EDIT: Comment most fowl

Our man in Washington turns chicken

In describing as headless chickens those who oppose the nuclear deal with the USA, Ronen Sen, our man in Washington, has done our collective manhood a disservice. Does not the fact that we want to retain the right to conduct future nuclear tests prove we are roosters, and not mere chickens? When Sen sneered, in his ‘‘off-the-record’’ interview to Rediff, about headless chickens running around, he was probably picturing Yashwant Sinha tripping over his dhoti and plunging headfirst into the Speaker’s well in Parliament (we were tipped off by the fact that the BJP’s former foreign minister was the only MP named in the interview). To Sinha we quote the old joke: Why else did the Indian chicken cross the nuclear threshold, but to get to the other side? Sen must have been irritated by the Left, collectively emulating Chicken Little, shrieking that the sky was falling, when all that was happening was that a US tent was moving into position to cover our heads (or our headlessness).

Perhaps he was worried that opposition to the deal was sweeping the country like an Avian flu epidemic, and the only way to stop it was to cull the poultry - make them headless. After all, both he and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have invested so much personally in the deal they are afraid to see it fly the coop. To quote Sen further, ‘‘and there has not been and I don’t think in the near future we will see such a friend and supporter as this President. Absolutely. There is none.’’ Though a bird in the hand is worth two in the Bush, we headless chickens are suspicious about the rush to formalize something that is predicated on the good feelings of one of the most unpopular persons the planet has ever seen.

There is no point clucking in disapproval about Sen’s choice of words, but rather, we wonder why he should have done so. If Singh gave Sen the go ahead, then he would have foreseen the consequent hardening of positions by the other parties. The go-ahead logically follows from his ill-advised challenge to the Left to withdraw support to his government; it means he wants out of the UPA-Left marriage. But if he thinks the nuclear deal will enamour him to the electorate, we’d just like to remind him of the sad fate of the slogan ‘‘India Shining’’ in 2004. We would advise him instead to do some damage control; the headless chickens now demand no less than Sen’s head, his qualified clarification/apology notwithstanding.