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.

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

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

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

Can the UPA be put together again ?


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

War

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

Casualties

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

Choice

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

Manmohan's illness as a factor in the recent political crisis

This article appeared in Mail Today (New Delhi)November 21, 2007

September-October 2007: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, former finance minister, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, economic bureaucrat and economist, confronted the worst moment of his career. The man whose personal integrity is a byword in India’s dirty politics and whose personal reputation helped crisis-hit India change directions in 1991, found himself battling with enemies from the right and left, as well as from within. An angry prime minister dared the Left to withdraw support on the issue of the Indo-US nuclear deal, and the doctrinaire anti-American CPI(M) General Secretary, Prakash Karat, took the opportunity to tug that rug under the government’s feet. After a show of determination, the government retreated in panic and froze the process. The spat and its outcome resulted in his reputation suffering the worst buffeting it had ever got in his otherwise sterling career.

Crisis

The Prime Minister’s behaviour pattern was uncharacteristic even though the provocation from the Left was great. His apogee was the August 6 interview to The Telegraph, “I told them to do whatever they want to do; if they want to withdraw support, so be it”. But then came the perigee on October 12 at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit when he said, “If the deal does not come through, it will be a disappointment. But sometimes in life you have to live with them. It is not the end of life”.
Many explanations have been put forward for the Prime Minister’s behaviour — pique, intolerance, arrogance and so on. Few have bothered to look at another factor which was no secret, but whose significance has been grossly underestimated.
The Prime Minister was being bothered by that nagging, sometimes dangerous, problem of age — an enlarged prostate gland. According to doctors, the PM had been suffering from benign prostatic condition for the past three years. Prostate surgery is usually an elective procedure. But if the PM had the surgery at the time he did, Saturday, September 15 — in the midst of a full-blown political crisis — it is clear that his condition was not good and that either he, or his doctors, felt there was some urgency. Undoubtedly his doctors would have told him that it was a minor procedure and that he would be fit as a fiddle in no time. Fortunately, the surgery went well and the growth was benign. But the recovery may not have been as smooth as he had been told it would be. One reason is, as appearances show, the Prime Minister is a somewhat fragile person. He is also old and he celebrated his 75th birthday while convalescing on September 26. The first indication that things were not going as per schedule was when the PM was not discharged on Monday, as planned, but a day later. The next indication came on September 28, when a terse note issued by the PMO said that the PM was still recovering and that his visit to Punjab and Himachal was cancelled. On Air Force Day — October 8, three weeks after the surgery, the Prime Minister was clearly not well. He sat out the entire reception on the sofa, while President Pratibha Patil and Ms Sonia Gandhi mixed with the assemblage. It is difficult to believe that the PM's frame of mind was not affected by his illness and surgery, minor though both were mooted to be.
Only in the last fifty years, when hair-trigger decision-making became an issue, has the subject been studied by social historians and what it reveals is not pleasant. According to one, Bert Park, notwithstanding what his physicians said, President Franklin Roosevelt was seriously ill between 1940-44 and it affected his performance as a war leader; he has also linked Hitler’s rise to the age-related dementia of British Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald and German Chancellor Paul von Hindenburg who, as one story goes, signed everything that his staff placed before him, including a packet of sandwiches. Even today it is not clear as to the degree to which Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s serious illness affected his political judgment and attitude in the crucial months of January-August 1947 .

History

Perhaps the most dramatic impact of illness on public affairs was the influenza pandemic of 1918 which killed more people than the Great War of 1914-1918. It ran its course through most of 1919, the first half of which took up the Paris Peace Conference that gave the world the terribly flawed Treaty of Versailles. Many negotiators were struck down by the flu, and nearly one-third died. President Woodrow Wilson’s chief of staff Colonel Edward House was struck down and as he noted in his diary in late February, “When I fell ill in January, I lost the thread of affairs and I am not sure that I have ever gotten fully back.” Wilson arrived in mid-March, at the final stages of the negotiations, and was struck down by the flu. The Treaty of Versailles has been called the worst treaty in the world, ever. It imposed punitive terms on Germany, leading to the rise of Hitler and World War II, it delayed the US’s entry into the world as a great power, and gave us the flawed League of Nations that did little to avert the catastrophe.
In India, things have not reached that stage, though we do not know how ill Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri was at the time of the Tashkent Conference, dying soon after. But you have to only recall a couple of instances of the Vajpayee prime ministership to realise that it is not that far-fetched. Vajpayee had a number of ongoing problems when he became PM — prostate, kidney, but after he took office, his most nagging ones were his arthritic knees.

