07-01-2008, 04:00 AM
<b>Nuclear Deal: Questions That Baffle </b>
Brahma Chellaney
Asian Age, June 27, 2008
Why is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in a hurry to approach the IAEA Board when he knows the deal cannot be sealed during the Bush presidency? The best way to proceed is to do what he had promised â build a broad political consensus in favour.
The civil nuclear deal with America, although steeped in growing partisan rancour, is hardly the weighty issue that should determine any governmentâs future. Indeed, it is an issue of little long-term import to Indiaâs great-power ambitions or energy needs. For the U.S., the deal offers substantive benefits. But for India the benefits are largely symbolic.
Yet the costs the still-uncertain deal is exacting on India can be gauged from the self-induced federal paralysis, with a sulking prime minister withdrawing into a shell and senior ministers deferring important work. The defence minister, for instance, called off a trip to Japan intended to add strategic content to a bilateral relationship pivotal to power equilibrium in Asia. Such government disruption from the top has no parallel in the annals of independent India.
The ungainly political stagecraft on display raises several unanswered questions. The first relates to Dr. Manmohan Singhâs obsession with a deal that has begun to warp his priorities. Many are asking the same question: Why is he willing to stake his governmentâs future on a single issue of questionable long-term strategic weight? Can he fashion a legacy by choosing deal-making over deterrent-building?
What is mystifying is that Dr. Singh has landed the country in a political logjam over a deal he knows cannot be completed during the remainder term of U.S. President George W. Bush. Time has simply run out. Even in an overly optimistic scenario, the deal cannot be ratified by the present U.S. Congress.
In addition to New Delhiâs insistence on taking its safeguards accord with the International Atomic Energy Agency to the latterâs governing board at this stage â an action that will gratuitously tie the countryâs hands even before the final deal is clear â an extraordinary plenary meeting of the Nuclear Suppliersâ Group will need to be held to consider a rule-change by consensus. An NSG waiver will neither be easy nor swift, with the U.S. itself seeking to attach conditions that mesh with its Hyde Act. In the last stage, the deal will come up for congressional ratification, but only after three documents â the so-called 123 agreement, a presidential determination that India has met all the stipulated preconditions, and a âNuclear Proliferation Assessment Statementâ â have been placed before the U.S. Congress âfor a period of 60 days of continuous sessionâ.
Given the limited number of days left in the present U.S. legislative calendar to let a ratification process run its full course, why this tearing hurry on the part of India to take the safeguards accord to the IAEA Board? Washington â whose almost-daily statements have sought to egg on New Delhi to play that very card, even if it led to the collapse of Dr. Singhâs government â acknowledged this week that, âobviously, the next U.S. government will have to look at this [deal] and make their own decisions on itâ. In fact, as early as last month, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden had said the deal is unlikely to be approved in Bushâs term.
Before knowing how the NSG will condition cooperation with India or the attitude of the next U.S. administration, why is New Delhi willing to part with its last remaining card by taking the safeguards accord to the IAEA Board? That accord, at any rate, ought to be taken to the Board only after the contours of the Additional Protocol with the IAEA have been firmed up. Otherwise, a leverage-stripped India could face more-stringent and wider inspections when it returns for Additional Protocol negotiations.
Like the 123 agreement, India has already finalized and âfrozenâ the safeguards accord. But unlike the former, which was made public days after it was initialled, the latter text has not been shown even to coalition allies, underscoring the creeping official opacity.
There are other mysteries, too. One centres on Dr. Singhâs metamorphosis from being anti-nuclear to becoming a fervent votary of commercial nuclear power. As finance minister in the first half of the 1990s, Dr. Singh starved the nuclear programme of funds, disabling new projects and halting uranium exploration.
The uranium crunch India confronts today is rooted in the fact that the actions Dr. Singh set in motion then were not reversed until several years after he left office. That Dr. Singhâs newfound interest in nuclear power relates merely to reactor imports has been underscored by his recent action in cutting the Department of Atomic Energyâs 2008-09 budget by more than half a billion dollars.
