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03/01/2006:

"Tens of Thousands Protest Bush India Visit"

NEW DELHI -- Tens of thousands of Indians waving black and white flags and chanting "Death to Bush!" rallied Wednesday in New Delhi to protest a visit by President Bush.

Surindra Singh Yadav, a senior police officer in charge of crowd control, said as many as 100,000 people, most of them Muslim, had gathered in a fairground in central New Delhi ordinarily used for political rallies.

"Whether Hindu or Muslim, the people of India have gathered here to show our anger. We have only one message _ killer Bush go home," one of the speakers, Hindu politician Raj Babbar, told the crowd.
washingtonpost.com


Good Nukes, Bad Nukes
Juxtaposed this week are the two poles of the emerging world: India and Iran. They are alpha and omega, the dream and the nightmare. One symbolizes the promise of globalization, the other the threat of global disorder.

What they share, unfortunately, is a passion to be members of the nuclear club. India has nuclear weapons; Iran wants them. Between them stands the United States, trying to set rules that will apply to both -- rewarding the good boy while maintaining an ability to punish the bad one.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously observed that intelligence "is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time." That has always seemed to me like an argument for enlightened hypocrisy. And maybe it's the best explanation for why we should say yes to India's nukes and no to Iran's. The two cases are different because -- they're different.
The same rules don't apply to both; one has shown that it is benign and the other behaves like a global outlaw.


Why India Should Choose Iran, Not the US
Dr Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and one of the leading technical nuclear experts in the United States, believes that even if India gets everything it wants under the US-India civilian nuclear agreement signed by President George W Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on July 18, it would still be only a tiny fraction of the oil and gas it could obtain from Iran to meet India's growing energy needs.

It is not, Dr Makhijani argues, therefore worth jeopardizing India's relationship with Iran by voting with the United States against Tehran at the International Atomic Energy Agency.