Vajpayee

For almost a year before the surgery, on June 7, 2001, Vajpayee was down and out. People who met the septuagenarian leader him found him listless and inattentive and prone to long silences. Whether or not the long healing process was the cause, is difficult to say, but the surgery was followed by the disastrous Agra Summit with President Pervez Musharraf on July 14-16 and the threat, shortly thereafter, by Vajpayee to resign because of allegations that his kin may have been involved in a scam. Unfortunately, the surgery did not help him as much as he expected, and the then 74-year old leader took more than a year to regain his composure, having the indignity of being attacked for being “asleep at the wheel” in a Time magazine article in June 2002.
The problem with doctors attending prime ministers, and of PMs listening to doctors, is that they think that the aura of the office will somehow make recovery and convalescence different. You may get world-class medical treatment and care, but the human body does not know whether you are the PM or his driver. What matters are the laws of nature and your age.
In a country with a tradition of geriatric leadership, the issue of the impact of illness on decision-making should be a serious one. The idea that one man’s illness can change history may appear somewhat far-fetched. But it would be difficult to deny that when a leader as crucial as a president or a prime minister undergoes illness and recovery, his or her state of mind is not normal and can impair their judgment. To believe otherwise would be to believe they are not human, and that, of course, is not the case.

One step forward, two steps back

In contrast to Lenin's dictum, "Two steps forward, one step back," the Left has succeeded in inflicting a wound on itself by its maneuvering on the Indo-US nuclear deal. Its concession allowing the government to begin negotiations with the International Atomic Energy Agency means it has abandoned its stand demanding that the government do nothing to "operationalise" the deal. In fact, all that is left to operationalise the deal from the Indian side is to work out an India-specific safeguards agreement with the IAEA. Thereafter, the US will take the agreement to the Nuclear Suppliers Group and seek an exemption from its rule barring trade with countries that have not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Only the US can do that,India is not an NSG member (as yet). But India can, and has been talking to individual NSG members for the past year or so, though there is no public record of the discussions. Formally, it is the US that will have to approach the NSG and seek, as India has demanded, a "clean exemption" ie, an unconditional one. This is not likely to be easy because the non-proliferationists in the US and Europe are mobilising their efforts to ensure that an NSG exemption is conditional on India's agreeing to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and commit itself to the Fissile Material Cut Off Treaty, if and when the latter is negotiated.Conditions are likely to be political dynamite in India and will be unacceptable to New Delhi.

The IAEA agreement is not likely to be too complicated because it will be based, as we have noted before, on the basic IAEA safeguards document relevant, INFCIRC/66. The Left has demanded, and the government has conceded, that the safeguards agreement will placed before the Left-UPA committee for approval. Just how this highly technical document be judged on by a political committee is not clear.The Left could insist on demanding provisions that are available for the de jure nuclear weapons states (under the NPT provision of having conducted a nuclear test before January 1, 1967). However, this would be a deal-breaker. Because while the US is willing to give India a de facto nuclear weapons state status, it simply does not have the power to turn the clock back and give India a de jure one. Seeking parity for the sake of parity will be a counter-productive move.
Whatever it is, Comrade Prakash Karat has given special interviews to indicate that there is no change in the Left's policy. That is hard to accept considering that he had declared that any step to operationalise the deal would lead to a withdrawal of the Left's support.
My guess is that the government is readying for an election by March-April and at the appropriate moment, it will move to clinch the deal and precipitate an election.

The worm is turning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bitter October

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, say reports, is a bitter man. He feels particularly let down by allies, since he expected that the opposition would be unsparing towards the Indo-US nuclear deal anyway. There are two things he can do—swallow his bitterness like a kaliyug Shiva and stay in office, or spit it out and quit. Either way, there are implications for the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance. He may not be much of a political heavy-weight, but he is clearly indispensible for the Congress president who does not trust a Pranab Mukherji and is not likely to hand the government over to the lightweight and incompetent Shivraj Patil.