Another unexplained action â one that demolishes the official contention that the deal has no bearing on the strategic programme â is the U.S.-dictated decision to permanently shut down Cirus, one of Indiaâs two bomb-grade plutonium-production reactors. As Paul Nelson, T. V. K. Woddi and William S. Charlton of the Texas A&M University point out in a U.S. government-funded study, much of Indiaâs cumulative historic production of weapons-grade plutonium has come from Cirus, operating since 1960.
As a completely refurbished reactor, Cirus is as Indian a facility as any. The prime minister's baffling decision to shut down Cirus two years from now, without approving a replacement reactor, will leave a major production shortfall in military-grade plutonium.
No less troubling is the fact that solemn promises made in Parliament were not kept. After the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate Foreign Relations Committee had approved separate versions of an India-specific bill, the prime minister declared on August 17, 2006: âI had taken up with President Bush our concerns regarding provisions in the two bills. It is clear if the final product is in its current form, India will have grave difficulties in accepting the bills. The U.S. has been left in no doubt as to our positionâ. When Congress disregarded Dr. Singhâs red lines and passed the Hyde Act by amalgamating the toughest elements from the Senate and House bills, the prime minister admitted on December 18, 2006, that âthere are areas which continue to be a cause for concernâ.
Yet India negotiated a 123 agreement that complies with the Hyde Act, with the U.S. stating publicly, âWe have the Hyde Act, and we kept reminding the Indian side, and they were good enough to negotiate on this basisâ¦â Of all the 123 agreements the U.S. currently has with partner-states, the one with India stands out for conferring enforceable rights only on the supplier-state.
The prime minister's assurances on ââremoval of restrictions on all aspects of cooperationâ, lifetime fuel stockpiles, linking perpetual international inspections with perpetual fuel supply through âIndiaâs right to take corrective measuresâ, securing an operational consent to reprocess spent fuel, etc. today lie in tatters.
The governmentâs secrecy on the safeguards accord springs from the fact that its text release will expose the manner it has yielded further ground. For example, the 123 agreement, instead of granting the right to take corrective measures, just records that India will seek such a right in the IAEA accord. But the IAEA accord, in its preamble, merely cites the 123 agreementâs reference to corrective measures!
It is manifest from this record that if the deal attracts more onerous conditions during the NSG and congressional approvals, the prime minister will go along, as he has in the past, after making some perfunctory noises. Indeed, it is this record that is likely to embolden NSG members and U.S. lawmakers to tag on more conditions in the next stages to constrain Indiaâs nuclear leeway.
As it nears its third anniversary, the deal has become an emblem of how not to conduct Indian diplomacy. The deal also symbolizes the manner it has been sought to be thrust on the nation through media management, instead of by political co-option.
Public relations alone cannot sell an initiative. Can it be forgotten that the dealâs current cheerleaders were the drumbeaters to get India to send an army division into Iraq in 2003? How more vulnerable would India have been today had that campaign succeeded?
Just as in 2003, todayâs campaign is centred on overstatement â that the concerned issue holds the key to a strategic partnership with America. There is also gross exaggeration about the utility of high-priced, foreign fuel-dependent reactors from overseas.
The dealâs collapse will neither alter the direction of the U.S.-Indian relationship, which is set toward closer strategic cooperation, nor affect the modest role nuclear power will play in Indiaâs energy mix, with or without reactor imports. The deal, contrary to the propaganda, does not offer India unfettered access to uranium imports. Indiaâs uranium crunch, in any event, is set to ease in two yearsâ time as new mines and mills open, according to nuclear chief Anil Kakodkar.
In that light, how justifiable is Dr. Singhâs action in turning the conditions-laden deal into a make-or-break issue of personal prestige and upping the ante to the extent that the nation has been plunged into a political crisis? Instead of wanting to precipitously approach the IAEA Board and step into a firestorm of national furore, shouldnât the prime minister seek to achieve what he pledged in Parliament â âthe broadest possible consensus within the country to enable the next steps to be takenâ?
