Mr Advani, POTA alone cannot defeat terrorism

POTA like laws are needed, but they are part of a larger set of measures that need to be taken to fight terrorism. They involve radical restructuring of our counter-terrorist forces, efforts to reach out to the alienated Muslim community, and a judicial system that is able to moderate check against unjust application of anti-terrorist measures.

Young Khushi Jha rides on the stretcher with her father Sri Rang Jha who was injured in Connaught Place by a bomb blast on September 13

The first thing I did when I heard the news of Saturday’s bomb blasts was to call my college-going daughters. The Greater Kailash M-Block market is just about one and a half kilometres from where we live and it is not unusual for my girls and their friends to hang out there on a Saturday evening. It wasn’t only parents who felt that clutch of panic at that time. Dear and loved ones from across the country and even abroad called later. You never know.
There is a certain terrible randomness in the way people are struck down in such incidents. They may have been window-shopping, on a family outing, at work or just hanging out. In a city where 3,000 people die in a year from road accidents, chance plays a larger than life role in our lives. But when people are out to kill you with bombs and guns, the odds are much shorter.
As a journalist getting into harm’s way is an occupational hazard. But, with the reportorial years behind me, the physical risk I face is as much as that for any other citizen of Delhi. And that has not been insubstantial in the last quarter century.
An uncle of mine died, the sole casualty, of a bomb blast outside Palika Bazar in the summer of 1990. A few years earlier, another actually faced a terrorist who fired at him from the road, and missed, as he stood on the balcony of his first floor house in Chittaranjan Park.
But it is not the personal risk that you worry about the most. For the dead it no longer matters. It is about those who are left behind — the trauma of losing a spouse, parent or child, of making ends meet, or the battle of those maimed to live with scars within and without.

Muslims

On Sunday morning I took my dog to her long-time vet. We never discuss politics, and he somewhat apologetically broached the subject of the blasts. “The feelings against Muslims are going to go sky-high,” he ventured. I responded with the somewhat cliché-ridden statement that a community should not be blamed for the actions of some individuals. But I knew what he was talking about. I told him of the arbitrariness of the casualties, and the Muslims who died or were injured, but it is true that the overwhelming bulk of people killed were Hindus. I took another track which he understood immediately.
The police would pick up ten Muslim boys, beat them up and after they were released at least three would be ripe for recruitment by the Indian Mujahideen or whichever group that came looking for them. Could we live with an alienated Muslim population, in permanent conditions of suspicion and civil war?
The Sangh Parivar believes that a hard line on terrorism, focusing on Islamic extremism, will help consolidate the majority Hindu community behind the BJP. They are playing with fire if they think that this will be a costless exercise. Their first assumption is that draconian laws alone can combat terrorism.
Their second is that isolating the “guilty” community and applying relentless police pressure will end terrorism. Just what happens when a community is put under such a pressure cooker is evident from what is happening in Palestine and Lebanon. Relentless and disproportionate force has so hardened the communities that even the most hard-line Israeli will concede that his countrymen are no more secure today than they were thirty years ago.

Police

Mr L.K. Advani speaks of the efficacy of POTA. The strident campaign of the BJP of course hides the fact that in its watch there was no let-up in terrorist incidents, and at the time POTA was there. And instances of misuse were so blatant that there was little outcry when the Congress-led UPA government repealed it. A stringent anti-terrorist law does have a place in an overall strategy of fighting terrorism, but what Advani and Co seem to suggest is that it has a central role. This is simply not true. The biggest problem is politicians themselves who have used such laws to imprison rivals and other inconvenient political groups, not terrorists.
The second problem is that the people who would apply the act are our policemen who have built up a formidable reputation for corruption, arbitrariness and brutality. A law is only as good as the institution that would apply them. And ours are rotten to the core. People can buy their way out of a murder charge, be framed for a narcotics crime, and be labeled a terrorist at someone’s whim. The act will provide the police an easy option of “solving” terrorist crimes by railroading innocents, because its provisions will make confessions before a police officer admissible in court.
Residents of the capital city which has seen waves of terrorist attacks going back to the 1980s, have, in a sense, gotten inured to such attacks. In that sense the terrorist project will not succeed: There will be no communal violence after an attack and neither will people rise in revolt against the government of the day. There are hundreds of families that would have been touched one way or the other by terrorist incidents in the last twenty-five years. They have learnt to live with their pain, physical or otherwise. But stoicism is a virtue of people, not of governments.
The system must be flexible, willing to learn and have the ability to reform itself to meet the challenges of the day. The Union Home Secretary is on record to say that the system is learning from each incident. Maybe on 13/9 the police did display more order and the hospitals were more responsive. But, by and large it was difficult to say that the response was as professional as it should have been. Actually, the Union Home Ministry, the intelligence apparatus and our police departments have shown little inclination to change. The post-Kargil reforms have largely remained on paper. Compare this to the enormous restructuring that has taken place in the US where a new anti-terrorism law has come with an entirely new Homeland Security department and a reshaped intelligence apparatus.