But the fact is that there is an irretrievable breakdown in the relations between the Prime Minister and the Left on one hand, and between the PM and his coalition allies who finally slipped the knife into his back earlier this month. There is, no doubt, an element of unhappiness with Ms Sonia Gandhi as well who went along with Lalu, Karunanidhi, Pawar and Co in the process, resulting in the current impasse. Worse, a day or so later on October 12, during the Hindustan Times conference, when asked as to who she depends on for political advice, named her son, daughter and son-in-law and did not even make a passing reference to her prime minister.

The Left played dirty by going along with the deal through 2005, 2006 and most of 2007 and pulled the rug under his feet after the enormous achievement of the Indian “123 Agreement” which is extremely favourable to us. His allies—Lalu, Karunanidhi and Pawar—not only went along with him, but were represented or actually part of the Union Cabinet that approved every step of the negotiations, and finally endorsed the “123 Agreement.” On July 25, a combined meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security and the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs okayed the 123. Incidentally, that very evening, Prakash Karat, Sitaram Yechury and CPI leader D. Raja were given a special presentation on the deal by officials at the Prime Minister’s residence. There are no reports of the Left having declared themselves dead-set against the deal at this stage. On August 19, according to The Hindu:

The key constituents of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) on Sunday night threw in their lot with coalition chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and expressed full confidence in their ability to address “all legitimate concerns” voiced by the Left parties.

The goings on of October 9/10 therefore were a surprise to Singh, though they should not have been. The allies may claim that it was one thing to give the endorsement above, quite another to have the cold water of an election thrown on their face. But the fact is that if they had held their nerve, they could have emerged winners, instead of the dispirited and confused bunch they appear now.

Now there are straws in the wind to suggest that the UPA is recovering some of the coherence it lost at that time. This is apparent from the outcome of the latest meeting of the UPA-Left committee on October 22. Prior to the meeting there were a lot of bombastic declarations demanding that the government announce the termination of the Indo-US nuclear deal, or leave it to the next US administration-- statements tantamount to a Congress party surrender. But the outcome of the meeting was anodyne, suggesting that it was the Left that backed off. The conclusion of Monday meeting declared that:

Issues currently before it [the committee] would be addressed in an appropriate manner and the operationalisation of the deal will take into account the Committee’s findings.

This is actually a restatement of the positions the committee has taken from the very outset and its reiteration indicates that the Congress is not budging and the Left could be up the creek without a paddle.

Reports in several papers now claim that the time frame of the nuclear deal will not be adhered to as regards India-specific safeguards negotiations with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) scheduled for October, negotiations with the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) slated for November and taking the deal to the U.S. Congress in January 2008.

Nicholas Burns seems to have repeated this view to a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Tuesday. According to Reuters, Burns is reported to have said that the US was approaching election time and that it was tough to pass legislation at such times. Adding,

We don't have an unlimited amount of time...We'd like to get this agreement to the United States Congress by the end of the year.

He is right, but the technical timeline—which means the time required to get the technicalities of the deal worked out—actually extends all the way to the end of 2008. However, as the months pass, there is an inevitable loss of momentum and the chances of it being taken up by the Congress recede. The steps needed now are for the approval of an India-specific safeguards agreement by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. Between you and me, this agreement is more-or-less ready and could be approved within a week of India’s request. While there is a formal 45-day process to summon the Board of Governors meeting, the IAEA chief Mohammed El Baradei is backing the deal and will provide a short cut.

There is an NSG meeting scheduled in November and it is possible that the US will get pre-approval from their colleagues based on the prospective IAEA safeguards agreement. The NSG approval will not be simple because the members want to connect it to the Fissile Material Cut Off and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. But a measure sandwiching the INFCIRC/ 66, the IAEA's basic standard agreement with some language on the FMCT and CTBT could pass.So the whole process can be telescoped into about a month. As for the US Congress, mid-2008 can be seen as the outside limit of prudent planning.

There has been some talk about how the Democratic party would look at the deal. The Hyde Act, that enabled the 123 Agreement to be arrived at was passed by an overwhelming vote of the US Congress. Observers expect that the non-proliferationists in the new putative Clinton Administration would make life difficult for India and Hillary has already signaled her views through an article in Foreign Affairs, saying she would push for the CTBT in 2009. However these observers do not realize that countries like the US do not make policy moves out of whim but considerable cogitation and analysis. What Bush II did was based on what Bush I had initiated. In addition, he built on the goodwill generated by Bill Clinton’s overtures to India. The Indo-US nuclear deal is part of Washington’s strategic grand design. India may be a cog in this, but an it is an increasingly important one.

