fast rule on who could qualify for volunteering for democracy. Noted physicist S. Chandrashekhar, later a Nobel laureate, and A K Ramanujan, eminent linguist and litterateur (not to be confused with the famous mathematician) were in the University of Chicago at that time engaged in research, but they were not interested in supporting the protests. There is a chapter on T N Kaul, who was India’s ambassador to the US during the Emergency, and was personally so close to the prime minister as to address her ‘Indu’, stoutly defended the Emergency at every step as directed by Indira. But after a few years since stepping down, he changed tone and admitted that Indira was surrounded by self-seeking sycophants and democracy was indeed in danger at that time. Powerful Christian groups in the US wholeheartedly supported the Emergency and came out in vocal agreement with it when the US Congress constituted a committee under Donald Fraser. James K Matthews, Bishop of the Washington area of the United Methodist Church and Charles Reynolds, secretary of the Ludhiana Christian Medical College, took the trouble to testify before the Congressional committee to extol the Emergency, but the prudent committee did not take them seriously.

Raju has followed a non-partisan approach throughout the narrative with a distinct negative bias. He includes the arguments against a particular organisation or individual without bothering to look deep into it or attempting to verify it. However, he leaves no party untainted and in that sense, keeps a fair and neutral stand. His characterizations are stellar and deeply convincing. He claims that the police ran the country during the Emergency and each police station was an independent republic with its own set of arbitrary rules, applied differently to different people. His observations on the extreme left faction, who were called Naxals, are noteworthy. Organisations like the IPANA were Naxal-minded. They were not angry with Indira Gandhi alone for having proclaimed the Emergency; they were angry with everything connected to the freedom struggle and since India’s independence. The book sports excellent diction. Rarely do we come across books of this genre. It was a pleasure to read Raju’s turns of phrase and assimilate the fine nuances. The book was written based on personal interviews conducted during the early-2020s, but the passage of half a century has not dimmed the colour nor dulled the pungency of the narrative of the protests which was a labour of conscience.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

India@100

Title: India@100 – Envisioning Tomorrow’s Economic Powerhouse
Author: Krishnamurthy Subramanian
Publisher: Rupa Publications, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9789390260836
Pages: 497

India’s stature on international platforms post-independence was that of a pygmy because of its poor economic clout. Jawaharlal Nehru, our first prime minister, self-delusively believed that the circus he set up – called Non-Aligned Movement – would guide the world into new paths in international relations. But the plain fact was that nobody took any serious note of a block of nations which struggled even to feed its people. The stark truth in global power dynamics is that unless you are economically well off, you are nothing. At the most, a poor country can hope to be a pawn in the power play and get some crumbs off the table. After the 1991 reforms, India grew in size financially and she is perceived as such by the great powers. Trump’s additional tariffs for India’s purchase of Russian oil is an unwilling recognition of this truth. The country is on its way to become viksit (fully developed) by 2047, when it celebrates a century of political independence. The 2047 target has catalysed policy formulations at the government level and a distinct push towards that goal is clearly perceptible in the economy. This book explores the strategies India must pursue to achieve the target of 8 per cent growth in the next two decades to reach the target of a 55 trillion-dollar economy when India is at 100 in 2047. The book suggests the four pillars of macroeconomic focus on growth, inclusive growth for a large middle class, ethical wealth creation and a virtuous cycle ignited by private investment. The entire book illustrates these four concepts in good detail. Krishnamurthy V. Subramanian is an executive director of the IMF and professor at the Indian School of Business (ISB). He was the chief economic advisor to the government of India from 2018 to 2021. He was born in a Tamil family.

To be able to see the country blossom into the dawn of developed status in one’s lifetime is an unalloyed bliss for any citizen. Subramanian makes a painstaking analysis of the factors which guide this transition. Its greatest asset as the most populous country in the world is the people itself. Fortunately for us, India has entered the demographic phase in which a large share of the population is working age – between 15 and 64. India will remain in this demographic dividend zone for over two decades. In 2011, the working age population was 50.5 per cent of the overall; in 2041, it is expected to raise to 60 per cent. The author’s estimation of reaching 55 trillion dollars in 2047 looks like the height of optimism, because some reputed rating agencies approximate the size to only half of this figure. However, the author is quite persistent and fairly convinced that the country can achieve this goal if it necessarily grows the GDP at a rate of 8 per cent per year for the next two decades. India is at the position where China was in 2007. They grew at 7.7 per cent thereafter for 16 years. Given India’s demographic dividend, it has the potential to achieve similar growth rates, provided there is a supportive economic policy. Another factor which can help make the switch is that about half of India’s economy is still informal. Formalization of this sector can provide growth through productivity improvement.

The book discusses about some of the blunders of India’s socialist-era economic policy promoted by Nehru and Indira Gandhi and dismantled by P V Narasimha Rao. A relic of this socialist era is the perception that creation of wealth is somehow immoral and evil. This mindset still remains in some of the influential circles and must be shed, the sooner the better. India must also boldly jettison anachronistic ideologies about the large and pervasive role of the state as the provider of employment and producer of goods. Except for some strategically critical sectors, where the state’s role cannot be ceded to the private sector, the government needs to get out of business to enable better business. Subramanian also advises the government to adopt protectionist measures if it would help local industry even at the cost of stoking ire on the part of developed nations. Before attaining economic advancement, these same advanced countries used the same insular policies for which they shun the developing economies now. In the present day itself, when they face financial difficulties, they resort to the same tariff- and non-tariff-barriers in trade. This book was written last year in 2024, but Trump’s tariffs vindicated this prophecy. The author also calls out overzealous thrust for equity which is prevalent in social circles. While we desire an equitable society, excessive redistribution can dull incentives. In most cases, inequality of opportunity is much more objectionable than inequality of outcomes. Perfect equalisation of outcomes after the efforts have been exerted to obtain those outcomes, can reduce individual’s incentives for work, innovation and wealth creation. Inequality is not poverty; in fact, increase in inequality is most often accompanied by reduction in poverty. This book suggests that poverty alleviation through growth should be India’s central strategy. High growth rate will lead to lower debt-to-GDP ratio. So, government should borrow more to fund investments in digital, physical and human capital, where the human capital encompasses investments in healthcare and education. The directive to borrow more may run counter to established wisdom in this regard.

