S. Raghotham
The Manmohan Singh-Shyam Saran ‘ready-to-bend’ approach to the India-US nuclear deal has already turned what was a rare opportunity to exhibit a new Indian strategic mind into a failure of diplomacy and strategic consciousness.
The danger lies in the fact that on nuclear matters in India, there are no formal checks on the prime minister. If he is already on the path to compromising India’s nuclear interests and if he is determined to continue on that path, there is little in the way to stop him, except perhaps a nation-wide outcry.
It is time parliament took control of the nation’s nuclear matters.
Up until now, India’s entire nuclear programme has been a closely guarded affair, with no parliamentary control over it. All heads in the nuclear establishment have reported directly to the prime minister. Jawaharlal Nehru instituted this arrangement in the 1940s to protect a fledgling nation’s fledgling nuclear programme from superpower pressures to stop or gain control over it as well as to give a free hand and budget to Homi Bhabha to build and nurture the programme.
Successive prime ministers have preserved the arrangement since the logic behind it – strategic autonomy – has persisted. So long as the idea of prime ministerial control was to preserve India’s strategic autonomy, it was acceptable that parliament and the people at large did not have any say over the nuclear programme.
But now that the prime minister himself is seeking to subject India’s nuclear programme to international dictates to gain condition-ridden civil nuclear cooperation, it is imperative that parliament and the people must demand to be fully informed about the programme and about the international agreement being sought to be finalised.
Any decision to open up the nuclear programme to international inspections and any decision to undertake and abide by international commitments must be made not by the prime minister and foreign secretary alone but by the parliament and the people of India after due debate.
Such parliamentary control is especially necessary when the nation’s Executive is preparing to bend before terms dictated by unequal arrangements such as the Non-Proliferation Treaty and cartels such as the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group.
If not from our own predicament, we must at least learn this lesson of parliamentary control from the Americans themselves. In the US, although the President has immense power and authority in respect of foreign and national security affairs, when it comes to signing international agreements, especially those that affect proliferation issues, the President is forced to go back to the US Congress and get its approval.
Consider the present matter of the India-US civil nuclear deal itself. The Bush administration negotiated and signed with India an agreement to build a ‘strategic partnership’ between the two. It was based on President Bush and his advisors’ understanding that such a partnership with India was necessary for the US to preserve its position of global primacy and the international economic and security systems it has fostered in the face of a rising and antagonistic China.
Despite the India-US partnership being of such vital national interest, President Bush is still forced to go to the US Congress for its approval because in 1978 the country took nuclear matters out of the realm of Executive discretion and put it under congressional control so that no President would have the opportunity to harm American non-proliferation interests even if he attempted to do so with the best of intentions.
We must learn from them.