Once the IAEA Board seals the safeguards accord, India will have little role to play in the next stages, other than as a bystander anxiously monitoring from afar what additional conditions the deal attracts in the NSG and congressional-ratification processes. So why throw nuclear caution to the winds and buoy up non-proliferation literalists in the NSG and Congress in their resolve to sculpt the final deal?
---------------------------------------------
<b>Emulate Americaâs bipartisan handling </b>
Brahma Chellaney
The Hindu newspaper
June 28, 2008
<i>The way forward on the nuclear deal is not through disinterest in bipartisan consensus but by emulating the example set by the much-maligned Bush administration at home. </i>
The political drama and uncertainty in India triggered by partisan wrangling over the civil nuclear deal cannot shroud a key fact: Three years after the deal was unveiled as a âhistoricâ breakthrough in U.S.-India relations, its final shape remains unclear and its future uncertain. Several developments have only increased the odds that finalising and implementing the deal will be a long, arduous challenge for both sides.
The most prominent of these developments is that time has run out for the deal to be approved during U.S. President George W. Bushâs term in office. Given the extended requirements for congressional ratification set by the U.S. Atomic Energy Act and Hyde Act, it will be a Barack Obama or John McCain administration â and a new U.S. Congress â that will have the final say on the deal. While acknowledging this reality, the Bush administration, however, continues publicly and privately to prod New Delhi to play its last card by taking the safeguards accord to the International Atomic Energy Agencyâs governing board for approval.
With no role to play in the subsequent stages, India may see more conditions being tagged to the deal by the Nuclear Suppliersâ Group and the U.S. Congress. Considering how the deal picked up tougher terms with each stage it crossed, there is a distinct possibility that it would attract more conditions in the remaining phases. Take the NSG process, which promises to be drawn-out in view of the impending change of administration in Washington. Although Prime Minister Manmohan Singh voiced hope in Parliament on August 13, 2007 that the NSG rule-change for India would occur âwithout conditions,â an unconditional waiver now looks fanciful. The Bush team is loath to share with New Delhi its revised draft proposal to the NSG.
In fact, one of the Hyde Actâs prerequisites for the dealâs congressional approval is that any NSG rule-change must mirror the conditions that legislation has set for nuclear commerce with India â from a permanent test ban and tightly regulated uranium access, to a continued prohibition on all civil nuclear fuel-cycle technologies and the right to demand the return of transferred items and materials. The Act requires that an NSG exemption should neither be less stringent nor take effect before congressional ratification of the deal. Its clause-by-clause explanatory notes state that no NSG decision should âdisadvantage U.S. industry by setting less strict conditions ⦠than those embodied in the conditions and requirements of this Act.â
The concern is that if the NSG fails to replicate U.S.-style conditions, New Delhi would do an end-run around America to buy power reactors from Russia and France. Indeed, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice assured Congress barely four months ago that the NSG exemption will be âcompletely consistent with the obligations of the Hyde Act.â The Act asserts the U.S. has the ânecessary leverageâ in a group it founded to âensure a favourable outcome.â
Given these realities, there ought to be neither hurry nor heat in evolving Indiaâs strategy and options on the deal. This is an issue that needs to be discussed dispassionately, in a bipartisan spirit, without succumbing to contrived deadlines. After all, the deal centres on the very future of the countryâs nuclear programme. Once India has invested billions of dollars in importing power reactors, the congressionally enforced conditions, with cyclic presidential certifications of Indian âcompliance,â will effectively bear it down. Even when Washington walked out midway from a binding 30-year bilateral pact over just one plant, the U.S.-built Tarapur nuclear power station, New Delhi continued to honour the accordâs terms till the end â and even beyond to this day.
Declassified U.S. documents show that the CIA had correctly assessed that India would not end its obligations even after America had broken its word, but instead would seek U.S. help to find a substitute fuel supplier to keep electricity flowing from Tarapur. That is exactly what happened. But in return, to this day, India has exacerbated its spent-fuel problem at Tarapur by granting the U.S. a right it didnât have even if it had not walked out of that accord â a veto on Indian reprocessing of the accumulating discharged fuel. Yet, even in the latest deal, India has inexplicably agreed to forego reprocessing until it has, in the indeterminate future, won a separate, congressionally vetted agreement.
