The enigma of victory

Obama needs to tap the same genius that Roosevelt did in the 1930s


As a media professional I can certify that the Obama-McCain presidential race was the most intensely scrutinsed US election in India. I am not sure why this was so. Perhaps our networks and newspapers did not have enough domestic news. But that’s unlikely. Many TV networks sent their top anchors to the US to cover the polls and aired the election day as closely as CNN or any American channel. All this would undoubtedly involve a massive commitment of time and money.



The reason is partly related to why the election was historic in the US—a black man was elected president for the first time in the history of that nation. That is important enough, but what was probably more was the circumstances in which the election has taken place. The world is in the midst of an economic crisis whose full contours are not yet fully visible. It could well be the worst in the last 100 years, it certainly is the worst in the last fifty. This is not just a crisis of liquidity or even solvency. It is one that has shaken the very foundations of global capitalism. But the message we got from Washington was that no one was in-charge, or that those who were were hopelessly inept. Time and again in the last eight years, the Bush Administration officials displayed overweening arrogance, and rank incompetence.

Context

But the crisis as such is deeper. Its beginnings lay in the surge in oil prices, high food prices and global inflation beginning from the start of 2008. The credit crisis actually came as a double whammy. The result has been in massive foreclosures of mortgages affecting millions of people in the US and, now, with the US and other major economies in recession, we are faced with the spectre of unemployment. In the past decade as Asian economies raced ahead, there was some vanity suggesting that they had decoupled from the US and European economies and could, when push came to shove, pull them out of trouble. There have been suggestions notably from the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that the world has an opportunity to push the US aside and use the power of the Chinese and Indian economies to reshape the world economic order.
That scenario is merely wishful thinking. It has since become painfully apparent that we will all sink or swim together. For this reason the world looks to Washington for leadership and is visibly relieved that the new President-elect of the country, Barack Obama, has that key ingredient needed—the ability to generate hope. In this sense he can be compared more to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose “we have nothing to fear but fear” slogan was like a lifeline for the US in deep in depression caused by the Great Crash of 1929. More than his deeds, which came subsequently over the span of three administrations, it was FDR’s persona that helped keep the American soul together in the grim early 1930s.
Roosevelt’s New Deal not only catered for the unemployed, but acted to push for the recovery of the economy and reform the banking and economic system to prevent another recurrence of the crash. The regulatory system that was created in a range of areas such as stock markets, aviation, drugs, and housing have endured. He was responsible for creating the Social Security System in the US.

Reconstruction

Like Roosevelt, Obama has been thrust into a country whose need for reform does not stop at its devastated financial sector. He and his team must mend American banking and finance system, as well as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. He has promised to make the health care system the centerpiece of his social policy in a country, said to be the richest in the world, but where 16 per cent of the people do not have access to any kind of health insurance. Obama has to do all this in a country whose national debt stands at a staggering $ 10 trillion.
What Obama does for the United States has profound implications for the global economy given the economic power of the US. Just how the bad news from the US has impacted on us is evident from the travails of the business process outsourcing industry in India. Obama may have taken a stand against the industry in the past, but the issue now is not whether or not the industry is good or bad for the US or India, but whether it will survive at all.
Obama confronts even bigger challenges abroad. FDR became a war president in his third term in office when Japan attacked Pearl Harbour. Obama begins as a war president from day one. The war in Iraq may be winding down, but the one in Afghanistan is in full bloom. That brings Obama close to an area of India’s strategic concern. Obama’s remarks on Kashmir seem to have set the cats among the pigeons. But there is no need to press the panic button. New Delhi is, after all, itself engaged deeply with Pakistan in trying to resolve the issue. In fact, US intervention could well work on India’s behalf in persuading the Pakistanis to accept a reasonable compromise.
Whatever the US may do, they are unlikely to derail the India-Pakistan process. Everyone knows that the only non-utopian solution to the Kashmir issue lies in recognizing the existing sovereignties in the state. If anything, the Talibani fires raging in Pakistan would be a disincentive for any large-scale meddling with the political status of J&K.
US leadership is also required in other world-order concerns such as climate change or non-proliferation. None of these are of concern to India specifically. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty could be one outcome, but if the US and China are willing to sign it, there is no reason why India should hold out.

India

Whatever be the situation, trom the geopolitical point of view, the balance of power has shifted in India’s favour since the last time around, in 1999, when the US got involved in the region by pulling Pakistan’s chestnuts out of the Kargil fire. The passage of the Indo-US nuclear deal, courtesy George W Bush, has actually strengthened India’s hand not just in relation to Pakistan but the United States itself.
In fact, the time has come for India to be much more focused on what it wants from the US and to go out and obtain it, without the kind of debilitating debate that we undertook over the Indo-US nuclear deal. India has a lot to offer the US, primarily its ability to assist the US in restoring normalcy in Afghanistan, preserving the stability of the South and Central Asian region and ensuring the security of the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean. India can play a role, too, in trying to dampen the conflict between the US and Iran. One of the biggest challenges that President Obama confronts will be in dealing with Teheran. As of now no one in Washington seems to have a policy that has a chance of succeeding. Primarily this had to do with the neoconservative sabotage master-minded by Vice-President Cheney’s office. The new administration can start with a clean slate and the situation within the country indicates that should Washington adopt a non-confrontationist posture, Tehran would reciprocate. This would go a long way in preventing a catastrophe that could be as ruinous for the US, India and the world, as the present economic crisis is proving.
Perhaps the most important thing that India, the world and even the United States is looking for in the new Obama Administration is competence. The neocons with their extravagant paranoid fantasies were also remarkably incompetent in executing the projects they began. Their Reaganite economic policy counterparts, too, turned out to be men of straw. We can only hope that an Obama is able to tap the kind of genius FDR was able to and take his country to greater heights.
The article appeared in Mail Today November 7, 2008

What does the US gain from the Indo-US nuclear deal ?

We all know what India stands to gain from the successful passage of the Indo-US nuclear deal— the ability to import uranium fuel, nuclear reactors, their financing and components, and a slew of the so-called dual use technology denied until now. But what does the US gain?

The answer lies in contemporary international politics. The US wants to befriend and strengthen India. As one unnamed official put it in 2005, the US wants “to help India become a major world power in the 21st century…we understand fully the implications, including military, of that statement.”

Geopolitics

Contrary to first impressions, there is nothing sinister about that statement. Global powers like the US are impelled to promote world order concerns, as much as they pursue their selfish national interests. Indeed a rule-based world order is seen as an essential component of national interests. By entering into a nuclear deal, the US is following this compulsion, as are the other powers like Russia, China and France who have signed on to the US-led process.
The rise of China has created a vortex in the Asian region and now the globe. The emergence of an economically and militarily strong India will help stabilize the region and benefit not just the US but the world, including China itself. Inviting New Delhi to attend G-8 outreach meetings is not quite the same as having India as a participant in meetings that decide global issues, be they economic policy, non-proliferation or international security.
Removing India from a list of countries which are under a major global embargo for nuclear and other high technologies is the first step in a process that could see us become a member of the G-8, the Nuclear Suppliers Group or even a permanent member of the UN Security Council in the years to come.
There is a great deal of innuendo about how the US will gain business from the process. Reference has been made to a letter of intent India has given to the US to have American companies set up 10 nuclear power reactors in India. But that is not the real prize. The business consequences of the reactors which could cost anywhere upto $30-40 billion cannot be sneezed at, even by the US. Nor can the exports arising from the lifting of the embargo on a number of dual use technologies.
But it is also a fact that the US has rarely used foreign policy to promote its economic interests in the manner, say, France or UK have done. Indeed, the Americans have gone out of their way to deny countries like India computers, weapons, equipment on various grounds. The embargo system that the US has created actually seeks to promote policy by denying commerce.

History

Now for the logical follow-up question: Is this good or bad for India? There is nothing ominous about the US helping India become a stronger power. This is what they did in the 1950s and 1960s as well. Between 1954 and 1966, the US helped set up some 14 engineering colleges and provided visiting professors to IITs in Khagragpur, the College of Engineering in Roorkee, Pune, Guindy and the Bengal Engineering College. The most significant US connection was in the establishment of the Kanpur IIT in 1960. Our first research reactor, our first nuclear power reactor, our first sounding rocket, all came with the help of the US.
Under the Technical Cooperation Mission, the US government as well as the Ford Foundation provided assistance for hundreds of Indian engineers to be trained. Indeed many of the nuclear scientists like R. Chidambaram and K. Santhanam who led the Pokhran II nuclear tests, were trained in the US or benefited from an exposure to US laboratories. American aid provided funds to enhance the quality of Indian labs like the National Physical Laboratory and the National Chemical Laboratory. US funds were also provided under the Development Loan Fund to enhance the technological capabilities of the Indian private sector.
Funds and technical assistance were also provided to a cross-section of engineering and medical colleges and specialized institutions like the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Perhaps the most significant aid the US provided was for the Green Revolution in the country, not to forget the food aid India received in the late 1960s that helped stave of starvation of millions.
Those who worry about India becoming a part of the US order of things and an American client state are patriotic Indians and are right to be concerned about the issue, but they are way off target. Indeed they reveal a tendency towards an ahistorical and linear analysis. For example, what the record actually shows is that despite the enormous help the US gave India in the 1960s, New Delhi did not support Washington’s war in Vietnam.
Indeed, there have been two occasions in the past when a weak India sought to become a client of the US, but was rebuffed. Just after Independence Pandit Nehru used Lt Gen B.M. Kaul, then military attaché in Washington, to seek out a US alliance. Pakistan, too, did the same, but both were turned down by the US. The second was in the wake of the disaster the Indian Army suffered in Bomdi La at the hands of the Chinese. A broken Nehru wrote to the US seeking outright military alliance. The embarrassed US was saved by the Chinese declaration of ceasefire, but at no stage does the record show that the US even contemplated anything but a limited arms transfer relationship with India.
In recent years, too, India has not hesitated to stand apart from the US on issues of vital concern to Washington. Despite terming the US as a “natural ally” Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee refused to support the US war in Iraq. Likewise, by walking out of the WTO deal earlier this year, India hardly behaved like a lackey of the US. Neither is it likely to do so whenever Indian interests clash with those of the US.