Justice

Leave alone the nuts and bolts of bureaucracies and laws, there is no evidence on the ground that our system understands the nature of the challenge. A section of the young in our Muslim community has been infected by the virus of militant radicalism. They have to be isolated and neutralised. This may sound clinical, but it is not because we are dealing with human beings, societies and communities. Eliminating the terrorist virus requires force, but only at the micro-level.
At the macro-level the need is to more closely integrate our Muslim community into the national mainstream. As of now, they feel that their entire community is under suspicion and their sense of rejection from the body politic is growing. Unfortunately, some political formations are not helping, and indeed, encouraging the process by demonising the Muslims in a bid to consolidate what they believe is the Hindu majority vote bank.
The war against terrorism cannot be fought cheaply, it cannot be fought symbolically through laws like POTA and it cannot most certainly be fought by dividing communities. The only way to fight terrorism is through a just war. Such a war has to use instrumentalities that may be tough, but fair and able to discriminate between the guilty and the innocent.
Just as a terrorist attack is about indiscriminate murder, counter-terrorist action must be about discriminate force, based on the rule of law.
This article was first published in Mail Today September 16, 2008

Sectarian politics is destroying India

Do you want to see how a nation builds itself? Look at the People’s Republic of China. From a tattered country, wracked by civil war and internal strife, in 1980, it has systematically pulled itself up to emerge as one of the leading powers of the world.
The Communist party there abandoned dogma to unleash its economic potential, and reformed itself to provide effective governance based on giving the levers of power to the best and the brightest in a systematic, time-bound manner.
In these years, it has sand-papered regional and linguistic variations by a national culture, built on a bedrock of a new network of road and railways, extending into the outermost reaches of the vast country. Its great metropolises like Shanghai and Beijing vie to become world centres of industry, finance and culture.
To see how a nation destroys itself, however, you do not have to go far. You only have to look at India.
In 1980, we were ahead of China in almost every department, except nuclear weapons. But over the years, we have fallen behind everywhere— in science, agriculture, manufacturing.
Our political system increasingly based on parties that seek to exclude or divide people on the basis of caste, creed, region or language seems determined to destroy the unified fabric of the country.


Hindutva

Our vaunted right of democratic protest has degenerated to a point where tearing up national communications networks like roads and railway tracks has now become the norm. Our great metropolis Mumbai has been blessed with leaders whose perspective does not extend beyond the state of Maharashtra.
In this process, the country’s leading political party, the Congress, has been the most complicit for its failures of omission, rather than commission. It has failed to provide the kind of national leadership that was expected of it. Instead, it has kowtowed to fundamentalists, fumbled before separatists and failed to keep the country’s tryst with destiny.
But perhaps the biggest immediate danger we confront is from the actions of the Bharatiya Janata Party which projects itself as a super-nationalist organisation, but seems determined to diminish the nation, and not just geographically. Recall, in the 1990s, it demanded that a Ram Mandir be established on the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and unleashed a national movement that led to widespread rioting and mayhem in the country.
It’s double-barreled somewhat transparent aim was to humiliate the Muslim community whose demonisation has always been a part and parcel of its mobilisational strategy, and to gain the support of the majority Hindus who worship Lord Ram. That project as we know has only been partially successful. The Muslims have been humiliated to the point that some of them have turned to radicalism and even terrorism, but the Hindus have not rallied behind the party in the numbers that were expected.