Subramanian was chief economic advisor of India in the Covid period and it is natural that he reminisces about it and brags a little about his achievements in that difficult and unprecedented period. India’s economic policy during the Covid 19 disruption is compared to its response to the 2008 global financial crisis. The Covid response was well-conceptualized and ab initio for the needs of the economy rather than a copy-paste of policies implemented by advanced nations. This was not so in 2008 and that was why India soon ended up in the ‘fragile five’ list by 2013. The author also advises about the Middle Income Trap which is usually encountered by rapidly expanding less-developed countries in their stride. This arises when fast-growing economies experience rising wages and struggle to sustain an economy that is based on labour-intensive manufacturing and export-led growth. However, he finds a ray of hope through which India might evade this trap. The productivity improvements driven by reforms suggest that the necessary conditions for avoiding the middle-income trap is being fulfilled in India. This is because India’s growth since the 1990s manifested more from growth in capital and productivity, with labour contributing very little. However, it may produce other problems such as an exacerbating inequality in societies and may create fault lines. The final two sections of the book are dedicated to healthcare and education that should develop a labour force which will take India to prosperity.

The author looks into every aspect of the economy and administration and suggests sweeping reforms in many sectors which would ease the way to India@100. The suggested judicial reforms skip all contentious issues regarding the appointment of judges. To clear pending cases and to ensure a 100 per cent clearance ratio of new cases, he suggests that more judges are to be appointed. The book recommends movement of professionals from private sector to middle-level government bureaucracy and vice versa. The government should simplify the regulations and allow some discretion in decision-making. Ex-ante accountability and ex-post supervision should be strengthened. The book also calls for agricultural reforms that benefits the small, marginal farmers who constitute 85 per cent of the households. The vocal minority of rich farmers in Punjab and Haryana earn most of the government’s largesse. These vested interests oppose real farm reforms. Profits of these farmers are also tax-free as agricultural income is not taxed. It is obvious that this observation was formulated in the wake of the repeal of government’s farm laws in response to the high profile agitation engineered by the rich farmers around Delhi. It is also suggested to relax restrictions on agricultural land conversion for alternate uses. Currently, these restrictions depress the value of agricultural land and pose obstacles to transitioning out of agriculture. This rule prevents other types of land to be converted to farm use. Aggressive privatisation of public sector enterprises is advised because it unlocks the potential of PSEs to create wealth.

It’s a no-brainer that private enterprise should be encouraged to the maximum to bring out the best in the economy and to reach fully developed status by 2047. The author makes some prescient observations in this regard. Private investment is the key driver that drives demand, creates capacity, increases labour productivity, introduces new technology, allows creative destruction of uncompetitive enterprises and generates jobs. India’s economic prosperity till the eighteenth century and her economic progress post-liberalization in 1991 demonstrate that the secret to sustained prosperity lies in enabling private enterprise in sectors where government has no business to be in business. A policy stance in favour of competitive markets and free enterprise – in short, pro-business – is often confused with a pro-cronyism stance. Competition will lead to creative destruction of some companies and generate more wealth for the whole sector. When creative destruction is fostered, sectors as a whole will always outperform individual companies within the sector. R&D investment is another area that needs to be strengthened. India’s R&D expenditure at 0.65 per cent of GDP is very low as compared to 2.5 – 3 per cent of advanced economies, primarily because of the disproportionately lower contribution from business sector. Government alone does the heavy lifting in this field and this should change. Manufacturing is also an essential sector India must accord priority to. Higher wages and lower uncertainty in this sector increase aggregate consumption more than service sector jobs.

Frankly speaking, this books flies over the heads of most readers who are not so familiar with the vocabulary of macroeconomics. The author uses a top class methodology of sophisticated charts and diagrams to prove the truth in his line of thought. These diagrams are too small in most cases and monochrome print has robbed some of its relevance. These look best if presented on to a big screen in full colour display. The publisher could have set up an online resource page to access these diagrams dynamically and in higher resolution so that some of the readers could follow through the argument. This book targets pragmatic administrators, visionary politicians and patriotic influencers who want to bring in change for the better. The targets Subramanian has chosen are very ambitious and there is every likelihood that they may be missed. Still, getting somewhere ahead and within a short range of the ultimate aim would itself be a tremendous achievement that will transform the lives of Indian society for the better.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Who is Raising Your Children?

Title: Who is Raising Your Children? – Breaking India Using Its Youth
Author: Rajiv Malhotra, Vijaya Viswanathan
Publisher: BluOne Ink, 2025 (First)
ISBN: 9789365470673
Pages: 438

India’s education system has changed itself completely within the span of a generation. ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’ was the motto of parents and teachers while I was in school. Of course, there were some teachers who spared the rod but still inspired their students. But such students were generally having better academic credentials anyway. Overall, corporal punishment generally helped all categories of students to perform better. When the rod was taken out of the system and scolding itself became a taboo, the academic standards collapsed. To masquerade this fall, the rigour of exams was loosened and marks were granted liberally, and often undeservingly, to show a decent score when the student was unable even to read and write. This is the present condition of Indian schools. These so called ‘reforms’ occurred under the watchful supervision and sometimes funding by international organisations which had their own motives which did not often align with our national ethos. This book neatly summarizes the hidden dangers and deceptive threats the children and youth of the country faces. The situation is likened to the story of Aghasura in the Bhagavata Purana. Just as Aghasura disguised his lethal intent with an innocent and appealing appearance to lure the children into his mouth to devour them, many dark forces are currently cloaked in benign forms. Developing skills of literacy, reading and numeracy along with character development were the objects of traditional education. This has totally given way to an education that is used as a tool to raise a generation of children who are oversexualized, unemployable, angry at the prevailing structures and driven by a sense of entitlement. Rajiv Malhotra needs no introduction. Three of his books – Breaking India, The Battle for Sanskrit and Academic Hinduphobia – were reviewed earlier here (click on the title to read review). Vijaya Viswanathan is a mechanical engineer having global experience in manufacturing and finance. As a co-founder of Agasthya Gurukulam, she leads initiatives on an educative system centred on Indian heritage.