Strength

The opposition to the Iranian pipeline does not come from any alleged subservience to the Americans, but real issues that the critics are ignoring, primarily the security of the pipeline that must pass through regions where insurgency has taken root. In the past year, Balochi rebels disrupted gas supply to parts of Pakistan several times. There is also a problem with Iran’s nuclear activities. This has not been dreamed of by India, but is subject to four critical UN Security Council resolutions. India is not letting down Iran; Tehran is being ill-served by its own leadership.
Raising such issues and groundless fears do disservice to the country. Today’s India is a far stronger entity than it has ever been since independence. We have the ultimate doomsday weapon to ensure that no external force can overwhelm us. We are self-sufficient in food and have substantial foreign exchange reserves and a booming economy. More than that, we have the self-confidence of having survived 60 years in which we have overcome war, famine, near-bankruptcy and rebellions.
If geopolitics has brought the US to our door, we should welcome the event and see how our new relationship can benefit us, rather than trying to invoke the chimeras of the past. invoke the chimeras of the past.
This article was first published in Mail Today October 10, 2008

This is by far the best deal we could have got

The Indo-US nuclear deal, with its attendant ‘123 Agreement’, the India-specific International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards and Nuclear Suppliers Group waivers, need to be seen as building blocks of an extended process through which India is being brought into the mainstream of global politics.
Critics of the agreement have parsed every full-stop, comma and preposition to delineate its faults. They have sought to play up fears and put forward worst-case scenarios to undermine the agreement. In the coming years, as India intensifies its nuclear power programme in a big way, there will be many occasions when there will be differences of opinion on various clauses and agreements.
But let’s be clear that if the US has its interpretation of the 123 Agreement or the NSG waiver, so will India. More important, US generosity and Indian diplomatic tenacity has ensured that we have got as much of a level playing field as could have been provided for an outlaw country in the nuclear arena. From now onwards, its future will be shaped not by the fears of its critics but the practical use we make of the opportunities it provides.

Agreement

What does the agreement do? First, and most immediately, it will allow India to import natural uranium fuel to run our existing and planned nuclear power plants at full capacity. Second, it will allow us to resume collaboration with Canada to upgrade the CANDU design on which most Indian reactors are based. The Indian reactors are typically 220, or now 540 MW, while Canada has developed 740 MW reactors and has a 1,000 MW unit on the drawing board. Third, India can import modern units from France, Russia or the US, along with financing to set them up.
Fourth, Indian engineers and researchers will be permitted to work or collaborate with their counterparts in advanced nuclear nations without any special restrictions. Fifth, it provides India’s own industry such as Larsen & Toubro or the NPCIL the opportunity to become suppliers of key reactor items or even reactors. Sixth, it will enable India to acquire hitherto forbidden dual use technology which is critical for our ambitious space and high-tech industry programmes.
In the US, critics like Joseph Cirincione of the Center for American Progress and Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association have claimed that US-supplied uranium fuel would free up India’s limited uranium reserves for use in its nuclear weapons programme. The views of these professional non-proliferation lobbyists were echoed on Wednesday in the US Senate by Senators Byron Dorgan and Jeff Bingaman. This claim flies against the face of facts. If India was interested in fabricating nuclear weapons it could have done so in the 1960s, to start with. Even after its single test explosion in 1974, it did nothing.
There were two reasons why it was compelled to change course. First, New Delhi got information of the extent to which China was assisting Pakistan in making nuclear weapons. This was a shocking development, because no country in the world had knowingly transferred nuclear weapons technology to another — not the US to UK or France, nor Russia to China. As a recent issue of Physics Today has disclosed, not only did China transfer a weapons design in 1982, but it also tested a weapon that had been made in Pakistan in its own test site in 1990.
Second, following the end of the Cold War and the scare over Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions, the US began to move in a concerted way to lock up India’s options. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — which acknowledges nuclear weapons possession only by five big powers — was extended “in perpetuity”. India was not affected as we are not signatories. But the second step was more compelling — the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was approved. This would ensure that India and other threshold powers would never be able to test their weapons.
Though we categorically rejected the treaty, it decreed that unless forty threshold countries, which included India, Pakistan, Israel, also signed and ratified it, it could not come into force. The pressure for ratification became intense as all significant countries signed up, though some key countries like the US and China did not ratify it.

Mirror

These pressures pushed India to test. The first attempt by the P.V. Narasimha Rao government in December 1995 was foiled when the preparations were discovered, and the second came apart when Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s 13-day government collapsed in 1996. The tests were eventually carried out in May of 1998, a quarter century after the Pokhran I test.
This was hardly the behaviour of a power bent on making nuclear weapons. In any case even today if India did want to make lots of nuclear weapons, it could simply take its 14-odd power reactors out of the electricity grid and use them in a “low burn-up” mode to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.
There is a mirror-version of this critique in India. There are those who say that the agreement has taken away our right to test and that it will come in the way of constructing our nuclear arsenal. The test issue would be clear to anyone who has bothered to read the various documents associated with the deal — there is nothing in there which prevents India from testing. As for the weapons, the most knowledgeable authority — K. Santhanam of the DRDO who steered the programme to the tests at Pokhran II has made it clear in an article last year that India already has all the nuclear material it needs to construct a “credible minimum deterrent.” R. Chidambaram, the chief of the DAE at the time, too, stated last August that the tests met all the scientific community’s requirements for fabricating the arsenal that was needed.

Nuances

It doesn’t take much common sense to see that while we do have the sovereign right to test, there will be diplomatic consequences of the event. While countries like France and Russia may not react at all, the US will, though its position is not as absolute as it appears. On the face of it, the US is required to terminate cooperation and seek the return of its nuclear and non-nuclear material, technology or components.
Practically, however, Article 15(6) of the 123 Agreement would require the US party to compensate at “fair market value” of the equipment and pay for the costs of the removal. As Department of Atomic Energy Chairman, Anil Kakodkar has pointed out, “It is practically not possible [to remove reactor vaults, steam generators, coolant channels etc that make up a nuclear power station]. It is nuanced too by Article 14 which commits the US to consider the context of the termination. In other words, the US reaction would be graded if India resumed testing because of China or Pakistan
doing so.
There are bound to be geopolitical consequences of the agreement. The US has its reasons for what it has done, and India has its own for what it is doing. If there is congruence, well and good, if there isn’t well, the world will not end. But to assume that India is so beholden to the US that it will now be subservient to its interests is to be blind to contemporary reality in which India is the strongest economically and militarily that it has been in 60 years. As for the US, well it would be unfair to extrapolate from its present infirmities.
This article appeared in Mail Today October 3, 2008

India and the world will be reshaped by the nuclear deal

AT every stage opponents of the nuclear deal said it would not make it, be amended beyond recognition, or simply fail to pass muster. But two people — Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US President George W Bush — insisted on pushing the deal based on a joint statement they had made on July 18, 2005. With the passage of the Nuclear Suppliers Group waiver, the Indo-US nuclear deal is through and it is set to shake not just the world, but Indian politics as well.
First, no matter what critics say, the agreement confers on India a de facto status of a nuclear weapons state. We can never be de jure because the NPT condition is that we should have tested our nuclear weapons before 1967. There is a special irony here, because the NSG was set up, as its own document states, “following the explosion in 1974 of a nuclear device by a non-nuclear-weapon State….”
The second, and perhaps the most important outcome, is that this represents India's entry into the world order as a significant power (Let’s not use the loaded “Great Power”). As long as India remained in an “outsider” category we were not quite the same as the others, no matter what they said, or we did. We could boast of our bomb, our BPO prowess, economic growth, invites to the G-8 meetings and candidacy for the UN Security Council seat and so on. But we were firmly at a different level from, say, China. They could import powerful computers, uranium, sensitive machine tools, software and components for satellites that were denied to us. The NSG waiver now lifts the embargo on India acquiring nuclear technology and, in some ways more important, the so-called dual use technologies.
Third, the deal finally buries the policy of equating India and Pakistan. For decades India has chafed at the world's tendency to lock India into a bipolar South Asian framework with Pakistan. Now, decisively, the rules have been changed for India, and pointedly not for Pakistan.
Fourth, while one aspect of this entry — our nuclear tests of 1998 — is tantamount to a gate-crash, it is by and large a friendly entry into the nuclear club. The opposition of Austria, Ireland, New Zealand — countries with no nuclear materials or technology but powerful anti-nuclear electorates — is history. Of greater significance is that countries as diverse as Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Japan, South Africa, Germany, France, Turkey joined the US in welcoming India into the club.
Fifth, the deal represents politics as being quintessentially the art of the possible. Both India and its interlocutors would have liked much more from each other, but chose pragmatically to be satisfied with a mutually beneficial compromise.

