Bad news for the Indo-US nuclear
deal By Praful Bidwai
NEW DELHI - The controversial US-India
"civilian nuclear cooperation" agreement met a
major setback over the weekend when the US Senate
recessed without voting on a bill that would have
granted President George W Bush the powers to
enable the deal to be implemented.
The
Indian government has been rattled by this
development and is pinning its hopes on a brief
"lame duck" session of the US Congress in
mid-November, when it reconvenes after elections
to
be
held on November 7.
Both the Bush
administration and the Indian government had
invested a great deal of effort into lobbying for
a quick passage of the bill through the Senate.
The House of Representatives has already passed
broadly similar legislation. The two chambers of
Congress are later meant to reconcile the two
versions and produce a single, unified law.
This law would implicitly recognize India
as a nuclear-weapons state and permit civilian
nuclear commerce with it even though India has not
signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and
has become a nuclear-weapons state in violation of
NPT principles.
However, the Senate bill
first ran into numerous procedural complications
and then got tied up with the extraneous or
unrelated agendas of some senators.
For
instance, Minority Leader Harry Reid moved an
amendment that would prevent any spent nuclear
fuel coming to his native state of Nevada for
storage at the Yucca Mountain Repository. This
would presumably include fuel burned in reactors
supplied to India by the US or from plants that
use materials traded under the India-US
nuclear-cooperation deal.
On Saturday, the
Democrats tabled as many as 19 amendments and
rejected a proposal by Majority Leader Bill Frist
to have the bill passed in its present form
through a ”unanimous consent” procedure, with the
promise of some changes to be considered and
discussed later.
Although the Democrats
agreed to accord a high priority to the bill in
the lame-duck session coming up after November 13
- that is, after the mid-term elections that could
alter the makeup of Congress - there is no
guarantee that it will really be taken up for
vote. The Democrats are expected to do better than
the Republicans in the election and may not allow
the chamber to re-convene until January.
"All this is bad news for the deal," said
M V Ramana, an independent nuclear-affairs expert
based at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies
in Environment and Development in Bangalore. "But
it's not terrible news. There is still a good
chance that the Senate resolution will eventually
go through. But there is now a higher probability
that more and more conditions will be imposed
which limit the degree of cooperation permitted
under the deal or demand special assurances from
India, which are not reciprocally sought from the
US."
If the deal cannot be approved by the
present Congress, it will once again have to go
through the entire process of drafting of separate
resolutions for the two chambers of the new
Congress that convenes in January, and of securing
agreement on them all over again.
The more
conditions imposed on the deal, the more it will
differ in content from the original agreements
signed between Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh last March.
"It's clear that the
fate of the nuclear deal now depends on the arcane
processes and parochial concerns that mark US
domestic politics, rather than on the dynamics of
the burgeoning India-United States strategic
relationship," argued Achin Vanaik, professor of
international relations and global policies at
Delhi University. "Various senators' preferences
and sectional interests will influence the way the
agreement is shaped. The initiative is no longer
in India's hands."
The Indian government
is particularly disappointed and nervous at the
weekend's result because it had made a strong
pitch for the deal through its top diplomat and
special envoy Shyam Saran and, more recently,
through Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee.
Last week in the US, Mukherjee met with
various members of the India Caucus in Congress,
as well as the American Jewish Committee and
influential representatives of the Indian-American
community.
Business groups, in particular
the defense-industry lobby and manufacturers of
nuclear-power equipment, have also been pitching
for the nuclear deal, according to Subrata
Ghoshroy of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology Center for International Studies. He
calls the deal a "triumph of the business lobby".
But the triumph has not yet been fully
accomplished.
Had the Senate vote gone
through before the recess, India would have been
in an advantageous position at consultations due
this month in the Nuclear Suppliers' Group. The
deal must be approved by the 45-member NSG before
it becomes effective. The International Atomic
Energy Agency too must clear it.
There may
be some opposition in the NSG to the agreement
from the Scandinavian states, Ireland and New
Zealand. China too is known to be uncomfortable
with it but is keeping its cards close to its
chest.
Besides this uncertainty, and
problems likely to be caused by a shift in the
balance of power between the Democrats and
Republicans in the US Congress, the deal faces two
obstacles: one in the United States, the other in
India.
First, the Senate bill explicitly
prohibits the "export or re-export to India of any
equipment, materials, or technology related to the
enrichment of uranium, the reprocessing of spent
nuclear fuel or the production of heavy water".
But the Indian nuclear lobby is extremely keen on
the right to reprocess spent fuel from power
reactors, whether imported or domestic, so that
plutonium can extracted from it.
India has
drawn up super-ambitious plans to produce 275,000
megawatts of nuclear-generated power (or more than
double the Indian power-generation capacity today
from all sources combined) by the mid-21st
century. This presumes the use of fast-breeder
reactors based on the reprocessing of spent fuel.
India's Atomic Energy Commission chairman
is on the record as saying that he won't accept a
deal that does not allow reprocessing of spent
fuel.
It is not clear how the Bush and
Singh governments will crack this nut. Their
difficulties will grow if the Democrats emerge
stronger in next month's election. In that case,
the influence of the traditional non-proliferation
lobby will grow, and the deal's passage will bear
its imprint.
The domestic Indian obstacle
is the political opposition, especially the
right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, which rejects
any shift away from the goalposts set by the
original July 2005 agreement.
It will try
to hold the Singh government down to its earlier
commitments, which call for unconditional nuclear
cooperation. This is likely to narrow the
government's room for maneuver and compromise.