The authors identify Marxist ideology as the motive force behind all kinds of wayward experiments in the field of education. Marxism started out by targeting only the economic exploitation, then expanded to include cultural exploitation and now gender is claimed to be an institution of exploitation. For them, gender is not a biological characteristic but rather a social construct which is not fixed at birth. Incentives are liberally provided for those willing to explore or experiment with one’s own gender. It has become a factory to mass produce trans-people. The international agencies in this field are funded by powerful oligarchs like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and many Western governments. They psychologically manipulate the youth of the world. Marxists believe hegemonic social structures reproduce itself following the educational methods designed by the oppressors and strive to undermine them. They teach students to dismantle the existing power structures through dissent, activism and resistance. However, the authors do not clarify the discrepancy of why capitalist barons like Soros or Gates fund the Marxist ideology.

The trap set by this clique is primarily intended to change sex education into methods by which they can manipulate the content and influence the outcome. Traditional sex education handled issues such as sexual hygiene, abstinence, prevention of sexually transmitted diseases and prevention of unwanted pregnancies. UN’s Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) coupled with Social Emotional Learning (SEL) anticipates on the other hand enjoyment and fulfilment of sexual desires in children, focus on treatment of sexually transmitted diseases rather than prevention, encourage abortion and disconnect children from cultural norms on risky sexual acts. Under the guise of diversity and inclusion, they want to introduce deviant sexual practices to children and de-criminalize paedophilia. UNESCO’s guideline is that human beings have sexual rights from birth! Organisations like International Planned Parenthood Federation are pressing the UN to modify the definition of human rights to include sexual right as a fundamental human right applicable equally to minors and even toddlers. They strongly oppose the POCSO Act in India which prescribes harsh punishment on sexual crimes involving minors. They deliver pornographic sex education through SEL and CSE programs to children as young as ten (p.114). These programs also try to encourage gender transition and abortions without informing the parents or mandating their consent.

The most damaging intervention made by woke educators is in confusing young children on gender issues. Woke social scientists declare that gender and sex are not biological fixities but only social constructs and therefore fluid. The dominant/oppressor group who has controlled society are responsible for the male/female binaries. They argue that this classification is wrong and children are taught that gender is a spectrum of maleness and femaleness with many combinative genders in between. Not only that, children are encouraged to explore the ways of behaviour of trans-people and are nudged to become one themselves. These organisations offer puberty blockers and create trauma in the lives of young people by pressuring them away from nature. Irreversible surgery to change sex are also dangled as carrots for young children, often keeping their parents in the dark. The author affirms that this is what is happening in the US at present and sooner or later it will arrive in India too. Women-only spaces like rest rooms are now being encroached upon with policies that permit men who identify as women in these areas. In sports, women have to compete with biological males who ‘identify’ as women. The author presents a comparison of China and India handling this UN-sponsored woke ideology. Jharkhand state in India is a willing partner of UN’s woke programs. They would do better if they look at Gansu province in China which is also mandated to facilitate these programs. China does not let global nexuses dictate how to run its health and educational institutions. UNESCO guidelines on CSE/SEL allow each country to tailor the guidelines to comply with their local laws. China quickly amended its child protection laws, added sixty new articles and made it impossible to exploit its children in the name of CSE/SEL. Numeracy and literacy skills are relegated as the most irrelevant in education of children and these skills are plummeting among school students. With such low basic literacy and math skills which resulted, the government should purge the education system of subjects that distract from basic learning, yet they are continuing to give priority to UN mandates. The woke ideologies undermine meritocracy, replace individual rights with identity politics, worsen divisiveness among groups and thwart academic freedom and free speech by adopting Cancel culture.

An unexpected takeaway from this book is its sharp accusation against the present government in India which is headed by a political party that is unabashedly nationalist and rightist. The authors claim that the National Education Policy (NEP 2020) was an effort to align India with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs 2030) of the UN. Though it boasts of lofty ideals such as sustainable goals, the program is inspired by woke ideology and tries to make Indian children adhere to woke standards set by foreign institutions. The mandates and targets of SDGs 2030 are built into NEP 2020 (p.150). Moreover, NITI Aayog often employs foreign-funded NGOs as consultants to draft policies thereby outsourcing the government’s job to foreign entities (p.234). Programs like the Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram is organized by the Health ministry and bypasses teachers to directly deliver sex education to children as part of CSE. They use mobile apps like Saathiya Salah to reach children directly circumventing parents. It also uses adolescents as peer educators for further reach which bypasses all persons of authority. Elite schools and programs follow this woke agenda and this prompts the authors to suggest declaring those educated in non-English medium as linguistically disadvantaged and a quota in jobs should be earmarked for them. The book quips that they are the oppressed and the English-educated as the oppressors, to pay the wokes back in the same coin. This book consistently urges Indians to emulate the deeds of China in resisting and fighting back the woke encroachment. China effectively strategizes proactively to protect its children, society and cultural values. On the other hand, India is scaling at a rapid pace and doing just the opposite by selling out its future generation (p.138).

The authors remind us that most major intellectual breakthroughs in history have been initiated by a small number of ultra-gifted pioneers. The obsessive focus on equity has neglected the value of gifted students. UN’s SDGs’ sole aim is to ensure that Indian children are advancing well in areas like human rights and global citizenship while literacy and math skills are deteriorating. This program intends the children to be made global citizens. However, this thrust is premature for the time being and facilitates illegal immigration to developed economies which is tolerated to an extent by people who are indoctrinated through the change in education which focussed on global citizenship. This book describes the Vedic philosophy of education as a model on which the Indian system should take root. The Vedic concepts of rtam, yajna and karma are explained in scientific terms, using the vocabulary and notions of modern science which might’ve had no resonance to the original Vedic line of thought developed several millennia ago. This is in fact a reintroduction of the original ideas borrowing or grafting on to the language of science. This exercise feels like old wine in a new bottle. Even then, there are some aspects of ancient thinking which don’t conform to modern consensus. The Vedic system’s deities are supposed to reside in other realms than space-time. In another instance, a new-born excelling in some field is suggested to be the result of a prior life’s samskaras (p.292). The author exclaims quite forcefully the need to focus urgently on the K12 (Kindergarten to 12th standard) system to arrest the rot being imported into India which is accelerating the ruin of an already failed education system for India and which will incorporate shastras and pedagogies relevant to a modern India.