United States

The United States has played a key role. No other country, or a group of them, could have done what it did — get the 45-member NSG to stand its rules on its head. There is no conspiracy here. Geopolitically and economically, India is a good bet on which the US has invested in for decades, even when its main stakes were on Pakistan. US assistance in the 1960s enabled India's educational base which paid off in the 1990s in the form of the BPO business that has helped India to emerge as an IT powerhouse. For their part, Indians have voted for good relations with the US with their feet — migrating there in unprecedented numbers. In the process, the two countries have developed cross-stakes in each other.
But the US commitment is also driven by the rise of China. While the US and China have far deeper economic links with each other than the US and India have, the Americans remain deeply suspicious of Beijing, if only because of China’s opaque and authoritarian political system. But this should not be seen in old-fashioned balance of power terms where the combine is aimed at weakening China. The aim of America’s India policy is to hedge against things going wrong there, and in the process sending a signal to Beijing that the US is not entirely without options in the Asian region.

Left

How do I argue that this deal also marks a major shift in India's domestic politics? The Congress has had a historical love affair with the Left. In the 1930s the socialists and communists functioned as a ginger group known as the Congress Socialist Party. Later the CPI officially supported Indira Gandhi’s Left-leaning government. Though the CPI(M)’s politics was marked by anti-Congressism between 1970 and 1990, the party began to reluctantly see the Congress as the only bulwark against the BJP.
As the Third Front failed to jell and the Congress strength ebbed, the party became more domineering with the help of Left-leaning Congressmen like Arjun Singh within the Congress. As of 2004, they became positively obstreperous on a number of issues. For a while the Congress played on, mainly because Sonia Gandhi felt a special obligation to the Communists for backing her in the “foreign origin” controversy raised by the BJP.
But in the end, Sonia had to look after her party and government which was being undermined by the Left’s unrelenting hostility to the goals of her Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Finally, however, the issue was settled by Prakash Karat and Co overreaching themselves and forcing the Congress Party to break with the Left. A major role was played in this by Rahul Gandhi who has emerged as one of the strongest backers of the deal within the party and who is seeking to redefine the party’s post-Indira ideology. This process was begun by Rajiv Gandhi, but was short-circuited by his assassination.
The thralldom of the Left has acted as a brake on India’s march towards economic reform and growth. With an uncompromising leader like Karat in control, the chances of a rapprochement between the Left and the Congress is dim. This is all for the good for it compels the latter to swim in the deep end of the pool by itself and to build up a party that does not rely on the problematic support of the Left.

Politics

For a variety of reasons, none of them honourable, our Left and the BJP remain determined to oppose the nuclear deal. They have taken recourse to scare-mongering to persuade the public of their point of view. The BJP claims we will not have the right to test, as though such a right could have been incorporated in a civil nuclear agreement, leave alone be granted by the NSG.
The Left claims that India has sold out to the American camp; well, they have been saying this since Independence. Recollect, when India became free in 1947, B.T. Ranadive, one of Karat’s heroes, claimed that freedom was a sham and Jawaharlal and the Congress were just lackeys of the imperialists. They were wrong then, they are wrong now.
The set of agreements that comprise the Indo-US nuclear deal are not static documents tantamount to the Scripture. They are living products of international politics and, in this sense, will mutate and reshape themselves in the future, depending on the use or misuse they are put to. As documents, they are in themselves worth only their weight of the paper they are written on, unless there is a congruence of interests, and mutuality of benefit, among the signatories — India, US, the IAEA, and the constituents of the NSG.
This appeared in Mail Today September 10, 08

Victory at NSG

At every stage opponents of the nuclear deal said it would not make it, be amended beyond recognition or simply fail to pass muster. But two people-- Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President George W Bush-- insisted that a deal based on a joint statement they had made on July 18, 2005 would emerge.

It has, and it is set to shake not just the world, but Indian politics as well. Let me make one thing clear-- the agreement now confers on India a de facto status of a nuclear weapons state. We can never be de jure because the NPT condition is that we should have tested before 1967. Amending this, which seems to be what the BJP claims it wants to do, would require the strong support of over 120 countries in the world, a task that can be well deemed impossible. The point is, is it worth it ?

The second thing the deal does is to finally bury the policy of equating India and Pakistan in the South Asian region. For decades India has chafed at the world's tendency to adopt an equidistant approach towards the two South Asian neighbours. Now, decisively, the game has changed.

The third, and perhaps the most important outcome, is that this represents India's entry into the world order as a significant power. (I won't use loaded terms like "Great Power" .) As long as the nuclear embargoes remained on us, we were not quite the same as the others. We could boast of our bomb, our BPO prowess, our economic growth, our invites to the G-8 meetings and so on. But we were still at a level different from, let us say, China. They could import powerful computers, uranium, sensitive machine tools and components for satellites that were denied to us. Now, all these possibilities will open up.

The fourth point is that while some aspects of this entry (India's nuclear tests of 1998) are tantamount to a gate-crash, it is a friendly welcome. The opposition of Austria, Ireland, New Zealand is history. What is more significant is that countries ranging from Russia, Brazil, Japan, South Africa, Germany, France, joined the US in welcoming India into the nuclear club. They have not done this because they love India, but because they recognise the role India has played in global politics till now, and the one it will play in the future is benign and will be beneficial to them individually.

The key role in this has been played by the United States. We need to understand why. There is nothing conspiratorial about it. India is good bet. In its own way the US has invested in us for decades, even when its main bets were on Pakistan. It was US assistance of the 1960s that enabled India's educational base which paid off in the 1990s. Why it is so important for the deal to go through now is that President George W Bush has invested as much political capital on this deal as he has on Iraq. That is a losing investment, but India will pay of.

Let us be very clear. No other country could have delivered the NSG to India other than the US. At the end of the day it was the US which had to kick the collective butts of the Irish, Austrians and the Norweigians. These rich, white, countries have zero dependence on nuclear power and are not nuclear exporters, and were yet trying to play spoiler. In some ways this is an object lesson in power politics. These countries were trying to punch far above their weight and they were clobbered.

In India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh deserves the credit for single-handedly steering the complex agreement. For long stretches he was alone and had to face the lonliness of the long-distance runner. But his frail frame hides an iron will which has been manifest not just on this deal, but in India's efforts to restructure its economy in the 1990s. But Manmohan Singh's policies were not sui generis. He didn't dream them up. They represent the culmination of a strategic direction that was set by Indira Gandhi in 1980. She, if you recollect, is the one who put us on the path of making nuclear weapons as well.

We should also not forget the role played by Mohammed El Baradei, the head of the IAEA. His positive attitude towards the deal and his personal credibility as the chief of the anti-proliferation watch-dog, went a long way in shoring up support for India.

The last point I would like to make for now is that this deal also marks a major shift in India's domestic politics. Since the mid-1950s, the Congress party has had a left wing. This has comprised of crypto communists and real communists. It has been based on the party's belief that socialism is somehow the solution to India's ills.
By forcing the Congress to take a call on the deal, Prakash Karat and co have actually forced the Congress party to take a look at itself. The clarity with which Sonia, and more important, Rahul Gandhi have supported the deal indicates that the Congress is at last in the process of defining its post-Indiria ideology. This process was begun by Rajiv Gandhi, but was short-circuited by his assassination.

FAQ on Nuclear Deal

The Indo-US nuclear deal comprises of two segments—the technical and the political. Linking the two is a complex web of agreements with implicit and explicit conditions and statements. It is politics that has enabled the technical—because the US wants to befriend India, it has taken the decision to take the lead to lift the embargo on civil nuclear trade that has been imposed on India by the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

Technical:
Contrary to some views, the technical is not unimportant. Government figures show that the demand for electricity would increase ten-fold by 2050. After taking into account all available generation options, the country would still be left with a power shortage of 400 giga watts (one giga watt is equal to one billion watts). Importing uranium fuel and reactors will help ease this shortage.

Q. Is there a shortage of natural uranium in the country ?

A. According to a news report, speaking in Hyderabad on June 8, Anil Kakodkar, Chairman, Atomic Energy Commission observed that there was a huge shortage in the supply of uranium, although the country was on the road to increasing production. Owing to this shortage, the National Power Corporation of India Limited operated at only 50 per cent capacity utilisation. The government agreed to sanction four more units of 700 MW each to NPCIL but they would be constructed only after fuel linkages were established.

Political:

Q. What is this latest revelation in the US ?

A. The State Department has, in a letter to a US Congressman said that under Article XIV of the Indo-US 123 Agreement, the US “has the right to cease all nuclear cooperation with India immediately.” And that the fuel supply assurances demanded by New Delhi "are not, however, meant to insulate India against the consequences of a nuclear explosive test or a violation of nonproliferation commitments."

Q. Didn’t the PM say last August in Parliament that “ The agreement does not in any way affect India's right to undertake future nuclear tests, if it is necessary."

A. Yes, he did. But note the wording of the US letter, it says that the US has the right to cease cooperation, it does not say that India does not have the right to test.

Q. Are Indian officials right when they claim that the July 18, 2005 statement, the 123 Agreement or the IAEA safeguards agreement do not explicitly ban further nuclear tests by India ?

A. Yes they are. But there is a very clear implicit condition-- should India resume nuclear testing again, it will have to pay the price.

