His days in the White House may be truly numbered. His own Senate may have refused to ratify his charter of nuclear hegemony known as the CTBT. His unabashed exhibition of superpower arrogance vis-a-vis countries like Iraq, Cuba and several other small and weak countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America may have earned him the title of the world’s most hated policeman or number one terrorist. His venom against every non-Western civilisation and culture, especially Chinese, Asian or Islamic, may be soaked in the stinking solution of Western cultural imperialism. His policies of treacherous trade and plunderous globalisation may be creating havoc in large parts of planet Earth, evoking angry and loud protests even in his familiar Western turf from Seattle to Davos. But when he decided to make a five-day trip to India, his saffron hosts in Indraprasth started leaping in comprador ecstasy!
For the last few weeks, ordinary citizens of Delhi, Mumbai, Jaipur, Agra and Hyderabad - centres included in the Clinton itinerary - and virtually the entire country have been hijacked by a Clinonised Indian administration. Beggars have been brutally evicted, jhuggis have been demolished in thousands and even entire roads and beaches and skies have been reserved for the Clinton entourage. Managers of the print and visual media have also been busy marketing this incredible craze for everything with even the remotest of connections with the Clintons. It is however not surprising that in their desperate bid to showcase India, the rulers have chosen the greatest care to insulate the guests from any close encounter with Indian democracy!Almost everywhere, public protests have virtually been banned by an overzealous administration and then neatly blacked out by its partners in the press.
What will be the upshot of the Clinton visit for his saffron hosts? Their best attempts to get Washington to declare Pakistan a terrorist state continued to end in utter failure. By including Pakistan in his South Asia itinerary, if only for a four-hour stopover, Clinton has put paid to the saffron plans for outmanoeuvring Pakistan with US assistance. The BJP’s surrender on CTBT is now almost an open secret, care is only being taken to delink it from the Clinton visit. A suggestive Vajpayee made it abundantly clear only the other day when he said his government would not sign CTBT under pressure, laying special emphasis on the clause "under pressure". Don’t we know that for allowing your arms to be freely twisted, the bully often rewards you with a patronising pat on your back?
Beyond CTBT and cross-border terrorism, the NDA government is actually hoping to emerge as the largest American client in Asia and also get a few dollars more of American investment in the process. What a grand vision of strategic partnership? The Sangh managers also hope to use the Clinton example for their own domestic agenda of constitutional review and introduction of a US-style presidential system and, more crucially, a "nationalist" political culture patterned on the American tradition of McCarthyism - rabid anti-communism and systematic witch-hunt of Leftists and progressive elements in every sphere of the state and civil society! Above all, the Sangh sees the Clinton visit as the single biggest legitimation of India’s saffron regime. All Indian compradors are bound to feel proud of the greatest international honour and recognition that they believe has now been bestowed on this independent nation of fifty years and the BJP will try and market it as an exclusively saffron success story! The saffronites may be the poorest defenders of swadeshi, but haven’t they just proved to be the strongest seducers for the US!
Real patriots could have of course only felt offended by the reprehensible hype over the Clinton visit. If the visit itself has been detrimental to our national interests, the nauseating display of the Great Indian Colonial mindset has only added enormous insult to that injury. The anti-imperialist protests sponsored by the CPI(ML) and other Left organisations and patriotic citizens have only sought to save the nation’s dignity and patriotic legacy from the imperialist marauders and their saffron collaborators.