Jammu & Kashmir

So in the past year or so, the party has experimented with a number of other issues like Sethusamudram, hoping that one of them will be the spark that sets off the prairie fire. But last month it believes it hit pay dirt when the issue of the transfer of land by the Jammu & Kashmir government to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board rocked the state. There is no doubt that the protests in the Valley had a communal colour, led as they were by the Mir Waiz Umar Farooq and Syed Ali Shah Geelani. Neither is there any question that it was mishandled by the previous governor Lt. Gen (retd) S.K. Sinha and the coalition government of the Congress and the People’s Democratic Party.
The counter-agitation may appear to be a spontaneous upsurge of Jammu-based Hindus angered by the communalism of the Valley leaders, but it is in fact a well organised campaign being directed by the Sangh Parivar which had, as recently as 2002, backed the idea of a separate Jammu state. The leaders of the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board Sangharsh Samiti are known Parivar men — Tilak Raj Sharma of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, VHP state president Ramakant Dubey and the BJP state chief Ashok Khajuria.
When militancy broke out in 1990, some administrators like Governor Jagmohan had suggested a scorched earth policy of destroying the financial support structure of the separatists by blockading the Valley and preventing any export of its fruit and handicraft products. Fortunately better sense prevailed and the Indian security forces were able to restore a great measure of authority of the state without having thrown the baby out with the bath-water.
But the Jammu agitation is trying to do precisely that by blockading the Valley and preventing the export of its apple produce. It is being assisted in the process by the Punjab government which is a coalition between the Akali Dal and the BJP. It does not take much imagination to see that the consequences of these actions will be to deepen the sense of alienation of the Kashmir Valley Muslims from the rest of the country. Since the other major route out of the Valley leads out of the Jhelum Valley to Pakistan, this will go a long way in promoting the Pakistani project in the state.
But these things do not matter much to the BJP. It has not hesitated to pursue a cynical and dangerous policy of alienating the 140 million Muslims and pushing them over the brink through actions like the Babri Masjid demolition and the Gujarat massacres of 2002.

Typhoon

Now it seems determined to push the scheme of trifurcating the state which was last attempted by the Jammu Mukti Morcha, an RSS-backed body, in the 2002 elections. It should be clear what trifurcation implies — the Valley, Doda, Poonch and Rajauri becoming 100 per cent Muslim and edging towards Pakistan, so that the rump of a Hindu Jammu and Ladakh remain with India.
The BJP leaders think that once they have consolidated their electoral majority in Parliament, they can douse the fires they have lit, or coerce the Muslim community into total submission. But given the experience of the consequences of Babri Masjid and Gujarat — the repeated acts of terrorism that we are witnessing in the last couple of years — it should be clear that they will be unleashing a typhoon which will destroy the nation as it is constituted.
This article appeared first in Mail Today August 7, 2008

"Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall"

Can the UPA be put together again ?


Once upon a time, six months ago to be exact, there was a government that was moving full steam ahead. The economy was flourishing, the allies quiescent, and the Opposition dead beat. The ruling party had managed to get its nominee appointed President of the Republic — a sign of its commanding position — the Sensex had breached the 15,000 mark in the space of just half a year, and India’s traditional bugbear, Pakistan, was in the midst of a deep political crisis brought on by the sacking of the Chief Justice of its Supreme Court and the Lal Masjid affair.
Then suddenly the ground started slipping. And in the space of the next six months, Humpty Dumpty was pushed off his perch, ironically by his own friends, and has come apart. Now the proverbial King’s men are exerting mightily to put him together again to fight the next general elections, but somehow the glue does not seem to stick.

War

It is not as though the warning signals were not there. The defeat in the UP assembly elections in May came despite an enormous amount of effort by the crown prince Rahul Gandhi. But the rapidity with which the whole picture changed in August and September was staggering. It began with the revolt of the CPI(M). For two years since the Indo-US nuclear deal had been announced in July 2005, the party had gone along with the government probably in the belief that the deal would not really come through. Then at the end of July it became clear that the impossible had been achieved, that the country had managed to get a generous 123 Agreement with the US. Suddenly the Left attitude changed and CPI(M) General Secretary Prakash Karat launched a major campaign to derail not just the deal, but question the entire foreign policy track of the United Progressive Alliance.
Buoyed by its success till then, the Congress was initially inclined to fight and tell the Left where to get off. In early October, Sonia Gandhi declared that those attacking the deal were “enemies of development”. There was talk of a possible general election. And then came the craven U-turn: Sonia said her reference was specific to Haryana and Manmohan Singh declared that if the deal did not come through it would not be the end of life. The Congress’ enthusiasm to fight the Left came a cropper when close allies like M. Karunanidhi and Lalu Prasad Yadav said that they were not for elections and could even break with the UPA on the issue.
Coincidentally just as the UPA relationship was hitting the nadir, the Sangh Parivar got out of its trough. Confronted with the possibility of general elections, the RSS and BJP sorted out their differences in quick time and formally anointed L.K. Advani as the leader of the party. This came with the important electoral victory of the party in Gujarat, and then Himachal. There has been a great deal of hand-wringing and analysis over the BJP’s success and the Congress’ defeat.