Q. How are these conditions implicit ?

A. The Hyde Act has waived the US ban on civil nuclear trade between the US and countries like India which have not signed the NPT, and yet conducted nuclear tests. But this waiver is retroactive going back from July 18, 2005 and covers our tests of 1998 and 1974. Any new test will lead to a termination of the waiver and compel the US to terminate the 123 Agreement.

Q. What is India’s view of the Hyde Act?

A. India says this is a legislation that binds the US Administration, not India. India is bound by the bilateral 123 Agreement that was worked out last year.In international law, an international agreement trumps domestic legislation. Were it not so, countries would undermine international commitments by passing domestic legislation. Actually the US did this to India in the case of Tarapur, and that is why India has gone out of its way to seek assurances of fuel supply from the US.

Q. So was the PM bluffing us when he said we had the right to test ?

A. Not quite, he was correct in the statement, but he did not lay it all out by saying “ My fellow countrymen, we have the right to conduct further nuclear tests, but the Indo-US nuclear cooperation agreement could be jeopardized in case we did so.”

Q. Why do you say only “jeopardized”, and not that it would be terminated ?

A. Because there is some clever drafting that provides a loophole of sorts which says that before the agreement is terminated, both sides will consider the circumstances and consult on why the party is seeking a termination. Though either of the parties may still terminate the agreement if they are not satisfied, they have agreed “to consider carefully the circumstances that may lead to termination… [and] take into account whether the circumstances that may lead to termination or cessation resulted from a party’s serious concern about a changed security environment or as a response to similar actions by other States which could impact national security.”

Q. Is the BJP making too much of the testing issue ?

A. It is, because Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee told the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September 1998 “after concluding this limited testing program, India announced a voluntary moratorium on further underground nuclear test explosions. We conveyed our willingness to move towards a de jure formalization of this obligation. In announcing a moratorium, India has already accepted the basic obligation of the CTBT.”
In other words, India was ready to forgo any further nuclear tests.

Q. Does the US have an agenda in pushing the nuclear deal?

A. Of course it does. As they say, there is no free lunch. But that’s not quite the same thing as accepting that India will slavishly serve that agenda. What it will do is to utilize the opportunity to move its own agenda forward.
India has its own agenda and sees in the present global conjuncture an opportunity to strengthen its own position relative to the major powers.
In fact, being stronger than it has ever been, both economically and militarily (India is a nuke power, remember ?) it is in a far better position to resist unseemly pressure on issues. On the other hand, there is no reason why we should not cooperate with the US and other world powers, if there is a mutuality of interests. Sitting out the dance as a wall-flower is certainly not a good option for India.

Q. So why have the two countries taken such a round-about way of dealing with the issue ?

A. We come back to politics. For four years, the Congress formed a coalition with the Left and so did not want to spell out the price India would have to pay for violating the agreement. At the same time, it had to deal with the BJP which muscularly asserted India’s right to test.
At the same time, in the US, the Administration had to walk the fine line of satisfying existing US law in relation to countries like India, Pakistan and Israel, who are outlaws of the world nuclear system because they have not signed the NPT and possess nuclear weapons.

They had, in the words of Nick Burns, the former US official who negotiated the 123 Agreement, to “square the circle.” As you know squaring the circle is not really possible, you have to create an illusion of sorts to achieve that feat.

Running aground at the NSG

My simple view on the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the Indo-US nuclear agreement: First, the entire agreement is premised on the NSG community accepting that India is a de facto, not de jure nuclear weapons state. In other words 1) India has not and will not sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and 2) that it has demonstrated that it possesses nuclear weapons and intends to retain them. The challenge for the NSG is to skirt these two issues in a manner that enables nuclear trade with India and also ensures that nothing in the process goes against their non-proliferation commitments. As of now they seem unable to do so.
You may say that India is demanding to have its cake and eat it too. Possibly, but that is what the so-called Nuclear Weapons States under the NPT do. India has stayed out of the NPT and has broken no international agreement in testing or possessing nuclear weapons. The 123 Agreement between India and the US has successfully dealt with the issue, as has the India-specific IAEA agreement by the simple device of working on the agreement in the narrow sense—dealing with nuclear trade issues rather than the larger question of nuclear weapons possession by India.
The NSG purists however want to get in through the backdoor what was kept out of the front.
For a more detailed analysis, you must see Siddharth Varadajan in The Hindu

TIME FOR A CHANGE

India’s old constitutional system has broken down and this is poisoning the governance of the country



An Israeli defence scientist, now a member of the country’s Parliament, once told me in another context, that it is important to learn to recognise organisations that have gone beyond the capability of being reformed; they malfunction to the point where the only option is to dismantle, and then reconstitute them. The Union of India as created by the Constitution of 1950 seems to have reached what is called in Army terminology “beyond economical repair,” in other words, it is kaput.
The events of the past week may appear disparate, but they are all linked to the collapse of our political and administrative system and show that the old structure of governance is unable to cope with the demands of the era. The problem is systemic, and cannot be handled by fixing one or the other element of it.
Almost every analysis of the failure of the state to tackle terrorism comes up with the conclusion that the Union government and the States are unable to cooperate in this fight. Neither are our reformed intelligence agencies which suffer from poor leadership anyway. Some say this requires the creation of a federal intelligence agency, others claim that strong anti-terrorist legislation is the answer.
On the other hand critics point out that both would be misused just as POTA, TADA and the CBI have been. Even more fundamental is how in the present system political parties use caste and creed for mobilisation and do not hesitate to demonise other groups for electoral gain.

Defunct

The faultlines are not only visible in the case of terrorism. They were visible also in the trust debate and its outcome. Over the years, the experience of “Aya Rams and Gaya Rams” led Parliament to pass stringent anti-defection measures to prevent parties from opportunistically splintering. Yet, in a crucial vote the second largest party in the country suffered an attrition of as many as 9 MPs. Cracks appeared in other parties as well.# The issue that has emerged is not just defection, devoid of anything called ideological principle, but a situation where our already fractured party system is held hostage by parties of one or three or six individuals, which destabilises the entire governmental system.
An associated issue is the subject of the debate itself — the Indo-US nuclear deal. Ever since it sharpened its opposition to the deal, the Left had been arguing that a Parliamentary majority was against the deal. Some other parties wanted Parliament to vote on the deal itself. Yet, in the Parliamentary system, there is no provision for approval or disapproval of such international agreements.
The Indo-US deal was discussed threadbare at almost every stage since the July 2005 agreement between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President George W Bush, but it was never voted on since that was not required. The idea of voting on an international issue really comes from the Presidential form of government like that in the US.
In the Parliamentary system, the legislature is supreme and the government formed by the leading party in the lower house is presumed to act on behalf of Parliament as long as it is able to maintain its majority on the floor of the house. India needed no Parliamentary approval to enter the WTO, or to agree to the South Asian Free Trade Agreement. In the future, too, should the government wish to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, or even the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it would not need the specific approval of the Lok Sabha. Associated with this debate, and as a subtext to it as it were, was the legitimacy of Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister. No one questions the legality of his position. What was in question was his authority, since it is known that he is not the true leader of the legislature party in the Lower House; that position is held by Sonia Gandhi. In fact, the Prime Minister is not even a member of that house. He is an indirectly elected member of the Rajya Sabha. #

Renewal

In my view, we need to seriously think about reconstituting the Republic on the lines of a presidential system. Our 1947 unitary-federal Constitution was created by a group of people who were most comfortable with the Westminster system which had been partially introduced in the country through the 1919 and the 1935 Government of India Acts. Sixty years later, the writing is as clear on the wall as it can be — the system is not working.
A system with term limits for the chief executive, and a scheme of countervailing powers for Parliament, Judiciary and the States has many advantages that will help our country to overcome its present stasis: First, the issue of a strong or weak Prime Minister will be settled by having him be directly elected by the entire voting population of the country. Since each vote from every part of the country and its many communities would count, it would go a long way in doing away with exclusionary politics of the BJP type.
The executive president would choose his own Cabinet which would be responsible to him or her, rather than Parliament. Second, the executive would be empowered to act on “national” issues, relating to security and the economic well-being of the country. Third, Parliament would be given the right to vote on the appointment of the Cabinet, approve international agreements, or amend and block legislation presented by the executive.
Fourth, the Upper House, which is currently neither here nor there, would need to be reconstituted to provide it equal or near equal representation for all the states of the federation. Its members would be empowered by being directly elected in their respective states. In this way small states could have some influence in the large federation. At present if Mizoram or Nagaland have a view on relations with Myanmar, which they border, they have no way of influencing policy in South Block.
By having an upper house directly elected by the entire populace of a state, we would prevent the present tendency towards political fragmentation that has emerged from the operation of a Parliamentary system upon the Indian social structure.

Authority

As for terrorism or other national issues, a Prime Minister, directly elected by the people will have far more moral and real authority than one who is elected by a single Lok Sabha constituency, or worse, indirectly into the Rajya Sabha. Yet, at present he has unchecked powers to take India in any direction he chooses, our only remedy being to act against him by voting his government out in Parliament or through a general election. A presidential system that strengthens the PM and Parliament, will inevitably also empower the people.
The idea of switching to a presidential system is not an original one. It has done the rounds earlier but few have bothered to pay it any attention, in part because they suspected the motives of one of its proponents, L.K. Advani. Given the vested interests in the present system, I am sure that a change will only occur when the crisis deepens. All I can do is point to the fact that the present system is not working and we stand on the brink of disaster.
This was published in Mail Today July 30, 2008

Goodbye, and good riddance

I am sure you have heard this before: In Chinese, the term for “crisis” is a compound of “opportunity” and “danger”. The United Progressive Alliance government is in the midst of a crisis and it is not surprising that it confronts both danger and opportunity. What the former is has been spelt out ad nauseum by Communist Party of India (Marxist) General Secretary Prakash Karat, most recently after the Politburo meeting on Sunday — take one more step on the Indo-US nuclear deal and we will blow your government out of the water.
Not many have thought of the opportunity that the threat provides for the Congress party to take the much needed and long delayed step of redefining its politics and policies to align itself with today's realities — both economic and political. In other words, regaining its identity as India's pre-eminent political party, based on its programmes and principles, derived from its own history, instead of having to be in the awkward situation of being the dog which is wagged by the tail.