The book follows a textbook-like structure with paragraph titles, bullet lists and numbered points. This becomes a drag on easy reading later on. The narrative refers to a multitude of organisations which are referred by acronyms and hence each page is filled in an alphabet soup. A large number of illustrative diagrams are included which look like salvages of a PowerPoint presentation – a number of presentations, to be precise. This would be very good if projected on to a large screen in full colour and at the same time explained by the presenter. But on a monochrome page, it looks out of place and often worthless. The authors maintain that the varna system in ancient India was based on individual talent and not by birth as in castes. So, on page 247, you’ll find a comment that ‘in India, it is the job of Kshatriyas to protect the rashtra’. If this is taken out of context, it would cause a serious allegation of casteism on the part of the authors. However, it is clearly stated elsewhere in the book that they mean the government by the term Kshatriya. The narrative is also unnecessarily elaborate and not a pleasant read. Somehow, somewhere, the authors lost their focus on external appropriation of our education system and concentrated on how a system rooted in Vedic learning is the best suited for India.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Iconoclast

Title: Iconoclast – A Reflective Biography of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar
Author: Anand Teltumbde
Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9780670093885
Pages: 676

Babasaheb Ambedkar is the architect of the Indian Constitution. He was also the figurehead of Dalit emancipation, rising from a low social and economic background to reach the topmost constitutional positions in the country. There have been numerous biographies of Ambedkar and precisely because of this, the author notes what is different in this book. It claims to follow Ambedkar’s approach of weighing facts on the touchstone of rationality and also to add reflections of the author to the story already told many times. The reflections are in the form of comments, questions and discussions on points deemed to be consequential to the lives of Dalits as well as others. Ambedkar defined himself as an iconoclast – a breaker of icons. It is hence ironic that he himself was elevated to the status of an idol in recent times. His writings are characterized by a direct, incisive, hard-hitting and combatant style. Anand Teltumbde is an engineering and management expert who turned to social work while employed in the highest management cadre of a central PSU. He is the husband of Ambedkar’s granddaughter. He was arrested in 2020 on the charge of instigating the Bhima-Koregaon violence and incarcerated for two years along with other urban naxals. The author is peeved at this and goes on a tirade accusing the Modi-led government of being fascist, authoritarian and totalitarian throughout the entire length of the book.

Ambedkar lived for the uplift of Dalits. His writings on Dalit causes may appear to be a one-sided narrative, declining to extend credit to others even when it is due. But his wisdom on public finance and political economy is unparalleled and out-of-the-box. His solution to the development of Indian agriculture is logical while sounding extraordinary. It was believed that the low productivity of land holdings was because of its small size. He showed that economic size of this land is not determined by the size in geographical area but by optimal provision of factors of production. A large surplus population was superficially engaged in agriculture with no capital. Ambedkar proposed India’s industrialization as a solution to its agricultural problems which would absorb surplus labour and generate savings to be ploughed back into agriculture. It is unfortunate that Jawaharlal Nehru could not see this truth even in 1951. There is no doubt that Ambedkar denounced Hindu society for casteism and the discrimination it heaped on the downtrodden people. Still, he notes in his essay ‘Castes in India’ that there is a deep cultural unity in Hindu society but this larger cultural unit is parcelled into bits by castes. However, the author challenges and negates this prudent observation. Ambedkar metaphorically compared Hindu society with a multi-storeyed tower with no stairs to connect one storey to the other. Each storey represented an individual caste. Teltumbde do modify this metaphor to a tower with five storeys, each housing innumerable castes in contention with each other.

This book covers the early work of Ambedkar in good detail, especially after completion of his education in the US and UK. A satyagraha was organized in Mahad for the use of Chowdar water tank for Dalits in 1927. This faithfully followed the Gandhian model of nonviolence and carried a portrait of Gandhi on the dais. This agitation failed. Babasaheb opposed separate electorates to Muslims in his minority report submitted to the Simon Commission in 1928. He suggested general electorates with reserved seats for Muslims and Dalits. The author narrates how the Congress mainstream ignored the wails of Dalits right from the 1920s. A committee headed by Motilal Nehru drafted a Swaraj constitution in 1928 and it did not provide representation for Dalits. Congress did not even invite any Dalit organisation to discuss on it (p.143). This was also the time that convinced Babasaheb that untouchability was practised by other religions too. During one of their journeys to Aurangabad, Ambedkar and his team visited the Daulatabad fort nearby. They washed their faces and feet on the pavement in the fort with water from a tank outside the monument. As soon as they did this, enraged Muslims confronted and abused them menacingly for daring to pollute the tank. Babasaheb noted that it could have led to a riot in the town (p.192).

The 1930s were the formative decade in Ambedkar’s career, bringing out the constitutional expert in him. He attended all three Round Table Conferences (RTC) convened to settle contentious issues before an anticipated constitution of India coming into force in 1935. He shifted his focus in the RTCs from untouchability as a socio-religious issue to a political question. He used the opportunity to internationalize the problem of untouchability. The British favoured him at that time because it justified the continued presence of their rule. Closer to the actual transfer of power, the issue ceased to be useful for their interests and they discarded the issues of caste/untouchability as well as Ambedkar himself. Gandhi attended only one RTC and Teltumbde observes that he was ill-equipped to participate in it. When grave constitutional and communal points were raised in the conference, he had only platitudes to offer, rather than views or suggestions of a constructive character. In the end, Babasaheb was victorious in getting adequate representation for Dalits in legislatures. However, he had to compromise on the issue of separate electorates while yielding to Gandhi’s fast unto death against this attempt to divide the Hindu society. In the 1937 elections, he was elected to the Bombay provincial assembly. He tried to unite Dalits and workers with communist support. He backed the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan acknowledging the validity of their claim that Hindus and Muslims were two separate nations and the two cannot live peacefully together.

Ambedkar reached the pinnacle of his achievements in the 1940s. He was nominated to the Viceroy’s Executive Council in the war period. However in 1945, his party AISCF was trounced by Congress in the elections which won 123 out of 151 seats reserved for SCs while the former could win only two. This convinced the British that Congress was the true representative of depressed classes and Babasaheb’s bargaining power fell. His memoranda to the Cabinet Mission of 1946 regarding safeguards for SCs were ignored. Ambedkar did not find a place in the interim cabinet and Congress’ Jagjivan Ram was included in his place. The colonial rule transformed the rebel in Ambedkar into a statesman during the war period and then he was side-lined when the British deal with the Congress was fructified. The author alleges that Gandhian strategy then embalmed his as a ‘modern Manu’ (p.338). It was with this intention that he was co-opted as the chairman of the drafting committee of the Constitution. Author accuses Babasaheb of then endearing himself to the Constituent Assembly as an ultra-nationalist even though he had opposed Congress’ nationalist movement till then. He who had voiced for separate electorates for SCs would oppose it later and accept joint electorates (p.333). Teltumbde then argues that all crucial decisions were taken without involving Ambedkar. Out of the various subcommittees of the Constituent Assembly, Nehru presided over three panels, while Patel and Rajendra Prasad headed two each, strategically controlling all decisions of the Assembly. Babasaheb’s task was alleged to be limited to document decisions in constitutional language.