The political passions the deal is generating make it all the more important that spin should not be allowed to obfuscate facts. Both America and China stand to gain from the qualitative and quantitative fetters the deal imposes on Indiaâs deterrent, including the test prohibition and the forced shutdown of Cirus â one of the two research reactors producing weapons-grade plutonium. Yet vicious attacks have been orchestrated on the Left for allegedly acting at Chinaâs behest. Disinformation has been planted to sow confusion in the BJP ranks and break the partyâs steadfast opposition to the deal. Can slogans and taunts serve as a substitute to an informed debate on an increasingly complex and technical deal?
One would have expected greater transparency in a deal between the worldâs most-populous and most-powerful democracies. In one telling example, the Bush administration, through a gag order on its written responses to congressional questions, has sought to keep the Indian public in the dark on the larger implications, lest the deal should run into rougher weather. In another example, New Delhi continues to shy away from explaining why it agreed to certain glaring provisions in the 123 agreement, such as its grant of an open-ended right to the supplier to suspend supplies forthwith simply by issuing a one-year termination notice on any ground, or the conspicuous absence of any dispute-resolution mechanism.
Citing the newfound support to the deal by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam or Brajesh Mishra can hardly lay to rest nagging questions. Cryptic personal opinions of individuals, however distinguished, will not obscure hard facts. After having been a party to all the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led pronouncements against the deal since 2005, Mr. Mishra has suddenly gone solo to find virtue in the accord. All he says is that he was officially briefed and now âhopesâ and âbelievesâ the deal is no longer injurious to Indian interests. But why not share with the public any new material facts he may know?
Mr. Kalam, as scientific adviser in 1999, publicly supported the then governmentâs U.S.-instigated but abortive move to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Now, in lending support to a deal that drags India through the backdoor into the CTBT, Mr. Kalam says: âIf at any time there was a fear that national security would be compromised ⦠we can withdraw.â This shows he hasnât studied the deal, because the one common thread running through the Hyde Act, the 123 agreement, and the safeguards accord is that India is to be barred from ever halting international inspection of its entire civil nuclear programme, even if the U.S. unilaterally terminated cooperation.
Letâs be clear: the deal has divided India like no other strategic issue. The rancorous divisiveness ought to give pause to those who may think the deal can be rammed through. Indeed, through political over-investment, the deal has been meretriciously presented as the centrepiece, if not the touchstone, of a new Indo-U.S. partnership. To depict the deal as critical to U.S.-India ties is to suggest the base of that relationship is still narrow. Any bilateral relationship cannot rise or fall on the basis of a single issue.
New Delhiâs best option today is to let the deal enter a period of suspended animation and await the new political line-up in Washington. A critical matter like this, which is going to tie India to legally irrevocable international inspections, demands a broad consensus at home. To ignore the widespread misgivings and to precipitously proceed ahead will set a treacherous and damaging precedent.
Dr. Singh had assured the nation on several occasions that he would build a broad political consensus in the dealâs favour. Just two days after signing the original deal on July 18, 2005, he said: âIt goes without saying that we can move forward only on the basis of a broad national consensus.â On August 17, 2006, he told the Rajya Sabha: âBroad-based domestic consensus cutting across all sections in Parliament and outside will be necessary.â Subsequently, he reassured Parliament that he will âseek the broadest possible consensus within the country to enable the next steps to be taken.â
That is exactly the wise course he needs to follow today. The partisan acrimony needs to be defused.
New Delhi should learn from the way the much-maligned Bush administration has handled the deal domestically â by forging an impressive political consensus. The Hyde Act was the product of such consensus-building and political co-option, with the administration holding closed-door briefings for lawmakers and allowing its three-and-a-half-page bill to be turned into a 41-page, conditions-stacked legislation. Bipartisan support also holds the key to the deal eventually winning congressional ratification. In India, the deal ought not to be turned into a partisan issue, for it will have to be implemented well after the present governmentâs term.