Ever since Jawaharlal Nehru passed away, the party has struggled for its soul. It has been assailed by the temptations of the Left and of the Right, and never quite regained its equipoise. There was a brief moment when, under Rajiv Gandhi the party began to move in that direction. The young prime minister adopted a pragmatic, forward looking approach that would have brought liberalisation a decade before it came. But he was brought down by a combination of scandals and bad karma.
Pandit Nehru had no problem with the Communists. His own history and understanding of the party went back to its very founding. He had witnessed the efforts of the Communists to penetrate the Congress and take over its agenda under the guise of the Congress Socialist Party faction within the party. He had seen how Communists had consolidated themselves in India by supporting the British during World War II, opposing the Quit India Movement and expanding their base at the expense of the Congress whose leaders were in jail.

Leaders

So, after Independence, his approach was to pick and choose what he wanted. He adapted central planning to Indian circumstances — a private sector developing on the foundations of a centrally planned infrastructure. Where the Communists would have wanted alignment, his foreign policy, stubbornly sought non-alignment. It remained independent in spite of the West's co-option of Pakistan as a military ally. Panditji did not hesitate to fight the Communists as he did militarily in Telengana, and through democratic means in Kerala in 1957.
The problem was Indira Gandhi. In a bid to distance herself from the Congress old guard, she hocked the soul of the party to the Communists, of the CPI variety. They encouraged her to go back on solemn assurances to the former royalty and deny them privy purses, nationalise banks and other businesses. They were the most vociferous supporters of the Emergency that took away the common liberties of the people and took the opportunity to place party members and fellow travelers in various government bodies and educational institutions.
Indira paid back the debt by standing on the wrong side of history and refusing to openly condemn the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. But thereafter she considered the debt paid and moved back to the political centre by beginning a process of rapprochement with the United States. The present confused attitude of the Congress party towards the Communists has come after the prime ministership of P.V. Narasimha Rao, who was a seasoned politician and knew what Communist politics was all about from Andhra Pradesh. Sonia Gandhi, on the other hand, has had little ground experience in the politics of the country. As a person who values loyalty, what she remembered, when the Indo-US nuclear crisis first began to loom last August, was that the Communists had unreservedly backed her on the most important issue of her political life — the BJP's attempt to raise the issue of her foreign origin. In refusing to precipitate the break last October, she has made what could be a major political blunder.
She does not realise that loyalty and ideological consistency are highly over-rated virtues in Indian politics. What really matters is opportunism. Take the Communists — they have not hesitated to ally themselves to fundamentalists like Abdul Naseer Mahdani to break the Indian Union Muslim League’s hold in north Kerala. Such opportunism has a old history in Leninist parties. World War II was a war of imperialist redivision till June 22, 1941, thereafter it became the People’s war.

Opportunists

Or, consider the DMK. It was part of the national coalition with the BJP for six long years. Yet two weeks ago we heard Mr. Karunanidhi declaiming on the importance of the UPA to stand with the Left so as to defend secularism. What the present situation then offers is a chance for the Congress to dump allies like the DMK and “friends” like the Communists.
The DMK should be shed because, in baldly opportunistic terms, Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK is almost certainly likely to sweep the coming elections. There are no ideological differences between the two, so the choice is simple — try and hook the winner.
Dumping the Left is important for the long-term future of the party. With the Left’s stranglehold, the Congress will be on permanent life-support. If it must flourish, it needs to catch up with what was wrought in 1991. There is need to achieve complete privatisation of the public sector, trade liberalisation and financial deregulation and reform of labour laws. Politically, India needs to get involved in the new and evolving Asian security architecture that connects democratic Japan, Australia, Asean and the United States.

Opponents

The Communists’ stand on the nuclear deal reflects less of its Luddite tendencies and more of its refusal to recognise the geopolitical realities of the post-Soviet world. The old CPI is of little consequence. Mr. Bardhan bellowing “bhar mein jayey stock market” (the hell with the stock market) sums up his world which denies reality for the sake of alleged ideological purity. All it does is to make for good bytes on TV, but it signifies little otherwise. The CPI(M)’s vigour comes from a general secretary who should have been in command of the party in 1980. In 2008, he is an anachronism. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of the Chinese economy, orthodox Marxism-Leninism has lost whatever rationale it had. It is not surprising that the CPI(M) has lost whatever vitality it had. Its programme refuses to account for the enormous changes that have taken place in the world and within India. This leads to its mulish stand on fighting US imperialism at a time when the US is finally declining, or to, Canute-like, resist economic reform that will make India a better market-based economy.
The Congress party's reassertion of its own political identity will set the basis for its clash with the BJP. Given its broad-based social and economic programmes and its secular politics, the field is stacked in the Congress’ favour, no matter what the result of the next election is. But to achieve its destiny, the party needs to transform this crisis into a historic opportunity. To this end, to use another Chinese saying, it must seize this hour, this day.
This article first appeared in Mail Today July 2, 2008

Why is the CPI(M) cutting its nose to spite the country's face ?

On May 23, and on June 21, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) issued statements on the nuclear deal. The burden of the two notes was roughly similar — questioning the government’s statements and figures on the energy issue and claiming that these were being fudged, or slanted, to promote the Indo-US nuclear deal.
The May note accused the government of negligence resulting in a temporary shortage of uranium in the country. And the second claimed that the government had launched a “massive disinformation campaign” that nuclear energy was not only a solution to the shortage of electricity in the country, but also the oil price rise. The June statement then went on to claim that the best way to tackling the problem would be to build coal-fired plants, and while indigenous technology based nuclear energy could be used in the future, it would only meet 8 per cent of our electricity demand. Another leading statement claimed that our energy security could be better served by the Iran gas pipeline. The central point of the notes, however, was that the real intention of government policy was to promote India-US strategic ties.
I see nothing sinister in developing India-US ties. If the country needs strategic ties, I would rather have them with the world’s dominant power than any wannabe. The US has, in the past, helped us some and harmed us some, and there is every indication they mean well in the future, no doubt for their own reasons. On the other hand China, which the CPI(M) looks to as an ideal, has not helped us any, harmed us more, and their future attitude towards India remains a big question mark.

Figures

I don’t know where the CPI(M) has got its figures from. The ones I am offering comes from a 2007 Planning Commission Report of the Expert Committee on Integrated Energy Policy which was chaired by Kirit Parikh. Essentially what it says is that to maintain an 8 per cent rate of growth, as well as our commitments, moral if not legal, to a regime demanding the least possible carbon emissions, we would require a fuel mix that would annually comprise 350 million tonnes of oil equivalent (Mtoe), 150 Mtoe of natural gas, 632 Mtoe of coal, 35 of hydro power, 98 of nuclear, 87 of renewables of wind, 185 of non-commercials like fuel wood.
But while coal and oil will form the dominant fuels in any mix, the addition of nuclear and other fuels will make the crucial difference in the sheer availability of power, as well as our carbon footprint. India would, in this scenario, which is the greenest among those offered, have carbon dioxide emissions of some 3.9 billion tonnes in 2030(compared with the 5.5 billion tonnes for the US today).
It is possible, for example to forgo the nuclear in this mix, but the balance would have to be made up with oil, natural gas or coal, of which two are getting more expensive by the day, and there are quality problems with the third. The Parikh committee had calculated that if we forgo the nuclear and natural gas import option and go exclusively for coal, then, because of the poor quality of our coal, the requirement would increase from 415 million tonnes in 2004-5 to 2,500 million tonnes in 2031-2. Since the quality of Indian coal is deteriorating steadily, the actual requirement could be nearly 3,000 million tonnes. The massive increase in coal requirement could actually compel us to import huge quantities of coal. “This,” the committee noted dryly, “would actually increase our energy dependency on imports even more than today.” Think also of the logistics of storing and transporting it all over the country.
In the May statement, the CPI(M) had criticised the government for misleading the country about uranium shortages. The facts are that Indian uranium is of extremely poor quality. Efforts to open mines in Kadapa district in Andhra Pradesh and in Meghalaya are being held up by public protest. The CPI(M) of all parties should know that land acquisition for industrial projects has become a major issue in the country. But the real issue is not availability but the need to hedge against technological obstacles that may appear in the way of our ambitious three-stage nuclear programme which has not yet reached stage two and is only scheduled to reach its pinnacle by 2030 and beyond.
Incidentally, the Parikh committee’s nuclear scenario of 63,000 MW by 2030 is based on the import of 6000 MW of light water reactors because it was written before the Indo-US nuclear deal was signed. The CPI(M) statement’s sneering reference to having only 8 per cent of our energy demand met through nuclear energy in the future can have an alternate track if reactors and capital could be freely imported. It is only through a conscious policy begun in the 1970s does France today use nuclear energy to produce 79 per cent of its electricity, and most of this is through imported uranium.
Actually India’s only hope for some kind of self-sufficiency lies in being able to bridge the current shortage of uranium, stabilise its fast breeder programme and go on to the advanced thorium reactor phase. The payoff would come in the post 2050 period when it could produce 275,000 MW of electricity.