A great contribution of this book is the inferences it provides readers regarding Ambedkar’s relations with Hinduism. It is true that he renounced it and termed it as the sole reason for oppression of the Dalits. What he fought tooth and nail in this equation was the caste system. When he opted for conversion, he chose Buddhism which some scholars say was nothing more than Hindu Protestantism in the early stages. Babasaheb was emotionally as well as culturally anchored tightly to Mother India. During Partition, he called for the division of Kashmir along Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist lines and the Muslim areas were to be given to Pakistan if they wished so and proved in a plebiscite. However, he declared that the Hindus of Jammu and Buddhists of Ladakh belonged to ‘our religion and culture’ and to protect them is not communalism (p.427). The author criticises Ambedkar for Islamophobia on his warnings in the Rajya Sabha against the possibility of Pakistan teaming up with other Islamic countries against India. He even feigns to point fingers at Babasaheb for not toeing the author’s line of thinking. Ambedkar accepted the two-nation theory but did not trace its roots in the Brahminic aspirations to recreate their hegemonic control (p.325). But Teltumbde does this with a ridiculous set of arguments that has no substance. His criticism of Babasaheb is unnecessarily sharp so as to put the great man in a bad light. He corrects Ambedkar himself even on the name of his ancestral village to Ambadava and claims that Ambedkar had wrongly spelt it as Ambawade! The author further arraigns him to be of having a ‘faulty understanding of socialism and communism’. Moreover, strategic incoherence is alleged to be a trait on his person (p.425). This is in spite of Ambedkar’s own justification for the occasional inconsistency in his words and actions with the rhetoric that consistency was the virtue of the ass. This biography is not only ‘reflective’, it is actually critical. The author goes after later followers of Ambedkarism too, because they packaged him into an icon endowed with infallibility. Any view or act that does not reflect devotion to him could be blasphemy. This is contrary to Ambedkar’s opinion of the relationship of great people to ordinary ones. This leads us to doubt whether this book is an attempt to strike hard on the blind followers.

What is evident in this book is the inveterate hostility Congress under Nehru displayed towards Ambedkar. He was defeated from a Bombay constituency to reach the Constituent Assembly. He then managed to enter the Assembly from East Bengal. Gandhi then intervened to call a truce to utilize Babasaheb’s talent in drafting the Constitution. He entered Nehru’s cabinet as law minister but had to resign soon. Again, he was defeated in the elections by Congress candidates. He was then elected to the Rajya Sabha. Probably because of being fed up with all these manoeuvres and side-linings, Ambedkar exploded in the Rajya Sabha that he was merely a hack and made the Constitution against his will. He said he was quite prepared to burn it because ‘it does not suit anybody’ (p.437). What he meant was that decisions were already taken by a clique in the Congress party and then he was forced to translate them into constitutional language by the drafting committee. It is also to be remembered that Nehru awarded himself the ‘Bharat Ratna’ in a most petty act of aggrandizement while ignoring the Babasaheb, who was awarded the highest civilian honour posthumously only in 1990 by V P Singh. The author narrates the mental conflicts Ambedkar had to undergo in converting to another religion and to choose Buddhism for it. He ascribed rationalism and scientific spirit in a religion which he deemed to be Navayana Buddhism in contrast to Mahayana and Vajrayana. Teltumbde claims that transmigration of soul from one body to another is a Buddhist belief which Ambedkar denied. This claim is doubtful because it is well known that Buddhism does not recognize the soul while karma is believed to be transmigrating. The author also confirms that Buddhism did not abolish casteism and in fact, castes are present in the societies of Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Nepal. Howsoever intensely Babasaheb detested Hinduism, his voice cracked and tears rolled down his cheeks when he declared that he was renouncing it before the huge crowd at Deeksha Bhumi in Nagpur.

The book is divided into seven phases of his life and a posthumous phase is added to explain how the Ambedkar icon was turned into a divine avatar in the later decades while the political organisations he spawned splintered and crumbled one after the other. Ambedkar paid little heed to organisation. His parties rallied mainly on his charisma. When he was no more, his shoes proved too big for his successors who turned to fratricidal warfare that led to the collapse of all factions. In the 1960s, Congress began to woo Dalits as a vote bank. They lured its leaders with power and the masses with the Ambedkar icon as a proxy for their identity aspirations. Some of the militant organisations like the Dalit Panthers which was modelled on the Black Civil Rights movements in the US and came into being in the 1970s, denounced the Ambedkarite vision of using only constitutional methods to resolve grievances and openly allied with the far-left rebels. It is to be kept in mind that Ambedkar was a staunch opponent of communism and its class-based theories of political action.

At 676 pages, the book is a bit too large, but the reading process is hassle-free and enjoyable, despite the occasional political outbursts of the author accusing the present Indian government under Modi to be autocratic. This political bias seems to have turned him into a cynic who is unable to find anything good even in the case of the protagonist of the book – none other than Babasaheb himself. Considering the fierce criticism levelled against him on all areas of his work – social, political, constitutional and legislative – one wonders whether this book is part of a cancel culture. Ambedkar’s remarks on the desirability of women entering politics and the relationship of several women politicians with Nehru given on page 477 are indeed shocking. If you respect Ambedkar, several parts of this book would make you uncomfortable by pointing out inconsistencies, contradictions and even personal quirks in his character and life-work. The book includes more than 200 pictures covering various phases of his life. This effectively makes it a pictorial biography. However, many photographs are group photos involving many people. After completing the book, what is obvious and standing out is the personal stamp of the author, particularly his prejudices.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The People Next Door

Title: The People Next Door – The Curious History of India’s Relations with Pakistan
Author: T C A Raghavan
Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2017 (First)
ISBN: 9789352770908
Pages: 348

 ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze’ is a very famous and thrilling Sherlock Holmes story for the insights the detective infers from the scene of a crime. There is a passage in it that goes like this:

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That was the curious incident."