Casualties

But not many have considered asking as to why the average voter in Gujarat and Himachal, even if they were no votaries of Hindutva, would have voted for the Congress. First, the advocates of anti-communal politics had muddled their message by associating with a range of BJP rebels, some who were no less communal than Narendra Modi. Second, the sight of the great anti-communal warriors fighting each other to death on the specious issue of “American imperialism”, would not have been the most reassuring for a voter.
Having humiliated the Congress, the Left could hardly expect it to look tall and fight the BJP in Gujarat. Purely coincidentally, these developments came at the very time that the Left got the worst drubbing of its recent political life on the Nandigram issue where, among others, it confronted the Jamiat-ul-ulema-e-Hind, the powerful organisation of Muslim clerics.
So here we are at the beginning of 2008, surveying the ruins of a once proud alliance and wondering whether it can be put together again. With elections just a year or so away, the Congress and its allies, which includes the Left, must ask the question: Just what have they achieved in the past three years? On what basis should the people vote for them the next time around?
True, the UPA has given us a stable government whose record is not marred by a Gujarat-type pogrom; its competent handling of foreign relations has enhanced India’s standing in the world. But economic growth has come on its own, or at least, without any significant government intervention, and despite the best efforts of the Left to sabotage it. Let’s not tarry on the still cooking nuclear deal. What about the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme? According to a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, it is not working. The government has hardly shown itself as an exceptional protector of the country, or a fighter against communal violence.
This is not to say that the condition of the other parties is any better. The coming year will see a bonfire of the vanities of other political formations as well. The BJP may send out its new poster-boy Narendra Modi to sup with Jayalalitha in Tamil Nadu, but it remains to be seen whether he gets the same kind of reception with Chandrababu Naidu or Nitish Kumar. Nandigram has yet to play itself out, not so much in terms of Mamta Banerji’s antics, but the alienation of the Muslim community from the Left.
Both the Congress and the BJP have been out of the Uttar Pradesh playing field and they don’t know how to get back on. The Congress’ chosen method is throwing sops that elude the targets and land up in the pockets of middle-men; as for the BJP, it is whistling in the dark hoping that Sethusamudram will do for them what the Ram Mandir did not. Turning up the communal temperature by using terrorism as the issue remains its most visible option.

Choice

Almost all political formations, barring Mayawati, want elections to take place at their assigned time in the first half of 2009. But that may not be possible. After its political mugging by the Left, the UPA does not look like it has the stamina to carry on for another year. If it does try, it could make the situation worse for itself. So, patchwork solutions are being attempted. In the coming weeks the Congress and the Left will try to pretend that their no-holds-barred battle never happened. Pranab Mukherjee’s declaration that the Congress would itself not like to proceed with a deal minus the Left’s support could be the beginning of an effort to revive the coalition. The effort would be to forget the August-December 2007 period.
There are straws in the wind to suggest that the Congress will again surprise the Left with a draft IAEA safeguards agreement that meets their somewhat extravagant demands. The Left will have the opportunity to reconsider. In the meantime, Mr. Karat may speak of the new Third Front and the Congress may dream of a modified UPA with Mulayam Singh, but time is not on their side.
As they confront the next general election, the future course of our political parties will be shaped by habit and vanities, rather than any deterministic unfolding of events. Choices exercised now could still make a difference, but just about.
This article was published in Mail Today January 16, 2008

The worm is turning

To go by what the media says, the nuclear deal is still showing some signs of life. This is what The Hindu reported on a press conference held during German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to New Delhi:

Maintaining that the government remained committed to the civil nuclear deal with the United States, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday said, “We have not reached the end of the road” even if there was some delay in operationalising it.

