NAM changes Manmohan

Manmohan Singh realised in Havana that he could hug Castro and Chavez and tight-walk the nuclear deal

Sanjay Kapoor  Havana

A few days before the Air India flight ferrying Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from Brasilia, Brazil, landed at the Jose Marti airport, it had become apparent that the prime minister would have to show nimble footwork in a country where people have refused to do Salsa to the big neighbour's tunes.

There was understandable apprehension in the foreign office about how to countenance the new radicalism of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). They painstakingly explained to mediapersons accompanying the prime minister that there was no way that India could have “sidestepped” the summit, as the evolution of India as a nation state was closely linked to NAM. “There would be a sharp backlash and public outrage against us ducking the NAM,” claimed foreign service sources.

Their ambivalence found expression in newspapers that are generally not kind to third world causes. Some of them questioned why Singh was going to Havana at all. The government particularly feared the dim view that the Left parties would take if it stayed away from Havana.

There were suggestions that the prime minister, before he agreed to fly to Havana from Brasilia, should fly past the Cuban capital and land in New York and take part in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Cognisant of its anti-imperial legacy and the ideological sustenance the NAM movement had provided to India, Prime Minister Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi both overruled these suggestions and committed India's participation in the summit. Both of them made it clear that relationship with any country would not be at the expense of the other (read the US).

Taking a decision to visit Havana was the easy part. Perhaps, more difficult was how to traipse through the minefield that geography, history and contemporary politics had contributed in creating.

Cuba has a legitimate grievance against the US for blockading it for the last 47 years. The embargo has pauperised an economy located 90 miles away from the US and so heavily dependent on tourism. India, traditionally, had opposed the embargo, but after its relations warmed up with Washington, it has stopped making these perfunctory noises expressing solidarity with Cuba. India was aware that Cuba would use the NAM summit to build up support against the US and its neo-liberal policies.

What caused greater nervousness was the presence of a belligerent Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinijad. Foreign ministry officials, who had been working to iron out creases in the civilian nuclear deal with the US, did not want the anti-US rhetoric of Chavez and Ahmedinijad to bend the NAM agenda in their favour and consequently wreck India's embryonic nuclear deal. “A photo op with the likes of Chavez or Ahmedinijad could be a kiss of death,” they apparently signalled.

Singh, in a news conference in the aircraft, hoped that the NAM would not divide nations and instead promote peace. He expressed desire that the summit would be non-confrontationist in which India would serve as a bridge between the NAM countries and the industrialised West. This was a new formulation for which there were no real takers as the agenda of the summit had been clearly set, first by the statements of the Foreign Minister of Cuba, Felipe Perez Roque, who said that 114 nations would join US President George Bush's 'axis of evil' after the NAM summit gets over, and later, by the dapper Vice-President of Cuba, Carlos Lag Davila.