Facts

Proposing that India achieves energy security through the Iran gas pipeline is also intriguing. I am not against the pipeline deal because I think that India needs all the energy it can get, from whatever source it can locate. The problem with pipelines, not just from Iran, is that they point only in one direction. That is, the gas can only flow in one channel from the source to the destination. In the event of a disruption, it leaves industries and users downstream high and dry. The Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline has to traverse through Iranian and Pakistani Balochistan. Google and find out how many times the gas supplies between Pakistan’s Balochi gas fields and the rest of the country have been disrupted by Baloch nationalists in the past year. Both parts of Balochistan are disturbed areas and relying on a smooth gas flow through the region before peace has been restored there is being optimistic, to say the least. Ties between India and Pakistan are also better, but things are not quite normal. And expectations that Iran will somehow behave differently from other rich oil and gas producers can only be termed naive.

Independence

The CPI(M) and others involved in the current debate need to focus on the larger issue of the country’s energy needs. Here is a perspective: China’s current annual consumption of energy is 1100-1200 Mtoe (Parikh Committee draft report figures), the USA is 2400-2500. India consumes just 327 Mtoe. Even if we use the most optimistic coal-based scenario, we would just about consume, in 2030, what China consumes today. The fact staring us in the face is that there can never be energy independence for a country that is short of almost every energy source. No matter how you game it, we will be dependent for oil and natural gas on the outside world, and they will make up between 35 (optimistic) to 42 (pessimistic) percent of our energy mix in 2030.
The CPI(M) seems to have no problem with India depending on Iran and the OPEC cartel, which has allowed prices to rise from $60 to $130 in less than a year. They do seem to be getting worked up about depending on the Nuclear Suppliers Group cartel whose membership comprises not just of the US and its allies, but Brazil, South Africa, France, China and Russia.
Actually the only way we can have energy independence is to go back to Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of an India comprising of independent village communities. The alternative is a policy of promoting energy efficiency and conservation, and to spread our risks. These issues don’t move the CPI(M). In their blinkered geopolitical vision, opposing the US is more important than a prudent effort to secure the country’s energy future.
This appeared in Mail Today June 24, 2008

Half-baked ideas lead to national indigestion

In recent weeks the government of India observed two anniversaries in two different ways. The tenth birthday of the Pokhran II nuclear weapons tests was observed by ignoring it. On the other hand, the twentieth anniversary of Rajiv Gandhi’s plan to promote complete nuclear disarmament was celebrated by an international seminar, with the Prime Minister, the External Affairs Minister, and the Minister of Panchayati Raj, holding forth on the virtues of nuclear disarmament and pressing its case anew. You could interpret this in two ways. The simplest would be to say that New Delhi acted with its traditional hypocrisy — accumulating nuclear weapons and missiles, even while preaching the virtues of disarmament.
My interpretation is different. Like most people I can live with hypocrisy, a commonly visible trait in individuals and institutions. But I think that the government’s stand on the nuclear issue is characteristic of our establishment’s confusion. They are confused on caste, class, economic policy, and not surprisingly nuclear strategy. Being confused is a very human, and even endearing, trait in individuals, but when applied to governments it can be dangerous and destructive.

Contradiction

Confusion here is not meant in the dictionary sense of being bewildered, but of being mentally caught between two stools. India has had a history of confused and confusing leaders. P.V. Narasimha Rao ushered in market reforms claiming that they were merely an extension of that great socialist Jawaharlal Nehru’s policies. That same kind of sophistry did not work in the case of the Babri Masjid which came crashing down, in no small measure a result of confusion of policy being articulated from New Delhi. V.P. Singh was the only prime minister who owned up to the fact that his job was to confuse people. He called it managing contradictions, but the actual aim was to confound everyone and come out winner. He tried it with the Mandal quota issue and has bewildered the Indian polity ever since.
So today we have a Prime Minister and an External Affairs Minister who hold forth passionately on the need to rid the world of nuclear weapons, forgetting no doubt, that they are also members of the Political Council of the Nuclear Command Authority, which has the sole right to order devastating nuclear strikes against our adversaries.
India’s nuclear policy has been dangerous because of its ambivalence, not, as is often assumed, its ambiguity, which is a legitimate tactic in itself. Between the 1960s and 1980s, India ran with the hares and hunted with the hounds. It was a leader of the disarmament camp, participating in each and every call for the abolition of nuclear weapons. At the same time it built up a nuclear estate which was also involved in making nuclear weapons. In the 1980s and 1990s, a dangerously unstable situation developed as India dithered on crossing the threshold, while Pakistan raced to do so.
While clarity of thought and deed is a virtue everywhere, it is a vital necessity in the world of the military. Unfortunately, India has specialised in giving wrong signals and promoting insecurity. In 1947, following official knowledge that Pakistan had used its forces to fight in Jammu & Kashmir, India still avoided widening the war. The price was paid by the 1965 Operation Gibraltar when Pakistan, misreading signals, launched an attack on Kashmir under the fond belief that India would confine the war to the state. Arguably wrong signals, which, in this case, meant an over-defensive posture, led to the Kargil adventure as well.
Similar confusing signals have been sent out by tests, earlier of missiles, currently of anti-ballistic missile systems. Does India believe in nuclear deterrence, or does it not? I have a feeling that the political establishment is itself not clear on this, yet it is allowing the DRDO to build anti-missile systems that could undermine deterrence and destabilise the nuclear equations in South Asia.
Our latest signal is the allegedly integrated cell for space warfare. A cell is neither here nor there. As of now there are no signs that India intends to do anything about the increasing use of space for military purposes. Yet when its defence minister chooses to talk about it, he comes with a whimper, rather than a bang.

Identity

Having crossed the threshold, India has dithered on deployment of nuclear weapons. Our casual approach to the issue was apparent when our hurried no-first-use pledge developed feet of clay. In 2002 when the Indian army threatened to march into Pakistan in the wake of the terrorist attack on Parliament on December 13, 2001, there was sudden realisation that perhaps the pledge did not cover Indian troops who were on Pakistani soil. So after the crisis was over in January 2003, the government issued a clarification declaring that a nuclear attack on Indian forces “anywhere” could invite nuclear retaliation from us. For good measure, and characteristically, they also threw in the clause that said chemical and biological weapons attacks would merit nuclear retaliation as well, though both Pakistan and China, like India, have given guarantees under the Chemical Weapons Convention not to use chemical weapons under any circumstances.
The latest and somewhat pathetic manifestation of the Indian approach is over an arsenal that barely exists in a ready-to-use form. Some want the Indian right to test written into the Indo-US nuclear deal. Others want better and improved thermonuclear weapons, and say India should not give any commitment as to what should be the size of the Indian arsenal because, as they claim, “you never know what may happen in the future.” This wonderfully vague claim goes against the grain of contemporary developments where nuclear weapons states are trying to reduce their arsenals. One way of doing this is to declare an upper limit. The British have said that they have around 200 nuclear weapons, the French have most recently officially declared their number to be less than 300. Estimates for the Chinese and the Israeli arsenals are the same. But for the Indian chicken hawks the sky is the limit because that frees you from thinking and acting precisely on our nuclear posture.
Just why we are like that, is an answer that historians or maybe social psychologists can provide. My own pop-psychology take on this is that India is an incomplete nation. That is why you hear little about what it means to be in India and an Indian from a Karunanidhi, a Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, or Lalu Yadav, Mayawati and, increasingly, Narendra Modi. Most Indians have other identities that come before their sense of Indianness. Other nations, too share this phenomenon of citizens with multiple identities, but their national identity has primacy. As of now India has yet to decide politically whether it is a federation or a confederation. In these circumstances all national concepts are tentative, confused, as is thinking about national security.


Reconciliation

There are parties which try to get us think in a national manner, but look at them: The RSS/BJP’s sense of Indianness is not just medieval, it is positively antediluvian, based on medieval mythological texts, or early 20th century European political ideas. As for the Congress, the party of modernisation is now in the vice-like grip of a declining medieval dynasty. For the Left, the only nationalism that matters is that of China. So we lack a sharp sense of nationhood and what is required to foster and protect it.
At a social function at the seminar on disarmament I was asked by some participants from abroad as to what was the significance of India hosting this conference and the impressive speeches of Manmohan Singh, Pranab Mukherjee and Mani Shankar Aiyar. At the end of the day I am not sure whether we are for armament or disarmament. All I know is that we are doing neither.
This recalls a King Crimson song from the 1960s:

Confusion will be my epitaph.
As I crawl a cracked and broken path.
If we make it we can all sit back
And laugh
But I fear, tomorrow I’ll be crying
Yes I fear, tomorrow I’ll be crying

This article first appeared in Mail Today June 12, 2008

A Country Betrayed by its Leaders

Their actions on the nuclear deal and oil prices undermine the future of the nation