Brahma Chellaney
Asian Age, June 27, 2008
Why is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in a hurry to approach the IAEA Board when he knows the deal cannot be sealed during the Bush presidency? The best way to proceed is to do what he had promised â build a broad political consensus in favour.
The civil nuclear deal with America, although steeped in growing partisan rancour, is hardly the weighty issue that should determine any governmentâs future. Indeed, it is an issue of little long-term import to Indiaâs great-power ambitions or energy needs. For the U.S., the deal offers substantive benefits. But for India the benefits are largely symbolic.
Yet the costs the still-uncertain deal is exacting on India can be gauged from the self-induced federal paralysis, with a sulking prime minister withdrawing into a shell and senior ministers deferring important work. The defence minister, for instance, called off a trip to Japan intended to add strategic content to a bilateral relationship pivotal to power equilibrium in Asia. Such government disruption from the top has no parallel in the annals of independent India.
The ungainly political stagecraft on display raises several unanswered questions. The first relates to Dr. Manmohan Singhâs obsession with a deal that has begun to warp his priorities. Many are asking the same question: Why is he willing to stake his governmentâs future on a single issue of questionable long-term strategic weight? Can he fashion a legacy by choosing deal-making over deterrent-building?
What is mystifying is that Dr. Singh has landed the country in a political logjam over a deal he knows cannot be completed during the remainder term of U.S. President George W. Bush. Time has simply run out. Even in an overly optimistic scenario, the deal cannot be ratified by the present U.S. Congress.
In addition to New Delhiâs insistence on taking its safeguards accord with the International Atomic Energy Agency to the latterâs governing board at this stage â an action that will gratuitously tie the countryâs hands even before the final deal is clear â an extraordinary plenary meeting of the Nuclear Suppliersâ Group will need to be held to consider a rule-change by consensus. An NSG waiver will neither be easy nor swift, with the U.S. itself seeking to attach conditions that mesh with its Hyde Act. In the last stage, the deal will come up for congressional ratification, but only after three documents â the so-called 123 agreement, a presidential determination that India has met all the stipulated preconditions, and a âNuclear Proliferation Assessment Statementâ â have been placed before the U.S. Congress âfor a period of 60 days of continuous sessionâ.
Given the limited number of days left in the present U.S. legislative calendar to let a ratification process run its full course, why this tearing hurry on the part of India to take the safeguards accord to the IAEA Board? Washington â whose almost-daily statements have sought to egg on New Delhi to play that very card, even if it led to the collapse of Dr. Singhâs government â acknowledged this week that, âobviously, the next U.S. government will have to look at this [deal] and make their own decisions on itâ. In fact, as early as last month, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden had said the deal is unlikely to be approved in Bushâs term.
Before knowing how the NSG will condition cooperation with India or the attitude of the next U.S. administration, why is New Delhi willing to part with its last remaining card by taking the safeguards accord to the IAEA Board? That accord, at any rate, ought to be taken to the Board only after the contours of the Additional Protocol with the IAEA have been firmed up. Otherwise, a leverage-stripped India could face more-stringent and wider inspections when it returns for Additional Protocol negotiations.
Like the 123 agreement, India has already finalized and âfrozenâ the safeguards accord. But unlike the former, which was made public days after it was initialled, the latter text has not been shown even to coalition allies, underscoring the creeping official opacity.
There are other mysteries, too. One centres on Dr. Singhâs metamorphosis from being anti-nuclear to becoming a fervent votary of commercial nuclear power. As finance minister in the first half of the 1990s, Dr. Singh starved the nuclear programme of funds, disabling new projects and halting uranium exploration.
The uranium crunch India confronts today is rooted in the fact that the actions Dr. Singh set in motion then were not reversed until several years after he left office. That Dr. Singhâs newfound interest in nuclear power relates merely to reactor imports has been underscored by his recent action in cutting the Department of Atomic Energyâs 2008-09 budget by more than half a billion dollars.