I am not surprised. I never believed it was dead. It did suffer a terrible blow when the Left suddenly pulled the rug under it in August, and a worse one when party members and UPA allies stabbed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the back.The reason why I remain optimistic is not some special information, but my analysis of what underpins its robustness.

In my view, the Indo-US nuclear deal, occasioned perhaps, by US worries about China, is actually a a larger geopolitical shift that is taking place as a result of the end of the Cold War. This is about the new world order that Bush 41 spoke of in 1990. India's nuclear status has been a pill stuck in the collective throats of the international community for quite a while. Bush 41 tried first to handle this by pinning down India and Pakistan in a regional arrangement, but this did not work. After India’s nuclear tests, and especially after 9-11 the situation was such that the idea of equating India and Pakistan became laughable. Pakistan was on the verge of economic collapse, the A Q Khan network had been exposed, and was now seen as a “rogue” state that had to be controlled. So, the US emphasis shifted to co-opting India.

The nuclear deal is a means of doing that, and there is nothing dishonourable about this. India is getting an opportunity to join the world community, whose leading lights also constitute the Nuclear Suppliers Group. There is an unwritten consensus among them that the US will work out the terms of engagement, and the Indo-American 123 Agreement is precisely that.

American benevolence has nothing to do with a sudden love for India and Indians, it is again, systemic. Indian economic weight is growing in handsome measure, its military power, though dissipated in internal policing, is not insubstantial. India is one of the most open societies in the world, fiercely democratic, naturally capitalistic, indeed a natural ally of the US, once the latter gets off its high horse and begins to understand the consequences of its misadventure in Iraq.

As for the nuclear deal politics, what we are seeing currently is intense effort to knock sense into the BJP’s head. Everyone, but everyone knows that the party is taking a completely opportunistic position on the deal—in other words, opposing it for the sake of doing so, rather than any principle. Brajesh Mishra’s comment is kind of non sequitur:

“If I were to get credible guarantees from the government about the integrity of what we (the NDA) had left behind three and a half years ago, what has been done in these three and a half years for them to prove that there are also enthusiastic about the nuclear weapons programme, then I would say, personally, to go forward with the deal because I am not so critical of the US for following this particular policy. I am critical of the government bending to the wishes of the US.”

The real pressure is coming from the BJP’s “natural allies”—its supporters and well-wishers in the corporate and business world who are unable to comprehend the party’s stand. No one knows what has driven that stand which reflects the views of the xenophobic right of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch. Apparently Mr. Arun Shourie is its key mentor within the party’s core committee that decides policy. Why he, or for that matter Mr. Yashwant Sinha are there is a bit of a mystery since neither have any political base.

The BJP now has the option of simply backtracking and supporting the deal “in the national interest” or negotiating an arrangement with the Congress that could see the Parliament pass a “sense of Parliament” resolution underlining India’s belief in an “independent” foreign policy. The problem, however, is that the Congress and BJP are not on talking terms—the PM literally does not talk to the leader of the opposition. It is in such circumstances, of course, that the extremes of the Left flourish.

Confronted with the possibility that it may be left holding the can, the Left has changed tune. CPI(M) Party chief Prakash Karat who virtually accused Manmohan Singh of being an American stooge says in The Telegraph that he respects his integrity.

New Delhi, Oct. 30: In his first public overture to Manmohan Singh since the bitter stand-off began in early August over the Indo-US nuclear deal, CPM general secretary Prakash Karat today underlined the Left’s “respect” for the Prime Minister and appreciated his “unquestioned integrity”.

Is that a climb-down? Or an effort to get on to the "statesmanship" horse, after unhorsing the PM? You decide.

Indo-US Nuclear Deal: The last lap

(This has been revised in the past 12 hours)

As readers of this blog know, I have been, and remain, a strong supporter of the Indo-US nuclear deal. Many of my articles of the past two years can be found in this blog archive. I was 100 per cent sure that the US will concede all the major issues—right to reprocess nuclear fuel, accepting the concept of perpetual supply of fuel for reactors in exchange for our placing our civilian reactors under perpetual safeguards, linked to this ensuring that the deal is not automatically held hostage to the consequences of another Indian nuclear test, and the issue of fallback safeguards that would be needed if the IAEA failed to carry out it's duties.