The story involves deceit, avarice, crime and punishment. Likewise, India-Pakistan relations also involve most of these attributes and the curious incident is that bilateral relations have not improved a bit in spite of laborious measures undertaken by both sides. As far as India is concerned, Pakistan was always a pain on the western frontier. The nations had fought two large-scale and two small-scale wars over the issue of disputed territory. After realizing the futility of its desire to humble India on the battlefield, Pakistan turned to sponsoring terrorism as state policy to ‘bleed India through a thousand cuts’. The one thing that stands out from this exercise is India’s surprising resilience which always stood one step ahead of its troublesome neighbour. This book is a nice recap of India-Pakistan relations written with the authority of knowledge and experience. T C A Raghavan is a former Indian envoy to Pakistan. He also served in the Pakistan desk in India’s external affairs ministry and as director in the office of India’s foreign minister. Even though no personal anecdotes are mentioned in the book, the author has encapsulated the entire gamut of the relations between the two countries and presented his deductions with a commendable sense of justice and richness with every nuance carefully inserted at the right moment. The typical behaviour of the so called liberal intellectuals in India is to regret the partition that had occurred in 1947 and their wistful longing for Pakistan to come back to India and undo the partition. A useful takeaway from the book is the warning about the irritation such a desire would evoke in Pakistanis. Raghavan enunciates the point that Partition cannot be undone and what is doable is peaceful coexistence at least as non-meddling neighbours if not as friends.

The book narrates several incidents of India-Pakistan relations that vitiated the atmosphere but still are not widely known. Pakistan continues to harbour persons who are fugitives from Indian law such as Dawood Ibrahim, Hafiz Sayeed and Masood Azhar. This one fact amply demonstrates its enmity and hatred to India’s wellbeing. In fact, this is nothing new and was followed right from its existence. The peculiar episode of Bhupat daku is a case in point. Bhupat was a Hindu dacoit from Junagadh in Gujarat who was wanted in the context of 82 murders and several robberies. He escaped to Pakistan to evade Indian law. He was detained there for a year for illegal entry and thereafter it refused to deport him to stand trial for his crimes in India. This was sheer spite as Pakistan had no claim on him. Bhupat then converted to Islam and posed as a freedom fighter from Junagadh who opposed India’s takeover of that state in 1947. Pakistan never extradited him and he died in 2006. This policy is continued in the case of others too. However, with the recently rising trend of ‘unidentified gunmen’ disposing summary justice to some people wanted by India, the continued efficacy of this policy is in doubt.

Even though Afghanistan plays only a marginal role in India-Pakistan strategic reviews, its potential to seriously influence the regional balance is mentioned in the book. This perspective is very rarely seen in books of this genre. The British had unilaterally imposed the Durand Line of border demarcation between undivided India and Afghanistan thereby separating the Pashtun homeland into two. When the British left, the Pashtuns wanted to reunite with Afghanistan but there was no provision to revisit the frontiers on the northwest of Pakistan. Consequently, Afghanistan was the sole member state opposing Pakistan’s entry to the United Nations. Then came the invasion of Kashmir by Pakistani irregular troops in 1947. The UN ordered a ceasefire to which Pakistan proposed a conditional offer. They claimed the invasion to be on security grounds which included preventing India establishing a link for the movement of Pathanistan and to preclude the possibility of a pincer attack by India and Afghanistan. The Soviet occupation beginning in 1979 and the post-Taliban regime were eras in which Pakistan experienced a hostile neighbour on both the east and the west.

The people had to make a hard choice at the time of Partition in the provinces which were bifurcated. Hindus and Sikhs chose India while the Muslims selected Pakistan. The book lists out some Muslims who opted for India even though their native places were within Pakistan and their subsequent actions as it reflected on the relationship between the two countries. Most of these Muslims occupied high positions of power in the bureaucracy. Badruddin Tyabji was one of them working as secretary in the external affairs ministry. He advised Nehru to consider Pakistan as his ‘constituency’ in which he has to get elected. He also suggested treating the government of Pakistan as the opposition and that his reactions to Pakistan should be entirely those of one who was standing for election from there (p.50). In other words, this man was advising Nehru to offer maximum concessions to Pakistan! Nehru fully accepted the counsel was proved by his gifting of 80 per cent of the Indus waters in a treaty also co-signed by the World Bank. A very useful book on the Indus Waters Treaty named 'Indus Divided: India, Pakistan and the River Basin Dispute’ by Daniel Haines was reviewed earlier here. Nehru also agreed to conduct a plebiscite in Kashmir but barely wriggled out of the deal citing US-Pakistan military alliance concluded in the meanwhile. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, India’s first education minister, asked Afzal Iqbal, a Pakistani diplomat, regarding the military treaty: “Why did you do this? Kashmir was falling on your lap like a ripe fruit” (p.52). The Urdu poetry in India was also a fit case of doubtful loyalty. The author narrates some differences in mutual perception taking the case of Urdu poetry in the aftermath of the 1965 war. Indian Urdu poets deliberately introduced a line of separation between the people and rulers of Pakistan with the implied suggestion that the Pakistani society is not to blame even though the country was at war with India. This demarcation was purely fictional. On the other hand, the Pakistani Urdu poets had no hesitation at all in branding the whole of India – people and rulers alike – as enemy and called for a jihad. Ali Sardar Jafri extolled the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz and argued that Indian poets should have friendship and sympathy for the people of Pakistan. This was when Faiz was actively supporting the Pakistani war machine and vigorously participating in war mushairas (p.92).