WHEN I turned on the TV to listen to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s address to the nation on Wednesday evening, there was a brief flicker of expectation —perhaps he would actually use the occasion to say that the government had decided to go ahead with the Indo- US nuclear deal, damn the consequences. After all prime ministers don’t address the nation on trivial matters like raising oil prices. That was an administrative decision, which if commonsense had prevailed, should actually have been a commercial one. I didn’t expect that the PM would have to do something as dramatic as addressing the nation merely to justify a price hike of a commodity over which the government has been procrastinating for the past ten months. Alas, that was what it was all about. He did tell us how the international situation had warranted the price hike and did note that the present policy was not a“permanent solution” to the problem. But after a token reference to the need for conservation, and an exhortation to develop alternate energy sources, he was silent.
Mr. Singh’s address was par for the course for his prime ministership —uninspiring, dull and close to the political script of the pusillanimous Congress party that requires total appeasement of the Left allies of the UPA. This column is not about the nuclear deal. Though, for the record, the window is getting smaller and smaller and will probably close in September. What this is about is the larger failure of the political system to measure up to the needs of the country and its people.
Perhaps the best example is the oil price hike itself. Every party under the sun has gone out of its way to criticise it, even the BJP, whose record on dealing with the subject when in government as the leader of the NDA is not particularly edifying. None of them came out with arealistic and intellectually honest alternative to raising the prices of petroleum products. This is not surprising. After all, they are all fiddling while India’s energy prospects go from being bad to worse.
The country’s energy needs are not something that we have infinite time to resolve. The needs are here and now and not being met. Yes, we have our nuclear plan based on thorium, but it kicks in thirty years or so from now and that too if technical challenges don’t intervene. Reports that Indian nuclear power plants are running out of fuel have not been concocted by the Manmohan Singh government to build a political climate to favour the deal. The first official reference to the problem was available in the mid- term appraisal of the 10th Five Year Plan which was prepared in the early 2000s, well before the UPA came to power.

Demographic Dividend

There is an argument that nuclear power alone will not achieve much. True, it has to be seen as part of a package of measures. France, after all, has managed in the last thirty years after the first oil shock to ensure that 79 per cent of its electricity is produced by nuclear energy, Japan manages 30. Think where they would have been today without nuclear power. The current nuclear renaissance is moving in a similar direction. Fourth generation reactors and newer technologies based on thorium are on the cards. But these will only be available if India is part of the world nuclear order, as defined by the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the IAEA.
India’s window of opportunity is finite and can be defined with considerable clarity. It lies between now and 2030, because of something called the demographic dividend. As Prof Kaushik Basu has explained, the dependency ratio of our population, the number of people of working age as against those who are dependent, is set to decline in the next three decades and then start climbing again. In the year 2004 India had a population of 1,080 million, of whom 670 million people were in the age group of 15 to 64 years, which is considered as the “working age population.” The rest of the population —the very young and the old, some 400 million —were seen as the dependent population. So the dependency ratio, or the proportion of working age population to the dependent population worked out to 0.6.
Given our current trends this ratio will decline even further in the coming decades. In 2020, the average age of an Indian will be 29 years, compared to 37 for China and 48 for Japan; and, by 2030, India's dependency ratio should be just over 0.4. The advantage of a young working age population is obvious — they earn, consume and save. Higher savings rates make for greater investments into the economy. But this is only the theory. We need the practice. It is no good having a young working age population if it is not well educated, or if it does not have jobs.
So, the advantages of the demographic dividend are dependent on the kind of physical infrastructure we can provide for them —better universities, hospitals, roads, railways, factories, and so on. India needs a massive effort to shift avast number of people —we are talking of hundreds of millions —from the agriculture to the manufacturing and services sector. At the heart of this effort lies not only the availability of energy, but our ability to use it efficiently. The train to that future is leaving right now. We will not get another chance to board it again in this century.

Opposition

There is nothing in the policies and politics of today which tells us that our politicians understand this truth. What does the CPI( M)’ s Prakash Karat have against the nuclear deal? Something to do with an abstract notion called “US imperialism”, perhaps. The Left is not even addressing the issue on hand —how to get nuclear fuel to power our domestic programme and acquire technology and financing to establish nuclear power plants in quick order to boost energy availability in the country. The specious critique of the Hyde Act, the faux concern for fuel security, are all aimed at scuttling the deal because of an unscrupulous political calculation.
L. K. Advani’s response is even more difficult to comprehend. On one hand he says that the BJP does not “basically” oppose the nuclear agreement. His suggestion that the US insert a provision in the 123 Agreement saying that the Hyde Act will not affect India is an insult to intelligence. Does he really expect that the US executive will agree to a changed wording that will negate the validity of a legislation of the US Congress?

Responsibility

Perhaps we are being too harsh on Advani. The person who is steering the agreement is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and he has behaved in a peculiar way with Mr Advani. Instead of engaging the Leader of the Opposition to get his support, he has avoided dealing with him, and gratuitously insulted him by appealing to Atal Bihari Vajpayee to make the BJP see reason on the issue.
When history looks back at our present distempers, it cannot but point out the culpability of small men found wanting when confronted with the big problems of the country. In north Indian historical consciousness, two characters stand out for their chicanery —Jaichand and Mir Jafar. Since the nation state did not exist during their time, they cannot really be condemned as traitors, as they have been in popular imagination. They were merely run of the mill men involved in petty politics, unable or unwilling to see the larger picture. I wonder how the leaders of today whose politics are undermining the nation will be portrayed by future generations.
The article was published in Mail Today June 6, 2008

Endgame hurdles dog the Indo-US nuclear deal

THE END game has gone on for so long, that one would be tempted to say that it has become a game of its own. That there is still some life in the Indo- US nuclear deal was apparent by the buzz created last week, when the Samajwadi party cited former President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam’s advocacy of the deal, to say they were willing to reconsider their opposition to it. Given its single- issue approach to politics, which does not include an automatic distaste for things American, the change signifies little for the party, but it has larger implications for national politics.
Among other things, it weakens the CPI( M) General Secretary Prakash Karat’s claim — untested on the floor of the house — that the majority of the Parliament is against the deal. With 36 seats in the present house, the SP has nearly as many members of parliament as the CPI( M) itself. The Left is now reported to be readying to have yet another internal discussion on the deal. The Samajwadi shift could be used by them to modify their senseless blockade, though this is unlikely. The UPA- Left coordination committee meeting on May 28 could well be the final meeting on the deal. Optimists, and I am one of naïve lot, believe that the deal will still go through the Indian political hurdles. But that will only be the first of three endgames. The next will be with the International Atomic Energy Agency whose board of governors will meet on June 2. While India has a draft agreement with the IAEA in its pocket, that does not mean that the board of governors will automatically accept it. And then comes the clean exemption from the Nuclear Suppliers Group cartel on its rule against civil nuclear trade with a country that has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. This will not be a best of three outcome: India must win all three games to get the nuclear deal through. While we have the secretary general of the IAEA Mohammed El Baradei in our corner in the world nuclear body, as per agreement the United States must push our case in the NSG. The problem is that with the Bush Administration in its lameduck phase, countries which may have otherwise gone along with the US in the NSG could now become a problem. There is a blithe assumption in some quarters in the country that IAEA and NSG approval will be a cakewalk. But we could be in for a rude shock. In the case of the IAEA, we already have a draft agreement, but when we go to the NSG we may find that in addition to the conditions the US has made in the 123 Agreement, we are asked to make commitments to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the proposed Fissile Material Cut off agreement being negotiated in Geneva.

Mainstream

But it is not the endgame alone that should interests us, but the game itself. Given his background as an arch- nationalist, Kalam only told us half the truth when he said that the country needed to import natural uranium to keep its nuclear power programme going. “ Our uranium reserves are limited. We will need a certain amount of uranium to attain the next stage in the fuel cycle producing energy on thorium which is available in abundance in India,” he said. Atomic Energy chief Anil Kakodkar made the same point at the same meeting at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai. He pointed out that India was no longer “ technology limited” but “ raw material limited.” This is something of an understatement. India may boast of its small nuclear power station expertise, but the fact of the matter is that we have been stunted by the embargoes on us. As for the fast breeder, it offers us great promise of energy security, but there are still major technological challenges that must be overcome. The reality is that India also needs to be part of the world technology mainstream. This is important not only because it fertilizes your own endeavours, but because an open market is a source of cheaper and better components and technology. And surely if our fast breeder is a success, we would like to market the technology around the world. But that will not be possible as long as there are NSG restrictions on our civil nuclear trade. Let us also be humble and accept that we are unlikely to have some unique technology that will compel the NSG to come to terms with us. In the long debate over the desirability or otherwise of the deal, one fact that has been spun around is that nuclear power will be able to fulfil only a small fraction of our total demand, say 12 per cent by 2030. ( It is 3 per cent now) The point is that the 12 per cent could make the difference between a high and a low economic growth rate. When shortage occurs, say in Delhi currently, it is not the total power output that matters, but the shortage which could be of the order of 5- 10 per cent.

Security

So the marginal unavailability will be more important than the percentage it represents. In addition, it will also come as clean energy. Already there is considerable pressure on India and China to undertake mandatory emission controls in the post- Kyoto climate control treaty. By now it should be clear from the statements of people like former National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra that the Indo- US nuclear deal will have no negative impact on India’s nuclear weapons programme. How could it ? Western critics are not wrong when they say that by being permitted to import natural uranium for civil nuclear power, will enable India to use its limited resources for military purposes. As for nuclear tests, no agreement in the world would permit India the right to conduct them, and, frankly, in such matters relating to national security interests, you do not go around seeking permission from anyone.