So now we need to look at the political timeline here in India. Given the public postures, there is no chance that the Left will approve of the deal. So at some point the UPA must say they are going ahead, and when they do so, the Left will announce a withdrawal of support. The government need not fall immediately, but it will begin the clock ticking for the next elections. My guess would be that it could well be after the Gujarat elections whose results should be known by December 23. This times well with the end of the winter session of Parliament. So the technical and political timelines can be made to intersect in early January, leading to elections in May.

Almost every election in India is a paradigm shift and so will the next one be. The best the Indian people can hope for is the emergence of one, two or three fronts that have some ideological coherence and are coalitions with some dharma, not just opportunistic alliances that are used as stepping stones to political power.

Mysterious goings on in New Delhi

What is happening with the Indo-US nuclear deal ? The prime minister and Sonia Gandhi’s statements on Friday have set the cat among the pigeons. Speaking at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit , the PM said: “If the deal does not come through, it will be a disappointment. But sometimes in life you have to live with them. It is not the end of life.” Sonia Gandhi, too said that the Congress would try to address the concerns of its allies and the party “The dharma of coalition is to work together, try and understand and accommodate each other’s view.”
In our view, this seeming flip-flop of the Congress party and the government can be understood if you believe, as I do, that there is now a deal within a deal. In other words, the Congress and the Left have struck a deal to back off from their confrontation and arrive at a workable compromise that will see the deal move on to its logical culmination, perhaps on a slightly delayed time line. This is no doubt the achievement of Pranab Mukherji, Lalu Yadav, Sitaram Yechury and Sharad Pawar. So the process will involve formal agreement in the Left-UPA committee that is supposed to look into the deal. You need to read between the lines to get the Left's true reaction. Note, Mr. Karat has not said anything.

There are several straws in the wind to suggest that. First, a CPI(M) politburo meeting scheduled for October 18 has been postponed. Second, speaking at an Indian Express function, Kapil Sibal says that the Left has accepted the primacy of the 123 Agreement over the Hyde Act. “The Left has now agreed to the position that where there is a conflict between the Hyde Act and the 123 agreement, the 123 agreement prevails. That position has been agreed to.”

Till now the Left has been arguing that they are not against the deal per se, but the Hyde Act that allegedly commits India to follow the US foreign policy agenda. That this was factually untrue mattered little because most of us believed that the Left’s positions were motivated by blind anti-Americanism rather than reason. Once reason comes into play, and there are grounds to believe that it has, the Left’s loses its sharp edge.

My guess-- and this is a guess-- is that we will now have a compromise formula, where the Left will endorse this point, and in return the government may go along with a Parliament statement or resolution that purports to defang the toothless Hyde Act.

In the meantime, behind the scenes negotiations are going on with the International Atomic Energy Agency for the India-specific safeguards which Dr. Mohammed El Baradei keeps on saying are not that much of a problem."We are ready. I don't think we would take very long. It would be weeks, not more than weeks." My own belief is that some behind-the-scenes negotiations have already taken place based on what diplomats cutely term "non-papers"-- working drafts which are not attributable to any government or institutions. So, there would be a show of formal consultation, but the agreement would be done in a matter of a week or so after India gives its go-ahead. As for the NSG, that as per agreement, is America’s baby, though we will have to put in effort as well, but behind the scenes.

It is too early to say that all's well that ends well. But there should be no doubts that relations between Prakash Karat, the CPI(M) General Secretary who forced the confrontation and the Prime Minister are irreparably damaged because of the note of bitterness that they brought into the issue. Usually in politics these things don't matter, but both are ideologues in their own way, and it does tend to matter.

Nuclear deal: Future tense, but the show goes on

This post has been revised on September 22

You can already see the nods and winks going on between New Delhi and Washington, as well as the Nuclear Suppliers Group, and the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. While no one is saying anything officially, and taking care not to show any further “operationalisation” of the Indo-US nuclear deal, there is clearly action taking place behind the scenes. The government is compelled to act as it does because the Left, particularly the CPI(M) seems determined to scuttle it. Writing in Hindustan Times, Nilova Roy Chaudhury says that the government is determined to wind up the IAEA negotiations by October and seek the NSG waiver thereafter.