Another unexplained action â one that demolishes the official contention that the deal has no bearing on the strategic programme â is the U.S.-dictated decision to permanently shut down Cirus, one of Indiaâs two bomb-grade plutonium-production reactors. As Paul Nelson, T. V. K. Woddi and William S. Charlton of the Texas A&M University point out in a U.S. government-funded study, much of Indiaâs cumulative historic production of weapons-grade plutonium has come from Cirus, operating since 1960.
As a completely refurbished reactor, Cirus is as Indian a facility as any. The prime minister's baffling decision to shut down Cirus two years from now, without approving a replacement reactor, will leave a major production shortfall in military-grade plutonium.
No less troubling is the fact that solemn promises made in Parliament were not kept. After the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate Foreign Relations Committee had approved separate versions of an India-specific bill, the prime minister declared on August 17, 2006: âI had taken up with President Bush our concerns regarding provisions in the two bills. It is clear if the final product is in its current form, India will have grave difficulties in accepting the bills. The U.S. has been left in no doubt as to our positionâ. When Congress disregarded Dr. Singhâs red lines and passed the Hyde Act by amalgamating the toughest elements from the Senate and House bills, the prime minister admitted on December 18, 2006, that âthere are areas which continue to be a cause for concernâ.
Yet India negotiated a 123 agreement that complies with the Hyde Act, with the U.S. stating publicly, âWe have the Hyde Act, and we kept reminding the Indian side, and they were good enough to negotiate on this basisâ¦â Of all the 123 agreements the U.S. currently has with partner-states, the one with India stands out for conferring enforceable rights only on the supplier-state.
The prime minister's assurances on ââremoval of restrictions on all aspects of cooperationâ, lifetime fuel stockpiles, linking perpetual international inspections with perpetual fuel supply through âIndiaâs right to take corrective measuresâ, securing an operational consent to reprocess spent fuel, etc. today lie in tatters.
The governmentâs secrecy on the safeguards accord springs from the fact that its text release will expose the manner it has yielded further ground. For example, the 123 agreement, instead of granting the right to take corrective measures, just records that India will seek such a right in the IAEA accord. But the IAEA accord, in its preamble, merely cites the 123 agreementâs reference to corrective measures!
It is manifest from this record that if the deal attracts more onerous conditions during the NSG and congressional approvals, the prime minister will go along, as he has in the past, after making some perfunctory noises. Indeed, it is this record that is likely to embolden NSG members and U.S. lawmakers to tag on more conditions in the next stages to constrain Indiaâs nuclear leeway.
As it nears its third anniversary, the deal has become an emblem of how not to conduct Indian diplomacy. The deal also symbolizes the manner it has been sought to be thrust on the nation through media management, instead of by political co-option.
Public relations alone cannot sell an initiative. Can it be forgotten that the dealâs current cheerleaders were the drumbeaters to get India to send an army division into Iraq in 2003? How more vulnerable would India have been today had that campaign succeeded?
Just as in 2003, todayâs campaign is centred on overstatement â that the concerned issue holds the key to a strategic partnership with America. There is also gross exaggeration about the utility of high-priced, foreign fuel-dependent reactors from overseas.
The dealâs collapse will neither alter the direction of the U.S.-Indian relationship, which is set toward closer strategic cooperation, nor affect the modest role nuclear power will play in Indiaâs energy mix, with or without reactor imports. The deal, contrary to the propaganda, does not offer India unfettered access to uranium imports. Indiaâs uranium crunch, in any event, is set to ease in two yearsâ time as new mines and mills open, according to nuclear chief Anil Kakodkar.
In that light, how justifiable is Dr. Singhâs action in turning the conditions-laden deal into a make-or-break issue of personal prestige and upping the ante to the extent that the nation has been plunged into a political crisis? Instead of wanting to precipitously approach the IAEA Board and step into a firestorm of national furore, shouldnât the prime minister seek to achieve what he pledged in Parliament â âthe broadest possible consensus within the country to enable the next steps to be takenâ?