Tactics

The problem with a section of domestic opinion is that they think that India is somehow entitled to have the nuclear trade embargo lifted. But we are not dealing with a legal regime alone, but also a cartel like the NSG which functions on the plane of international politics. Many of its members have not quite gotten over India’s successful defiance of the non- proliferation order and building nuclear weapons. There are, after all, 184 countries who have decided to accept what Indians feel is a second class status, and signed the NPT as non- nuclear weapon states. These are also the countries that form the bulk of the 45- nation NSG. They do not take too kindly to India’s pretensions. Many resent what they see as New Delhi’s tactic of using American clout to crash into the club. Some are rich and not particularly amenable to US pressure anyway. So, India’s “ entitlement mode” negotiation may not have much traction with the NSG. Instead, we may need to more substantially address the non- proliferation sentiment by accepting some kind of commitment to the CTBT and the FMCT. In the end, politics, rather than entitlement, is what will determine the outcome.
This article first appeared in Mail Today May 14, 2008

Nuke deal dumb charade

Mail Today March 18, 2008 p.4

Hope floats for nuke deal, at least for now

By Manoj Joshi in New Delhi

THE nuclear deal remains on track, but just about.
Monday’s UPA-Left meeting and the decision to hold the next session early next month seems to suggest that a carefully choreographed action is taking place.
“If the Left wanted to kill the deal, they could have done it on Monday,” said a Western diplomat, speaking on condition of confidentiality.
In February, senator Joe Biden, who was visiting India with fellow senators Chuck Hagel and John Kerry, had said “If we don’t have the (Indo-US nuclear) deal back with us clearly prior to the month of July, it will be very difficult to ratify.”
So, technically there is a window of opportunity that will remain open, ever so narrowly, till early May. This coincides nicely with the end of the Budget session of Parliament.
The government’s strategy seems to be to operate the next two phases simultaneously — getting International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) acquiescence for the India-specific safeguards agreement, and the “clean exemption” for civil nuclear trade from the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).
A formal Indian approval of the India-specific safeguards agreement by the IAEA in Vienna is now necessary. This agreement has been clinched, and its frozen text was approved by the Cabinet committee on security two weeks ago.
This must now be approved by the IAEA board of governors. While there is a formal 45-day process to summon the board, IAEA chief Mohammed El Baradei is backing the deal and will provide a short cut.
According to the July 18, 2005 agreement, the US has to obtain the clearance for the deal from the NSG.
The frozen text of the India-IAEA agreement is already in circulation among NSG members and the US is in touch with them to obtain the necessary clearance.
The NSG approval may not be simple because the members want to connect it to the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty (FMCT) and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). But putting a preamble — that talks of the need for a FMCT and CTBT — to the India-IAEA agreement may do the trick.
According to officials, both the IAEA and NSG processes could be telescoped into a month-and-a-half period. So even if the clock starts ticking mid-May, the agreement can be with the US Congress by July.
The NSG’s plenary meeting is scheduled to be held on May 19, 2008. This can be seen as the second deadline of sorts for the Indian government. This, too, can be met if all the ground work is done in advance, as it has clearly been done, according to Western diplomats.
While the deadlines take off from the US Congressional calendar as indicated by Biden, it is possible that a last-ditch approval can be obtained by the Centre and the Bush administration even as late as the end of 2008. But this will be an outside chance since no one can predict how the US, or for that matter the Indian, political process will play out.
Former US president Bill Clinton has said at the recent India Today Conclave that a future Democratic administration will honour the deal and be ready to renegotiate some portions if necessary. But, currently there are so many imponderables, that predictions are not easy.
India and the US were able to square the circle in arriving at a 123 Agreement that was deemed as being “impossible” by many. Today, the UPA government confronts the challenge of squaring the circle of convincing the Left and many others in the country that the Hyde Act does not impose needless restraints on the country’s sovereignty.

Don't miss the nuclear train, there won't be another for a long time to come

Once upon a time in another continent, there was a country, almost as large as India, which was rich and prosperous. Between 1880 and 1916, Argentina was among the top ten nations of the world, a potential great power. Since then it has been steadily declining, with its politics veering between conservatism, military rule and radical populism.
Even today, the country possesses abundant resources and a well educated and talented population, but it remains a potential great nation, rather than an actual one. Somehow, it seems to have missed all the chances that it got in the past century to get back on the track to greatness. India’s story is an older one, going back more than three centuries. But these days we, too, seem to be resembling luckless Argentina, rather than our northern neighbour China which, in the short space of three decades, has nearly restored its status as a great world power.
There is a trite assumption that “Shining” or “Incredible” India, one with a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, are inevitable; indeed, in some measure, we are already “there.” The reality, if we are to learn from history, could be different. With the world’s largest population of illiterate, ill and hungry people, we are only part way through the journey. Our recent successes could turn out to be a peak, rather than an upward trend line.

Circumstance

Looked at from another angle, the health of the country’s political system and processes does not appear too good. First, India’s political system seems to be suffering from a serious dysfunction. With none of the three major political formations — the Congress, BJP and the Left —being able to establish themselves, the country is being pulled apart by smaller ethnic and caste leaders whose narrow focus not only does not take into account “India” and issues related to it, but actually undermines the idea of India. Second, the administrative system of the country has become so corrupt and inefficient that the delivery of public health services, education, and even basic law and order does not exist for the poorest half of the population. Third, the inefficiencies associated with the Indian political and administrative system have led to a collapse of rural infrastructure and the creation of shoddy urban conglomerations which are, in some measure because of factors 1 and 2, becoming ungovernable. Fourth, India’s sclerotic political and administrative system is so caught up with simply surviving that it has ceased to be effective in solving outstanding political problems, or problems that are emerging. So negotiations with separatists in Jammu & Kashmir, Nagaland, Assam, or with the Maoists in central India, seem to be trapped on a treadmill.
Just how does the Indo-US nuclear deal connect to these varied set of issues? It is not as if the nuclear deal will resolve all of India’s problems and make us a superpower. What the deal and the way it has been handled does is to tell us a great deal about India’s self-doubts and uncertainties, and indeed points to the hubris that could bring our ambitions low. Beyond the nuts and bolts of civil nuclear cooperation, the deal represents a major effort by the leading nations of the world to bring India into the mainstream of international politics — somewhat akin to the exercise that took place in the 1970s with the People’s Republic of China. Fitting India into the world’s non-proliferation system, whose lynch-pin is the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), is seen as an act that will promote global stability.

Opposition

The heavens will not come down if the deal does not go through. We can bungle on as we have. But it will leave uncomfortable questions about India’s ability to discriminate between what is good and what is bad for itself; and of the ability of its political system to work the international system. By all accounts, the US and the International Atomic Energy Agency have yielded on every single count raised by India, yet a significant chunk of our politicians, driven by short-term and narrow considerations, are unable to accept this.
Of the two main opponents, it is easier to understand, though not condone, the Left’s opposition. It is based on an irrational, and untenable belief that the US is the leader of “world imperialism”. The problem with the Indian Left and its leadership is that they are fighting a war on another planet. In that world, the Vietnam war is still continuing, Che and Fidel’s revolution has swept Latin America and the Soviet Union is flourishing. Unfortunately for the Left, in our world, a united Vietnam, has followed China’s “market socialism”, become a new tiger economy, and is a member of the Association of South East Asian Nations, a once reviled grouping of “imperialist lackeys”. The Soviet Union has ceased to exist and Fidel has just retired as the head of a nation he has left decrepit.
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s opposition is completely spurious, and somewhat cynical, because it has no bugbear like “imperialism” holding it back, neither is it opposed to the idea of having the US take the lead in lifting the nuclear embargo on India. The BJP, which termed the US India’s “natural ally” and whose current prime ministerial hopeful once pressed his government to send troops to Iraq, can hardly oppose the deal on the same grounds as the Left. The BJP says it will get a better deal. But, as Strobe Talbott has pointed out, it was willing to settle for less than 50 per cent of what the Congress has got. In these circumstances to argue that a “majority” of Parliament is opposed to the deal is superficial.
India certainly needs to be grateful to the US for pushing the deal to the extent it has. No doubt the US has its own interests in mind, but India is not a callow new nation, or a failing state which can be manipulated to some nefarious end. The 123 Agreement with the US and the India-specific IAEA safeguards agreement have shown that our officials, if properly directed, are capable of not only preserving, but furthering the country’s best interests.
As it is, in its totality, the deal is between the NSG cartel and India. The 123 Agreement, the Hyde Act, the India-specific safeguards agreement are all enabling processes. The actual agreement will be the “clean exemption” that the Nuclear Suppliers Group would have to give India to enable all its 45 members to resume civil nuclear trade with India. For a time the NSG was a western grouping. But over time it has gathered strength and drawn in countries like Russia, South Africa, Brazil and China and become a true international cartel.

Wishful thinking

There is an argument that, given the trends, the US and the world community will be happy to offer the deal to India at a later date. Perhaps they will, perhaps they won’t. True, having established several benchmarks, it will be easy to pick up the thread of the negotiations subsequently. But consider two issues: First, there is nothing left to negotiate. Everything that India could have conceivably wanted has been delivered. Second, it is not impossible that we can once again arrive at a conjuncture where we can get a friendly US president, an acquiescent US Congress, and a cooperative head of the IAEA to offer us a deal. But it is improbable. History does not usually repeat itself. In the coming decades we are unlikely to have another system-destructive US president like George W Bush, who was willing to bend the NPT system, as no other US leader would have been willing to, so as to accommodate India.
This article first appeared in Mail Today March 12, 2008