After agreeing to be part of a committee that would discuss the Left’s concern, Mr. Prakash Karat, the CPI(M) General Secretary undercut that position by declaring at a public rally in New Delhi on September 18 that the government now postpone action on the deal for six months “Otherwise, there would be a political crisis in the country. We do not want that.” This is a “too clever by half” kind of a statement designed to scuttle the deal, and it is unlikely to wash.

There are two time-lines at work on the nuclear deal-- one is a technical one, and the other political. A senior official familiar with the negotiations told me last week that India will have to meet these two objectives in the coming month or two “because President Bush is unlikely to have any power to influence Congress beyond February or March this year”. Otherwise the process to spill over into next summer, which in effect means 2009-- since 2008 is a Presidential Election year in the US. This would put the entire deal in a limbo, the more likely scenario is that the two countries will seek to push ahead within this year. This is likely to be the subject of the expected meeting between External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherji and his US counterpart Condeleezza Rice later this month on the margins of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York.

The technical time-line requires India to negotiate its India specific additional protocol and safeguards agreement with the IAEA. While India would be working on existing templates on both agreements, there are key differences that require extensive negotiations. The IAEA has an additional protocol in its books since 1997, but this relates to tightening inspection procedures for non-nuclear weapons states (NNWS). In other words the IAEA procedures relate to preventing NNWS from making nuclear weapons. But India already has nuclear weapons, and the US has accepted this and so the India-specific agreement has to reflect this. The safeguards agreement will be easier and can be based on the agreement that India has signed with the IAEA for the two Koodankulam reactors being built with Russian help.

Only when India has these two agreements can it go the NSG and request a rule change. According to an official, the procedure here could be “a simple line added to the existing guidelines or it could be a more complicated agreement.” He said that it was difficult to predict how the 45-nation body will respond to India’s request for an unconditional exception to its rule barring trade with countries that have not signed the NPT. India can negotiate behind the scenes with the IAEA and NSG, but at some point it must arrive at an open agreement with them. And that is the point the political time-line kicks in. As per the agreement, it is the US that has to get India the exemption from the NSG, so India need not directly interface with the cartel till the very end. On Friday (September 21) the US briefed 100 officials from 33 member countries. Richard Stratford, Director at the Office of Nuclear Energy Affairs in the US State Department told Press Trust of India "We are also putting forth India's case for clean, unconditional exemption and we are trying hard on that."

At any sign that New Delhi is negotiating with the IAEA or NSG on the nuclear deal, the 60-member Left group is committed to withdrawing its support from the UPA government leaving it with a minority in the Lok Sabha. The government may not fall immediately, but its days would be numbered, with both the Left and the Congress party seeking to maneuver themselves into an advantageous position vis-à-vis the General Election that will follow. But now there seems to be some rethinking going on in the CPI(M). The enigmatic statements of 94-year old Jyoti Basu seems to suggest that the party will climb down after the meeting of its politburo and the central committee at the end of the month in Kolkata.

After reaching agreement with the US on the “123 Agreement” New Delhi was to work out a safeguards agreement and an India-specific additional protocol with the IAEA, and thereafter obtain the approval of the 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group to amend its guidelines to permit nuclear trading with India. After these benchmarks are reached, the US Congress would again take a “yes” or “no” vote to make the deal operational.

More on the nuclear deal

The Prime Minister has confirmed what has been known internally by the government for a long time—that the country is short of natural uranium. The shortage is such that it will not only inhibit our nuclear power production, but actually has the potential of undermining our vaunted indigenous three stage programme. Speaking at the ceremony inaugurating the Tarapur 3 & 4 reactors on August 31, 2007, Dr. Manmohan Singh said:

“At the same time, our uranium resource base is limited. We have, therefore, consciously opted for a closed fuel cycle approach ever since the beginning of our nuclear power programme. We need to expeditiously develop fast reactor technologies and intensify efforts to locate additional uranium resources in the country. Government will extend its full support in this regard.

Even as we pursue our three-stage programme, it is necessary to look at augmenting our capabilities. We need to supplement our uranium supplies from elsewhere even as the DAE has taken a number of laudable steps to maximize output within the limited resources. We must take decisive steps to remove the uncertainties that result from shortfall in fuel supplies to avoid disruptions in our nuclear power production programme.”(emphases added)

This is the text of the statement read out by External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee after a meeting of leaders of the Congress and Left parties at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s residence on August 30, 2007:

In view of certain objections raised by the Left parties on the Indo-U.S. bilateral agreement on nuclear cooperation, it has been decided to constitute a committee to go into these issues.