Once the IAEA Board seals the safeguards accord, India will have little role to play in the next stages, other than as a bystander anxiously monitoring from afar what additional conditions the deal attracts in the NSG and congressional-ratification processes. So why throw nuclear caution to the winds and buoy up non-proliferation literalists in the NSG and Congress in their resolve to sculpt the final deal?
---------------------------------------------
<b>Emulate Americaâs bipartisan handling </b>
Brahma Chellaney
The Hindu newspaper
June 28, 2008
<i>The way forward on the nuclear deal is not through disinterest in bipartisan consensus but by emulating the example set by the much-maligned Bush administration at home. </i>
The political drama and uncertainty in India triggered by partisan wrangling over the civil nuclear deal cannot shroud a key fact: Three years after the deal was unveiled as a âhistoricâ breakthrough in U.S.-India relations, its final shape remains unclear and its future uncertain. Several developments have only increased the odds that finalising and implementing the deal will be a long, arduous challenge for both sides.
The most prominent of these developments is that time has run out for the deal to be approved during U.S. President George W. Bushâs term in office. Given the extended requirements for congressional ratification set by the U.S. Atomic Energy Act and Hyde Act, it will be a Barack Obama or John McCain administration â and a new U.S. Congress â that will have the final say on the deal. While acknowledging this reality, the Bush administration, however, continues publicly and privately to prod New Delhi to play its last card by taking the safeguards accord to the International Atomic Energy Agencyâs governing board for approval.
With no role to play in the subsequent stages, India may see more conditions being tagged to the deal by the Nuclear Suppliersâ Group and the U.S. Congress. Considering how the deal picked up tougher terms with each stage it crossed, there is a distinct possibility that it would attract more conditions in the remaining phases. Take the NSG process, which promises to be drawn-out in view of the impending change of administration in Washington. Although Prime Minister Manmohan Singh voiced hope in Parliament on August 13, 2007 that the NSG rule-change for India would occur âwithout conditions,â an unconditional waiver now looks fanciful. The Bush team is loath to share with New Delhi its revised draft proposal to the NSG.
In fact, one of the Hyde Actâs prerequisites for the dealâs congressional approval is that any NSG rule-change must mirror the conditions that legislation has set for nuclear commerce with India â from a permanent test ban and tightly regulated uranium access, to a continued prohibition on all civil nuclear fuel-cycle technologies and the right to demand the return of transferred items and materials. The Act requires that an NSG exemption should neither be less stringent nor take effect before congressional ratification of the deal. Its clause-by-clause explanatory notes state that no NSG decision should âdisadvantage U.S. industry by setting less strict conditions ⦠than those embodied in the conditions and requirements of this Act.â
The concern is that if the NSG fails to replicate U.S.-style conditions, New Delhi would do an end-run around America to buy power reactors from Russia and France. Indeed, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice assured Congress barely four months ago that the NSG exemption will be âcompletely consistent with the obligations of the Hyde Act.â The Act asserts the U.S. has the ânecessary leverageâ in a group it founded to âensure a favourable outcome.â
Given these realities, there ought to be neither hurry nor heat in evolving Indiaâs strategy and options on the deal. This is an issue that needs to be discussed dispassionately, in a bipartisan spirit, without succumbing to contrived deadlines. After all, the deal centres on the very future of the countryâs nuclear programme. Once India has invested billions of dollars in importing power reactors, the congressionally enforced conditions, with cyclic presidential certifications of Indian âcompliance,â will effectively bear it down. Even when Washington walked out midway from a binding 30-year bilateral pact over just one plant, the U.S.-built Tarapur nuclear power station, New Delhi continued to honour the accordâs terms till the end â and even beyond to this day.
Declassified U.S. documents show that the CIA had correctly assessed that India would not end its obligations even after America had broken its word, but instead would seek U.S. help to find a substitute fuel supplier to keep electricity flowing from Tarapur. That is exactly what happened. But in return, to this day, India has exacerbated its spent-fuel problem at Tarapur by granting the U.S. a right it didnât have even if it had not walked out of that accord â a veto on Indian reprocessing of the accumulating discharged fuel. Yet, even in the latest deal, India has inexplicably agreed to forego reprocessing until it has, in the indeterminate future, won a separate, congressionally vetted agreement.
