Indo-US nuclear deal hangs by a
thread By Praful Bidwai
NEW DELHI - US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice did her best to put a positive
face on Washington's controversial nuclear
technology and supplies agreement with India as
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began
hearings on Wednesday. Nevertheless, the deal
appeared to be in deep trouble.
To
implement the deal, the US Congress must pass
special legislation allowing India-specific
waivers to US non-proliferation laws, but the
package has met with a frosty reception from key
members of the Senate and
their counterparts on the House of Representatives
International Relations Committee.
If it
fails to make it through Congress, the newly
emerging intimate India-US relationship will be
nipped in the bud. Indian policymakers consider
the nuclear agreement all-important. They view the
larger India-US bilateral relationship through the
prism of this agreement and have no realistic
options to fall back on if the deal collapses.
At the televised Senate hearings, Rice
warned that ''all the hostility and suspicion of
the past would be redoubled'' if the deal fails to
go through. The reference was to decades of
tensions between the two countries when India was
allied to the old Soviet Union during the Cold
War.
In the United States, opposition to
the agreement, which permits India to acquire
civilian nuclear technology and expertise in
exchange for permitting international inspections
of some civilian reactors, is becoming
increasingly vocal. "Highly placed" Indian
diplomatic sources have been quoted as saying the
passage of the special-waiver legislation will be
"very difficult".
Just two weeks ago
supporters of the deal were extremely upbeat about
Senate passage. ''Their optimism was high partly
because the Indian government has engaged not one,
but two major public relations firms as lobbyists,
but also because the India caucus in Congress, the
largest country-specific group of legislators, is
considered powerful,'' said K P Fabian, a former
Indian ambassador and senior diplomat. ''But now,
it is clear that the road ahead will be thorny. If
the deal doesn't go through quickly, it may
collapse altogether.''
There have been
signs of support from some Democrats, such as
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and Joseph
Biden of Delaware, but unless there is greater
bipartisan support, it is rare for a major
controversial international agreement to pass
through Congress.
One reason for this is
the coming mid-term election, which the Democrats
hope to win. They are reluctant to hand an easy
foreign-policy victory to President George W Bush
in advance of the election and thus lose a chance
to reshape the deal under a future Congress over
which they exercise greater control.
''A
far more important reason would be the misgivings
which many lawmakers have about the deal because
of its implications for the US position on nuclear
non-proliferation,'' said Achin Vanaik, professor
of international relations and global politics at
Delhi University. ''Evidently, the Bush
administration has not addressed these concerns
adequately. It was in too much of a hurry to push
the deal through.''
On Monday, the
Washington Post quoted 20 senior US and Indian
officials to the effect that neither Bush nor Rice
consulted the US foreign-affairs bureaucracy,
influential congressmen, White House staff or
government nuclear specialists. They unilaterally
executed a major shift in US nuclear policy and
relations with India through a "big bang" approach
rather than an incremental one in recruiting India
as a key ally against China.
In the
process, they overruled their own nuclear
specialists, who wanted the deal designed so that
it would limit India's nuclear-weapons potential
and place all of its civilian power reactors under
international safeguards.
This exercise in
unilateral decision-making has produced
resentments that are now finding expression in the
domestic political discourse.
Indian
policymakers drove a hard bargain, managing to
have their way in tough down-to-the-wire
negotiations. They insisted that India must have
the same rights and privileges as the
nuclear-weapons states recognized by the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), even though New
Delhi never signed it. And they succeeded in
keeping eight of India's 22 power reactors outside
international safeguards, in addition to exempting
fast-breeder reactors and military facilities.
This led a senior US official to say,
''The Indians were incredibly greedy. They were
getting 99% of what they asked for and still they
pushed for 100%.''
These hardball tactics
are now extracting a price. With major Indian
facilities exempted from safeguards, it is hard
for Bush to claim that the deal is meant to
restrain India while bringing it into the
international nuclear mainstream.
The
staunchly pro-Israel lobby may have further
complicated matters. Some of Israel's strongest
supporters, such as Congressman Tom Lantos of
California, are threatening to vote against the
deal unless New Delhi radically revises its
established positions on Iran, Palestine and the
Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and demonstrates
complete fealty to the United States.
Complementing this lobby is the
anti-Castro Cuban-American pressure group, which
would like India to dissociate itself from the
Non-Aligned Movement, whose next summit is to be
held in Havana. India has been a prominent leader
of the NAM.
''Bush might still be able to
overcome all opposition to the deal,'' said a
former official of India's National Security
Council, who insisted on anonymity. ''But this
will involve closed-door discussions with key
lawmakers, some inducements, especially to please
their constituencies and immense diplomatic skill.
It's not clear that Bush, with his plummeting
approval ratings. can muster all this.''
It seems likely that many lawmakers will
push amendments to the bills. However, Indian
Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran, on a recent visit
to the US, made it clear that amendments will kill
the deal.
The nuclear agreement is viewed
with a good deal of suspicion by the Indian
public, which does not trust the US. Public
pressure compelled Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
to disclose to the Indian parliament details of
the deal on separating India's civilian nuclear
facilities from military ones.
''He will
find it impossible to change the terms of the
agreement without attracting serious criticism and
charges of selling out,'' said Vanaik.
Even if the deal goes through, it is
likely to face opposition later in the year from
the 45-state Nuclear Suppliers' Group, and
especially from Japan, China, Germany, South
Africa, Brazil and Argentina.
The Indian
government has no fall-back strategy to cope with
the deal's possible collapse.