My reasoning is that the US is not motivated by a desire to get a slice of the Indian nuclear power industry pie, or on capping India’s nuclear weapons programme. It based on a strategic calculation that requires a friendly India. This is not because we are ‘good’ and ‘deserving’ or even a democracy, but because our size, economic potential and location makes us just about the only large country that can offset the powerful gravitational pull being exerted by China. Our political ethos, not dissimilar to that of the US and the western world is a bonus. The problem for the US was that not only was India was subject to a host of US technology restrictions, but that most of the history of Indo-US relations was one of the Americans seeking to contain India, in alliance with Pakistan and even China. (see the previous post) You cannot befriend a country you also embargo and contain.

An awareness of the need to change this made the many US concessions possible. As for India, it sees the deal as a huge “confidence building measure” on the part of the Americans, or a token of atonement of the many wrongs they have inflicted on us in the past. India's new breed of realpolitik leaders don't want ritual apologies, they prefer to follow the Chinese style of extracting what you can when the situation is in your favour.

Now India has nothing to complain about the nuclear deal, and everything to celebrate. It's not surprising that on Wednesday, the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs and the Cabinet Committee on Security met jointly and quickly approved of the draft agreement. External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherji declared that all of India's concerns had been met in the recent round of talks in Washington DC.

Now, the world's sole super-power, one is willing to loosen the tight nuclear embargo it had placed on the civil part of our nuclear programme. The effect of the Indo-US nuclear agreement will be that while India remains a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty the US has agreed to resume nuclear cooperation in trade in the civil nuclear side, even while giving a specific commitment that it will not hamper India's weapons' programme. It has agreed to actively work to persuade the rest of it's cartel, the Nuclear Suppliers Group to do the same.

"It's too good to be true," said a senior official involved in the negotiations who spoke on background to this blogger earlier this week. The US decision has rescued the Indian civil nuclear programme as well, because India lacks natural uranium and its three-stage programme aiming at self-sufficiency through using the Thorium-Uranium cycle was in serious jeopardy. As it is, the American-led embargo had seriously crippled the programme both in terms of size and technology.

Because, say officials who went for the talks, the deal was wide open on all the three counts listed above when the team led by Indian National Security Adviser Narayanan and Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon went to Washington on July 17. There, in addition to the official-level talks, the Indian team leaders held parallel discussions with top US officials, Cheney, Hadley and Rice. By all accounts the talks were extended for a fourth and fifth day because of these discussions and in the end we have a “frozen text”—a draft agreement which, though already approved formally by India, must now be approved by the the US system.

The political push so vital for the agreement came from the very top-- President George W. Bush in the US and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in India. Note the key role played by US Vice-President Dick Cheney and US National Security Adviser Steve Hadley and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in breaking the log-jam in Washington.

The latest report by one of the agreement’s more knowledgeable and balanced critics Siddharth Varadarajan of The Hindu indicates that the ‘frozen text’ now with the Indian and US governments has met all the many requirements that were set for it and more.
Already two nuclear scientists, Placid Rodrigues and M.R. Srinivasan who attacked the July 18 Agreement have come out to declare it a success. See this report.

A senior official involved in the negotiations says that the deal meets India's goals because:

1. It places no hindrance on our strategic or military programme. 2. It does not hinder our cherished indigenous three-stage nuclear power programme and finally 3. It is in consonance with all the assurances given by Prime Minister Singh in Parliament.

The senior official says that the agreement now contains “specific language” declaring that the aim of the agreement is not to hinder any “unsafeguarded nuclear activity” on the part of India-- in other words the military part of our programme. In fact he says the deal has ‘no language on nuclear tests’ . While the US is required by it’s law to halt all cooperation with countries that conduct nuclear tests, the Hyde Act has given an exemption that covers the May 1998 tests. While India is aware that another test will have consequences, the Indo-US 123 agreement remains silent on the issue, a fact that tells it's own story.

The ghost of Tarapur

In the frozen agreement according to the senior official, the US has agreed to give India “prior consent” to reprocess US-origin nuclear fuel. This is an issue that had bedeviled the past couple of rounds of talks because, first, the US did not understand India’s need for reprocessing (this is linked to making plutonium to fuel fast-breeder reactors for stage II of India’s power programme). The US prior consent is conditional on India creating a dedicated national facility for reprocessing fuel which will be safeguarded by the IAEA to it’s declared standards on reprocessing, storage, safety and security.