The political passions the deal is generating make it all the more important that spin should not be allowed to obfuscate facts. Both America and China stand to gain from the qualitative and quantitative fetters the deal imposes on Indiaâs deterrent, including the test prohibition and the forced shutdown of Cirus â one of the two research reactors producing weapons-grade plutonium. Yet vicious attacks have been orchestrated on the Left for allegedly acting at Chinaâs behest. Disinformation has been planted to sow confusion in the BJP ranks and break the partyâs steadfast opposition to the deal. Can slogans and taunts serve as a substitute to an informed debate on an increasingly complex and technical deal?
One would have expected greater transparency in a deal between the worldâs most-populous and most-powerful democracies. In one telling example, the Bush administration, through a gag order on its written responses to congressional questions, has sought to keep the Indian public in the dark on the larger implications, lest the deal should run into rougher weather. In another example, New Delhi continues to shy away from explaining why it agreed to certain glaring provisions in the 123 agreement, such as its grant of an open-ended right to the supplier to suspend supplies forthwith simply by issuing a one-year termination notice on any ground, or the conspicuous absence of any dispute-resolution mechanism.
Citing the newfound support to the deal by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam or Brajesh Mishra can hardly lay to rest nagging questions. Cryptic personal opinions of individuals, however distinguished, will not obscure hard facts. After having been a party to all the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led pronouncements against the deal since 2005, Mr. Mishra has suddenly gone solo to find virtue in the accord. All he says is that he was officially briefed and now âhopesâ and âbelievesâ the deal is no longer injurious to Indian interests. But why not share with the public any new material facts he may know?
Mr. Kalam, as scientific adviser in 1999, publicly supported the then governmentâs U.S.-instigated but abortive move to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Now, in lending support to a deal that drags India through the backdoor into the CTBT, Mr. Kalam says: âIf at any time there was a fear that national security would be compromised ⦠we can withdraw.â This shows he hasnât studied the deal, because the one common thread running through the Hyde Act, the 123 agreement, and the safeguards accord is that India is to be barred from ever halting international inspection of its entire civil nuclear programme, even if the U.S. unilaterally terminated cooperation.
Letâs be clear: the deal has divided India like no other strategic issue. The rancorous divisiveness ought to give pause to those who may think the deal can be rammed through. Indeed, through political over-investment, the deal has been meretriciously presented as the centrepiece, if not the touchstone, of a new Indo-U.S. partnership. To depict the deal as critical to U.S.-India ties is to suggest the base of that relationship is still narrow. Any bilateral relationship cannot rise or fall on the basis of a single issue.
New Delhiâs best option today is to let the deal enter a period of suspended animation and await the new political line-up in Washington. A critical matter like this, which is going to tie India to legally irrevocable international inspections, demands a broad consensus at home. To ignore the widespread misgivings and to precipitously proceed ahead will set a treacherous and damaging precedent.
Dr. Singh had assured the nation on several occasions that he would build a broad political consensus in the dealâs favour. Just two days after signing the original deal on July 18, 2005, he said: âIt goes without saying that we can move forward only on the basis of a broad national consensus.â On August 17, 2006, he told the Rajya Sabha: âBroad-based domestic consensus cutting across all sections in Parliament and outside will be necessary.â Subsequently, he reassured Parliament that he will âseek the broadest possible consensus within the country to enable the next steps to be taken.â
That is exactly the wise course he needs to follow today. The partisan acrimony needs to be defused.
New Delhi should learn from the way the much-maligned Bush administration has handled the deal domestically â by forging an impressive political consensus. The Hyde Act was the product of such consensus-building and political co-option, with the administration holding closed-door briefings for lawmakers and allowing its three-and-a-half-page bill to be turned into a 41-page, conditions-stacked legislation. Bipartisan support also holds the key to the deal eventually winning congressional ratification. In India, the deal ought not to be turned into a partisan issue, for it will have to be implemented well after the present governmentâs term.