Raghavan includes a pointed analysis of the history of mutual dialog between the two neighbours. Nehru was damagingly generous (as far as India is concerned) but Indira Gandhi was curt most of the time, giving Pakistan no quarter. Pakistan was summarily defeated and split apart doing her tenure as prime minister in 1971. But the Janata party regime that followed (1977-79) was not firm enough with Pakistan. The 1971 victory had changed the Pakistani perspective on India’s fighting spirit. Disparaging rebukes like one Pakistani Muslim is equivalent to ten Hindus in the battlefield had given way to cold and rational estimates of military potential of both countries. Mani Sankar Aiyer, who was the Consul General in Karachi during this time, says that as compared to 1971, the prospect of a conflict with India generated not excitement and conviction of victory but fear and apprehension at the certainty of defeat. This, coupled with the change of guard in Pakistan in the form of General Zia ul Haq, ensured friendly terms for the Janata government. As the painful memory of Bangladesh gradually receded to the background, Pakistan again turned belligerent. Unusually meek overtures from India elicited only contemptuous response from the other side of the border. In June 1996 when Prime Minister Deve Gowda and foreign minister Gujral wrote to their counterparts seeking resumption of foreign secretary-level talks, not even a reply was received. The Gujral doctrine postulated India making unilateral and non-reciprocal concessions to its neighbours (p.221). A B Vajpayee at first stole the show with the explosion of nuclear devices, but then yielded to Pakistan even in the face of growing terrorist attacks in the country and hijacking of a commercial airliner. The secret incursion in Kargil fully exposed Pakistani duplicity. It also illustrated the futility of waiting for international diplomatic pressure to mount on Pakistan for effecting a withdrawal of its troops from Kargil. It was the might of the Indian army and its weaponry that drove Pakistani invaders scurrying to their lair. This was also a classic instance of Pakistan misjudging Indian will and ability to fight back. Of course, the author strictly maintains a tone of balance and an air of equanimity in the narrative exercising special care not to exhibit partisanship, but the message readers get is what is mentioned above.

The book shows a peculiar trait of early Indian envoys to Pakistan as of being under the illusion that partition was a temporary affair and they were working in a region not different from their homeland. Their familiarity with Pakistani officials and a shared common language of Urdu was instrumental in creating a superficial and illusive bonhomie. India’s envoy Kewal Singh attended the wedding of Pakistan foreign minister’s son in Rawalpindi while the 1965 war was raging in Kashmir. The reception was hostile, but he still found some excuse to praise the ‘grace and courtesy’ of some who behaved politely with him. Besides, he had gifted a Benarsi saree to the bride. This was auctioned by the family and the raised money deposited in the Pakistan defence fund (p.86). The author also notes the lengths to which India would go to prevent foreign agencies intervening in Kashmir often at great loss and inconvenience to itself. In the case of the Salal hydroelectric project on the river allotted to Pakistan in the Indus Waters Treaty, India agreed to significantly reduce the height of the check dam and unilaterally cut short the power generation capability in a bid to avoid seeking international arbitration as per the treaty. Raghavan does not propose any magic formula to settle the issues between the two countries. The implication between the lines is that the serious differences are not to be ironed out in any length of time or in any number of meetings. The issues remain exactly as it were before to create an impression that nothing has changed for the better since 1947. But the author notes that ‘clearly enough has changed to make sure that older solutions will not work’. This also puts former foreign minister Natwar Singh’s prescient remark that ‘the future in Indo-Pakistan relations lie in the past’ in bright focus.

The crucial role played by Pakistan army in shaping public opinion in that country is not fully addressed in this book. The irrelevance of elected representatives in deciding long term policy of Pakistan is notorious but not elaborated here. Instead, Raghavan observes that adulation and exasperation with the army controls Pakistan’s response to India. If the army has overplayed its card, the civilians show good regard to India, but once the army retakes its lost ground in domestic politics, this is reversed. In short, Pakistan is forever waiting for an unguarded moment from India to pounce on her. However, with the rising economic heft of India after 2000, they are finding it slightly difficult to keep pace with India. With financial and military gap further widening between the two countries with each passing year, Pakistan is likely to resort once again to unconventional warfare such as terrorism in future. The book’s narrative ends by 2004. Even though coverage is extended to 2015 by means of an epilogue, it misses the most exciting episodes such as the surgical strikes and the Balakot operation.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Critical Mass

Title: Critical Mass – Decoding India’s Nuclear Policy
Author: Rajaraman R
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2023 (First)
ISBN: 9789354359934
Pages: 450

When we were in college in the early 1990s, the suspense regarding India’s possession of nuclear weapons was an intriguing topic of debate. We were all unabashedly pro-nuclear: we wanted India to definitely possess nuclear weapons but not to use it till the last resort is exhausted. A nuclear test was conducted in 1974, but its euphoria had long died down. It was known that thanks to A Q Khan’s smuggling of nuclear material, Pakistan also possessed nuclear arms but they had not tested it. It was a nuclear ‘Schrodinger’s Cat’ situation in the subcontinent. The uncertainty was dispelled on 11 May 1998 by the Shakti nuclear tests conducted by India at Pokhran and tests two weeks later by Pakistan. Both nations then officially declared to have possession of nuclear weapons. The US was totally taken off-guard by India’s testing and frankly, that was the icing on the cake. We were so overjoyed that for many years hence, ‘shakti’ used to be our computer password with some combination of letters or numerals. It was reported that the US President Bill Clinton came to know about it from TV news. Crippling sanctions on transfer of technology and supply of uranium for reactors were imposed on both nations soon thereafter. Anyway, the 1998 nuclear tests was a game changer. With it, India elbowed its way to the international high table. India’s rapid economic growth in the ensuing years finally convinced the US to allow it a one-time exemption from nuclear sanctions if India separated its civilian and military programs and subjected the civilian program to international surveillance and safeguards. A nuclear treaty was put in place in 2008 after more than three years of hard negotiations amid opposition from even the ruling party in both the countries. India also formulated a nuclear policy at this time which clearly defined its objectives in having nuclear weapons. R. Rajaraman was a renowned theoretical physicist of JNU who changed his theatre of work to nuclear policy issues and arms control after retirement. He has worked in international NGOs like International Panel of Fissile Materials (IPFM) and has attended numerous programs on nuclear issues and disarmament. Even though the author is ideologically positioned against nuclear weapons, he understood the futility of opposing it after 1998 and changed track to analyse the scenario objectively.