Such a consent was available for the US-supplied Tarapur reactors as well. But when India called for consultations on the issue of reprocessing in the 1970s, the US simply refused to sit down and talk and the result was that India has had to bear the cost of storing the US-origin spent fuel.
To ensure this does not happen the current agreement has a provision which requires consultations to begin within 6 months of the Indian request, and within a year an agreement will be reached.

Cessation of cooperation

Any agreement worth it’s salt must have some way of coping with a breakdown. In this case, the guiding star is again the Tarapur agreement. The US Atomic Energy Act insists that should this happen, it should get back all the equipment and materials supplied. This seems logical, but is impractical. Uprooting a nuclear power plant is simply not possible. The only option is to entomb it. As for materials, especially spent fuel, most suppliers would rather not have it back because of problems of storage.

The current agreement contains an elaborate schema for any “cessation of cooperation” situation. According to the senior official, it will have a “many-layered” process of consultation after the cessation. This will focus on safety and compensation, with US commitment to the “continuous operation of the reactor” of US origin. In other words, the US government will not seek to uproot or halt its’ operation. It could demand the return of US-origin fuel, but only after India was satisfied that it had made up the deficit from alternate sources. Here again the process would not be interminable. The US would be committed to stating what it wants back within a year and compensating India for the return.

What the draft agreement has not given us

The “frozen agreement” does not as yet enable trade in enrichment and reprocessing(ENR) technologies. The US prohibits their export to all countries, but says the senior official, India already has these technologies. What India wants, however, are components but this can only happen through an amendment to the current agreement. Parliament is also bound to question the “prior consent” framework for reprocessing saying that there is always a chance that the US may renege at the last moment. Officials say that the issue will really come up after a decade and more because this presumed that India will, first, have to buy a US reactor, then use it for several years and accumulate sufficient spent fuel for reprocessing. At the same time it would have to build the dedicated facility for reprocessing it. So why hold the agreement hostage to speculative possibility, namely that India will indeed buy a US reactor ?

The Real Prize

India now needs to work out an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency and get the approval of the 43-member Nuclear Suppliers Group cartel. This should happen by October or November. Then the draft agreement, the IAEA India-specific Additional Protocol and the NSG's new rules on nuclear trade with India would be together sent to the US Congress and the 123 Agreement would be subjected to an "up or down" vote. This means that there will be no discussion or amendment, simply a vote on whether the Congress approves or disapproves of the agreement.

The NSG is the real prize. The Indo-US Agreement is merely the key that will unlock the global embargo on our programme. When the embargo is lifted, India will have the option of nuclear trade with several countries who are not as finicky as the US on nuclear issues. It is not that they are less committed to non-proliferation and will not insist on stringent safeguards on us, only that they will not have onerous rules of the type listed in the US Atomic Energy Act. Further, and perhaps more important, they have more advanced nuclear power technology-- Russian reactors are cheaper and the French more sophisticated.

Could the US use the NSG to pin India down on issues it has conceded in the ‘123 Agreement’?
Unlikely, say Indian officials, they have tried in the past but failed. Indeed, they are actually obligated by the July 18, 2005 agreement to push India’s case in the NSG. The US will give it in writing to India that it will not press the NSG to cut off cooperation with India, should the Indo-US agreement be terminated in some future date for some unspecified reason.

Domestic fallout

“Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan”. You will soon be reading about those who played a sterling role in working out the Indo-US nuclear deal. The actual fact is that barring Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself, no senior political figure backed the deal openly, though External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherji played a key behind-the-scenes role in promoting it. One reason was that many in the ruling coalition did not understand the deal and its implications and some didn’t bother to think about it. Among political parties only Left understood what it meant—the route to closer Indo-US ties—and so opposed it vehemently.

The BJP’s hostile stance is part of its addled post-2004 politics. The opposition of the “retired nuclear scientist” lobby ranged from senility to xenophobia. Many of those involved forgot their own record of incompetence and disservice to the Indian nuclear programme whose true history remains to be written. The mendacity of some of them has been truly astonishing.

And as for our bomb programme....

Those who claim that the deal will undermine our minimum credible deterrent should read the article here written by K. Santhanam, the DRDO scientist who steered the Indian nuclear weapons programme through the 1990s. He says "The accumulated weapons-grade plutonium in about 40 years of operating the CIRUS reactor (40MWt) and the relatively new Dhruv reactor (100MWt) has been estimated to be sufficient for the MCD (Minimum Credible Deterrent)."