After being put through months of anxiety as Indian negotiators seemed to be ‘selling out’ on the nuclear deal with the US, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s speech in the Rajya Sabha in mid-August and his subsequent meeting with former heads of the nuclear establishment have afforded the nation a measure of relief.
In effect, and without admitting his negotiating team’s dangerous failures, the prime minister resigned himself to rejecting the final deal if it did not conform to the now clear Indian bottomlines. One of Singh’s finest speeches, it may yet have been no more than a betrayal of the diffidence that has set in. Even so, however, it was welcome.
We can go back over his speech and pick on many points that he did not clarify. For instance, he did not clarify whether the different American interpretation of the Bush administration’s fuel supply guarantees to India is acceptable.
While Indian negotiators have claimed that the guarantees – agreed to during President Bush’s visit to India in March -- meant that Indian acceptance of perpetual safeguards under all circumstances had been reciprocated by the US with perpetual fuel supply assurances under all circumstances, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has since clarified to American senators that the fuel supply assurances were only against ‘market failures’ to supply uranium to India. The guarantees would not hold in case India was deemed to have violated any of the myriad of obligations it had accepted under the deal.
Singh also failed to enunciate what India’s rights would be and how they would be implemented in case supply was stopped.
For another, his negotiators and the government at large have indulged in a relentless campaign ever since the July 18, 2005 Joint Statement to spread only the ‘good news’ about the deal while suppressing all the ‘bad news’.
On the issue of Indian membership in the GNEP programme, for instance, the ‘good news’ that President Bush had offered to make India a partner in the initiative was given wide play through the media, but the news of Condoleeza Rice’s subsequent refusal to allow India to participate in the programme was somehow never made known to the nation.
(GNEP is part of an American initiative to create a global oligopoly of plutonium-supplying nations. Currently in its initial stages, the programme would result in – if it succeeds, several decades from now – what are termed ‘Advanced Burner Reactors’, as opposed to ‘Breeder Reactors’, which would be available only to the US-appointed plutonium suppliers. India was to be one such supplier, as per the original Bush offer. Condi Rice later wrote to US senators that the Bush administration had informed the Indian government that it would not be allowed to participate as a supplier).
There was no acknowledgement in the prime minister’s speech of the massive effort that took place throughout the past year to spread only the ‘good news’ about the nuclear deal, much of it merely tentative or even downright false (such as the ‘backgrounder’ on the July 18, 2005 civilian nuclear deal that was issued out of the prime minister’s office), and hide all the ‘bad news’ about it. Nor did he give any assurance that the government had any intention to behave differently henceforth.
We can even point out – once again -- that the nuclear deal had suffered deviations from the July 18, 2005 Joint Statement even before President Bush’s visit to India; and that Singh’s subsequent assertion that the separation plan and other arrangements arrived at for the nuclear deal had honoured his commitments to parliament was not wholly true.
Most importantly, while the prime minister did say India would retain the right to conduct further nuclear tests even after the nuclear deal becomes operative, he did not clarify whether or not his government had conducted any exercise at all to find out if India would be able to bear the enormous costs – economic and strategic -- of doing so.
Common sense tells us that if we were to now happily lap up the nuclear deal and import several reactors that would be dependent on foreign fuel, on both of which we would have spent billions of dollars, we would have to pay enormously if we were to conduct further nuclear tests. Several nuclear reactors across the country would then become wasteful monuments to the blunder of signing a deal that did not grant India a permanent waiver from the full Section 129 of the US Atomic Energy Act.
Core concerns also remain over several invidious and insidious provisions of the nuclear deal bills, especially because they have been callously dismissed as merely ‘non-binding’ and ‘recommendatory’ -- and therefore acceptable in the final legislation -- by Indian negotiators and commentators.
The congressional nuclear deal bills demand that India take dictation from the US on its policy towards Iran. Further, they demand that India become a full participant in the US-led Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) and make a formal commitment to the Statement of Interdiction Principles.
These ‘statements of policy’ have been given teeth in the form of reporting requirements that make the US president responsible for ensuring that India makes progress towards complying with these demands or is at least always on a leash.
Furthermore, certain reporting requirements, if accepted by India, will force it to engage with the US on issues regardless of whether it wants to do so or not. On the FMCT or a moratorium on fissile material production, for instance, the US Congress wants an annual report on the initiatives taken by the two governments during the previous year, how much progress they made and whether the US president at the time feels that India is still in compliance with American requirements.
The consequence of such reporting requirements – which requires details of even how much uranium India mines each year, details that are ‘‘not available even to the auditors of the Uranium Corporation of India Limited’’, according to Ashley Tellis, one of the principal authors of the nuclear deal – will be that India will have to spend its diplomatic energies negotiating issues that it does not want to, simply for the fear of being denied nuclear fuel.
By way of these negotiations, which India will have to per force engage in month after month, the US will seek to wear down India into accepting compromises.
The US Congress is clearly acting in a hegemonic spirit, trying to dictate Indian foreign and strategic policy choices. It cannot be allowed to do so. Foreign policy is the prerogative of any sovereign nation’s Executive. When even the Indian parliament does not have any say in India’s foreign and strategic policies, how can the Manmohan Singh government agree to let the US Congress dictate them to India.
These were some of the apprehensions and reasons why the Left, the BJP and even the nuclear scientists had to force the government to come clean on the nuclear deal. The PM can’t fault them for the apprehensions they expressed, because it was his own government and negotiators that gave them cause.
What Singh did with his speech in the Rajya Sabha, though, was to send out a message to the US that the deal hasn’t been wrapped up yet. By using domestic criticism of the deal to put the US on notice for the first time regarding Indian bottomlines, he has finally hit upon a chance to redeem this deal, and the promised strategic partnership, with the US.
There is now nothing to lose. If India manages to get the agreement it wants, it will herald the first post-Cold War alliance between two major powers. If India does not get the agreement it wants this September, the Manmohan Singh government can still take credit for having managed to draw the US this far on the nuclear issue. This is the sort of diplomacy that is welcome.