Truly, a Jekyll and Hyde Scenario
(A different version of this Edit was published in Vijay Times, 11 December 2006
The striking thing about this nuclear ‘deal’ and this long drawn-out legislation process, which has produced the ‘Hyde Act’ on India-US nuclear cooperation is that it was not necessary at all. The international non-proliferation agreement, the NPT, does not prohibit any nation from selling fuel and reactors to India if these are put under safeguards. It was America that had isolated India from global nuclear flows by applying its domestic legislation in an imperialistic fashion and by forming cartels such as the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which has no international legal sanction. Therefore, if all that America had really wanted to do was to give India access to fuel and reactors, all it had to do was to whisper to Russia and France that it would not object if they sold these to India. Better still, it could have given India a real ‘deal’ by unilaterally making it an exception to domestic US non-proliferation legislation, without demanding that India take on several stringent conditions. NSG members would have then taken the cue. But that’s not all that America wants. It wants imperial control over global nuclear trade with India, it wants all the business opportunities of nuclear trade with India, and it wants to bind India strategically to its orbit. To achieve these goals, the US conducted an elaborate twenty-month-long charade of a congressional process, with all pretentious seriousness designed to make it look to Indians as if the majestic imperial congress of the world’s lone superpower was making some grand gesture of munificience towards a poor, impoverished Third World country that would not be able to survive without eating up Emperor Bush’s yellow cake. This ‘deal’ has turned out to be an excellent win for America, even as it has professed time and again that all it wanted to do was to build a strategic partnership with India, to help India rise to global power. A pliant Indian government and a Prime Minister given to serving a variety of foreign masters have been more than helpful. ‘Yes master’ bureaucrats looking for post-retirement foreign postings and craven media pundits and strategic experts have acted to build a smokescreen around the details and implications of this ‘deal’. The unnecessariness of the legislation process is matched only by the unnecessariness of the immense feeling of gratitude that India’s strategic elites have felt and sought to infect the whole nation with – a sort of strategic equivalent of the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. That unnecessary gratitude – an unseemly thing in international politics -- has made it easy and justifiable for the Indian establishment to make equally unnecessary concessions and commitments to the US. In the end, what would India get. It would be able to buy nuclear fuel and reactors from foreign sources, but under the conditions of the US legislation. What would India lose. India cannot ever conduct a nuclear test again, no matter who else does one, without putting its economy in jeopardy. India cannot ever get out of this ‘agreement’ even if nuclear supply is denied. India cannot even seek to obtain enrichment and reprocessing technologies from the US or any other source. India cannot produce and use more nuclear materials in its military facilities than the low quantity it now does. India cannot step up the production of nuclear warheads from the mere 4-6 it makes a year now. India will have to keep up a dialogue month after month and show constant progress towards cutting off its fissile material production and towards an FMCT whether or not it wants to spend its diplomatic energies on it and whether or not it agrees with the US draft of the treaty. India cannot have an independent foreign policy, notably with respect to Iran at the moment. All this suggests that the Manmohan Singh government has gone way beyond the July 18, 2005 commitments and, as Condoleeza Rice has herself said, even way beyond what a signature on the NPT would have demanded. But it is now time for the Indian Parliament and the people – nuclear-handicapped as they are -- to show the majesty of Indian democracy.
