The disclosures contain generally useful, and sometimes valuable, information on diverse issues: Kashmir; public perceptions of the nuclear deal; India-Pakistan tensions; and Iran's nuclear pursuits.***

WIKILEA cables disclosures have hit India. The Hindu newspaper has accessed and summarised classified cables from the US Embassy in New Delhi to Washington — and produced a political furore.

The most sensational disclosure pertaining to India is about the July 2008 cash-for-votes scandal, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh staked the United Progressive Alliance government's survival on the India-US nuclear cooperation deal.

The Left parties had withdrawn their backing to the minority government, necessitating a confidence vote. The Congress bribed other parties to support it.

A TV channel's sting operation widely publicised all this in 2008, mainly indicting the Samajwadi Party. It now emerges that Gandhi family confidant Captain Satish Sharma got an aide to bribe the Rashtriya Lok Dal's Ajit Singh too.

However, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that "the veracity, contents and even the existence" of the cables sent by the US embassy in India couldn't be confirmed and that he had not "authorised anyone to purchase any votes."

Despite denials, the WikiLeaks disclosure constitutes a strong prima facie case that the UPA bought MPs to win the confidence vote. The government must let the Central Bureau of Investigation probe the scandal under Supreme Court supervision. Failure to do this will further damage the government's scam-tainted image.

The Bharatiya Janata Party too stands indicted. While it publicly criticised the nuclear deal, its national executive members told the Americans "not to read much into the [party's] foreign policy resolutions." Loh Purush L.K. Advani, no less, assured them that when in power, the BJP would "behave very differently."

The BJP opposed the US-India deal to affirm India's "sovereign" right to determine its nuclear policy. But it follows a Right-wing foreign and security policy and has been pro-US since the Cold War. This makes it practise double standards -- destroying its credibility.

More important than scandals, the WikiLeaks disclosures show the direction that India's foreign policy has recently taken, and how the world, in particular the US, views India's domestic situation and its response to regional and international events.

The disclosures contain generally useful, and sometimes valuable, information on diverse issues: Kashmir; public perceptions of the nuclear deal; India-Pakistan tensions; and Iran's nuclear pursuits.

Cables are routinely used by diplomats to convey information and assessments of the host country's positions. The present cables highlight divergence between the then President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and Ms. Sonia Gandhi over the execution of the death sentence for Afzal Guru.

They quote J&K Liberation Front leader Yaseen Malik as saying that hanging Guru would have an adverse impact in the Valley because the punishment is grossly disproportionate to the charge — of helping organise transport for the Parliament House attacks.

The disclosures highlight differences between Dr. Singh and former National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan over resuming talks with Pakistan. Dr. Singh had said India and Pakistan "have a shared destiny." Mr. Narayanan bluntly told him: "Your destiny is shared. Ours is not." It was highly improper for Mr. Narayanan to say this to his boss. Even more deplorably, he narrated this to a US diplomat.

On foreign policy, India comes across as an emerging but diffident giant, who often capitulates to Washington's pressure, sometimes without much resistance.

This is especially so on Iran, over which the US arm-twisted India. India voted three times against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency, thus enabling the Security Council to impose sanctions.

India's votes were against its Ministry of External Affairs’ own conclusion that Iran isn't in substantive breach of its obligations under the IAEA charter or the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The US made the nuclear deal conditional upon India dropping the proposed Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline and helping isolate Iran.

The US doesn't countenance even a peaceful nuclear programme for Iran, to which Iran has a right. Barring some disclosure infringements, Teheran has cooperated with the IAEA. India sounds doubly hypocritical on Iran because it acquired its own nuclear weapons by abusing the civilian route.

India's stance is at odds with friendly relations with Iran, which it for decades partnered in Afghanistan against the mujaheedin and Taliban. Afghanistan is vital to this region's future. And India-Iran relations are crucial to Afghanistan's future.

The WikiLeaks cables show that New Delhi was so frightened of US annoyance at the April 2008 India

visit of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that it notified the US embassy before informing its own agencies.

Recently, the MEA ordered its diplomats to do extraordinary things to please the US. Days after Hardeep Puri was appointed India's ambassador to the UN, he assured the US embassy in New Delhi that his "specific brief" was to seek a "higher degree of convergence" with the US even in South Asia, including Nepal and Sri Lanka.

In another bizarre development, the MEA asked its deputy ambassador to the UN Ajai Malhotra to undercut his own boss Nirupam Sen, whom he accused of taking "a confrontational approach to the US." In dispute was the secretary general's selection. The Non-Aligned Movement demanded he should be from Asia. Mr, Malhotra offered to help the US promote its candidate in case the NAM proposal didn't find wider support.

That someone of Mr. Sen's impeccable credentials should be overridden in such a slimy way speaks of the MEA's lack of professionalism and its craven pro-US bias. This is wholly unbecoming of a nation with a vision of global leadership.

The cables show the light-years' distance India has travelled from the Nehru-Indira Gandhi legacy of Non-Alignment and opposition to US hegemonism. After the Soviet Union collapsed, India was the last major nation with an independent foreign policy focussed on demanding a more balanced world.

The US has prised India from its independent policy moorings through inducements like the nuclear deal, and wants it to become an obedient ally. The WikiLeaks disclosures should make the public aware of this and provoke a strong response in favour of a fiercely autonomous foreign policy. The writer is an eminent Indian columnist.

E-mail: bidwai@bol.net.in