1. The composition of the committee will be announced shortly.

2. The committee will look into certain aspects of the bilateral agreement; the implications of the Hyde Act on the 123 Agreement and self-reliance in the nuclear sector; the implications of the nuclear agreement on foreign policy and security cooperation.

3. The committee will examine these issues. The operationalisation of the deal will take into account the committee’s findings.

This is my take on the issue:

The text of the agreement reached by the Manmohan Singh government and the Left parties over the impasse on the Indo-US nuclear deal is clearly a face-saving device. You can see it as a glass half-empty, or, as I do, as one half full. It does appear to us to be an anodyne measure that will help the deal to overcome the hiccup created by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) General Secretary Prakash Karat’s hard-line rejection of the deal.

The committee that will be created through the agreement will look into “certain aspects” of the 123 Agreement, as well as “the implications of the Hyde Act on the 123 Agreement and self-reliance in the nuclear sector… and on foreign policy and security cooperation.” The committee will no doubt tread on ground already walked on by the government itself. Is it likely that the government would not have studied the implications of the Hyde act on the 123 agreement ? Indeed, the agreement has been shaped by the Hyde act and the debates in the US Congress that preceded the act. Because the process has been relatively open, India is aware of the potential pitfalls that the legislative process could have created. However, forewarned by the time the act came into being—having done the route through the Congressional committees, debates in the two houses of Congress and finally at the reconciliation stage— the Indian authorities were able to ensure that none of the so-called “killer” amendments were able to pass.
Whatever was left over was taken care of by the US president’s signing statement. Bush bluntly noted that “My approval of the Act does not constitute my adoption of the statements of policy [ as listed in the Hyde Act] as U.S. foreign policy.”
So all that stuff about India following the American agenda on Iran and elsewhere are simply not true. Perhaps more important is that under customary international law, an international agreement, such as the 123 Agreement, will always domestic legislation like the Hyde Act. You may ask: How did the US deny us fuel for Tarapur in the late 1970s ? Actually the US did not deny us the fuel outright; they refused to activate the consultative mechanisms. That is the reason why the current 123 Agreement specifies time-bound procedures. The ghost of Tarapur I haunts the agreement.

As for self-reliance in the nuclear sector, it would be easy to show the committee that the 123 Agreement will actually be a life-line of sorts for India’s domestic nuclear industry. As per the three-stage plan, our current stock of pressurized heavy water reactors must yield enough plutonium so as to fuel our fast breeder reactors which will produce more plutonium, as well as Uranium 233 from thorium. This Uranium 233 will then be used with thorium in a process that will regenerate U 233 which can then be used with more thorium to provide an endless supply of nuclear power.

There is such an acute shortage of natural uranium that India is not able to run its current reactors at full strength. In addition it does not have fuel to power the reactors it is building. So importing fuel is vital for the success of our indigenous programme. Access to imported technology also provides us an important hedge in case our fast breeder reactors do not perform to the levels they are required to.

The issue of the impact of the 123 Agreement on our foreign policy and security cooperation are somewhat more difficult to assess. If you want to believe that India, a country with a record for taking independent foreign policy issues, will be bought over to the American camp because of this one agreement, you probably also believe that the stars are God's daisy chain. India cooperates with a variety of countries on trade and technology issues, as well as security—Russia, France, UK, and even China. Why should the United States, the world's leading economic and military power be seen as some pariah ?

Fortunately, according to the text of the agreement between Mukherji and the Left parties, the operationalisation of the deal will merely “take into account” the committee’s findings and will clearly not be bound by them.

Another Chinese take on the subject:

“the agreement does boost India' s nuclear energy development. According to the agreement, both India and the United States will unfold nuclear energy cooperation in full swing and the United States will provide India with nuclear technology, installations and fuel, and help it establish a strategic reserve of nuclear energy. As a matter of fact, India is extremely short of energy. Electricity shortage has been a big problem that has plagued people' s normal life and sustainable economic development. The civilian nuclear power development will help India greatly ease the power shortage and provide guarantee to a steady economic development.”

Read the whole, if somewhat convoluted comment here People’s Daily Online August 30, 2007