Being a physicist himself, Rajaraman clearly lists out the reasons for why India desperately wanted the post-1998 sanctions to end and reach a deal with the US which would automatically prompt other nations to follow suit. By 2020, it was estimated that the burgeoning energy demand of the nation would reach 300,000 MW of electricity. Out of this, 30,000 MW was to come from nuclear energy. However, uranium sources were very poor in India which could not meet the demand. Sanctions had caused the uranium supply to dry up. Another option was to ‘create’ uranium by transmuting thorium metal in a breeder nuclear reactor. But this technology was only in the design stages and tough technical challenges prevented its early maturing. Under the proposed deal, the civil and military programs were to be separated. India wanted to keep its fast breeder system in the military group but the US initially objected to it. Many, including the author, criticized India’s stand as it would torpedo the deal. India remained steadfast and negotiations remained in limbo for some time. Finally, the US blinked and the deal was signed. The author graciously acknowledges that ‘those observers, including myself, who felt that the Indian demand on the breeder was a deal breaker and should be softened in the higher interests of our nuclear energy needs turned out to be wrong’. This was made possible with a great deal of support extended by the then US President George W Bush in yielding to India’s demands. When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh acknowledged him for this, Singh was ridiculed by the Left intelligentsia. Rajaraman then quips that ‘it would only be poetic justice to rename the street in front of the what had been the world’s last leftist bastion – Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi – George W Bush Marg or Avenue’ (p.80). It should be remembered that the author was a teaching faculty at that institution for many decades.

Even though the nuclear deal was made functional at great risk of being aborted anytime in the middle, the author finds that India shot itself in the leg with a strange legislation whose only purpose was to scare away potential reactor suppliers. India passed a Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act in 2010 with stringent rules of compensation by the supplier in case of an accident attributable to negligence on their part. Even before reactors could be purchased and built, an extensive redressal system was put in place. In case of an incident, the reactor operator could sue the supplier if the incident was as a consequence of an act of the supplier which includes supply of equipment or service with patent or latent defects. No other country had stipulated such conditions for reactor purchases. When no supplier from the US, France or Russia was willing to enter into a contract on these terms, the government diluted the provisions. Supplier liability was then limited to the warranty period and capped at a fixed sum of Rs. 1500 crores. The book includes details of reactor negotiations with GE, Westinghouse and Areva. GE backed out due to the liability act while the others were mired in financial difficulties and bankruptcy. With the Fukushima reactor accident in 2011, many countries in the world chose to turn away from nuclear energy.

This book handles the issue of ‘credible minimum deterrent’ (CMD) in some detail which is the basis of India’s nuclear policy. This document states that India won’t use nuclear weapons first. But if it was attacked by nuclear weapons at home or wherever its troops are, it would retaliate with nuclear weapons to inflict an unacceptable damage on the enemy. A nuclear deterrent arsenal is required to convince the enemy of the stupidity of launching a first strike. The extent of the unacceptable damage is estimated and redundancy is added to arrive at the required number of warheads. However, the concept of deterrence necessarily assumes that the other side is rational who values human life. No deterrence is feasible against a suicidal jihadi group should one take over Pakistan as no amount of civilian deaths would deter them. Even Mao Zedong of China – may be only as a rhetoric – once declared that he was willing to sacrifice 300 million Chinese in a nuclear showdown with the US. The author then estimates that only two bombs are required as retaliation for a first strike on the major cities of Pakistan or China which would cause at least half a million deaths that is sufficient ‘unacceptable damage’. Hence he audaciously suggests just two bombs as sufficient CMD. This pittance is against thousands of nuclear warheads in China and hundreds in Pakistan. Why are our intellectuals so adamantly anti-national? The cold war arms race had accumulated around 60,000 warheads by both adversaries. The author suggests a ‘more is not better; less is enough’ principle. However, professionals in India’s nuclear technology front have outright rejected Rajaraman’s insinuations as ‘an amateurish oversimplification by a theoretical physicist unschooled in the complexities of nuclear technology’ (p.201). He then considers the delivery systems and concurs with the general view that the triad of delivery platforms such as land-based missiles (the Agni series), sea-based missiles from nuclear submarines and release from fighter jets. Assuming that many of them might be shot down by missile defence systems, conservative analysts feel that even 100-odd warheads will not be sufficient to arm the triad for ensuring minimum deterrence.

However cleverly one may play brinkmanship, the chance of getting struck by a nuclear bomb in a busy city cannot be entirely ruled out. This can also happen by accident or equipment malfunction even if not by intent. Rajaraman raises awareness of the requirement of a civil nuclear defence and complains that India has still not developed a system. The US had implemented several measures in the 1950s but the American civil defence was not revived once they petered out by the 1960s. Nobody finds it attractive enough to spend a lot of money on something that may never be used. The American public and government lost interest in maintaining such a high level of preparedness for an event that didn’t seem to be happening. Besides this may not even be practical in India because of the incredibly short time of response available to a missile launch from Pakistan. A nuclear device shot against India from the Sargodha air force base in Pakistan would reach Delhi in just six minutes! This book also hints that the Indian government should have conducted a referendum before going nuclear in 1998 because it was an existential issue for the public. Here again, he is demanding something from India which no other country had done before. In fact, this is an existential issue more for the author as his research, seat in international consultative bodies and stature are solely linked to his anti-nuclear stance. However, he is not much concerned about countries other than India possessing nuclear weapons.

An original idea which is fully explained in the book is estimating the casualty figures in case of a nuclear attack on an Indian metropolis. Based on international consensus charts, the author makes ballpark estimates of the number of civilian deaths in the event of a nuclear bomb exploding in various neighbourhoods of Delhi. This makes for sickening reading, but we must accept that it is a risk we have to contend with while living next door to our arch enemy who was willing to eat grass to get nuclear weapons. Rajaraman describes about the numerous international conferences on nuclear issues he had attended around the globe. Some photographs are included which do not go above the level of ‘selfies’. Many of these meetings were pointless exercises of academic-turned activists helping each other to make an item of expense acceptable to an auditor of the grants received by them. Many of them are simple gatherings of self-appointed arms control ‘experts’ running on liberal funding by American NGOs. The author’s criteria for evaluating the ‘success’ of such meetings verge on the comical. His estimate of the utility of such conferences is represented in such remarks as ‘they were attended by unprecedented number of heads of states’, ‘the set of invitees was very inclusive’, ‘the proceedings were very cordial’ etc. He has also shared the response of the official Indian delegation upon meeting him on the sidelines of such global meets. The officials considered him only as a rabble-rouser and won’t even talk to him even if he made an initiative to walk over to their seats to make a self-introduction. Reports of two such incidents are recorded in the book. International NGOs usually rank India very low in their much-trumpeted-yet-totally-worthless global indices. One such scheme is the Nuclear Security Index where India’s position is just two slots from the bottom. Rajaraman admits that this is due to the prejudice of the adjudicating members who are resentful of India not joining the NPT and peeved at its getting away from the consequences of the 1998 tests with a nuclear deal from the US.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star