A lame-duck chance for Indo-US deal
By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - With Democrats taking control of the US House of Representatives
and likely the Senate, the fate of the India-US nuclear deal hangs in the
balance. While there is perceptible anxiety within the Indian establishment,
opinion makers feel that the uncertainty is not over whether the deal will get
passed by Congress but how long it will take to get its approval and in what
form.
The India-US nuclear deal, which offers US nuclear technology to
energy-hungry India in exchange for placing Indian civilian reactors under
safeguards, was passed by the House of Representatives by 369-68 and by the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee by a 16-2 vote. But the 100-member Senate is
yet to vote on the deal.
India was hoping that the present Republican-dominated Senate would vote on the
bill before the mid-term elections to the US Congress. But that did not happen.
The Senate recessed without voting on the bill.
And now elections have altered the makeup of the Senate and the House. There is
anxiety in some quarters that the deal will die in a Democrat-controlled
Congress, so frantic efforts are on to try to get the current Senate to give
its nod during the brief "lame duck" session, which is expected to take place
next Wednesday and Thursday.
However, this session will have a lot on its agenda; so there is concern that
the nuclear deal might not make it to a vote. Besides, given the bitter
political rivalry and the fact that Democrats are unhappy with the Bush
administration's failure to consult them on the deal means some Democrats might
want to deny the administration a major - perhaps its only - success on the
foreign-policy front. This has triggered fears among Indian officials that the
Democrats will block the deal in next week's session.
There are some promising signs, however, that the brief session will take up
the deal. India's hopes received a boost this Wednesday when at a press
conference after the Republican electoral debacle, President George W Bush said
that getting the India-US nuclear deal through the Senate at the lame-duck
session was a priority. "I'm trying to get the Indian [nuclear] deal done, the
Vietnam [trade] deal done and the budgets done," Bush said.
What is more, several influential Democrats including Harry Reid, soon to be
majority leader, and Joe Biden, soon to chair the Senate's foreign-affairs
panel, said on Wednesday that they wanted the nuclear deal to be taken up in
the lame-duck session. Biden said lawmakers were "ready to go with the India
bill".
He said it would take "at least a day's worth of debate, no more than two", to
settle the bill in the Senate and that he believed it would pass "with a very
large vote" in its favor. However, whether the Democrats can agree to trim the
number of amendments they want remains to be seen. While Biden said he believes
the number of amendments proposed by Democrats is manageable, Republicans have
said they "still need them to cut their amendments".
If the nuclear deal does not pass next week, it will be put off until January
when the new Congress meets. In this event, all procedural formalities
completed since July 2005 will be rendered invalid, and the entire process will
have to start afresh. What is worrying New Delhi is that a Democrat-controlled
Congress (Democrats have traditionally been more vociferous in their
non-proliferation position) will introduce a long list of amendments
unacceptable to India.
Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) officials point out that while Reid, the
presumed majority leader in the Senate, backs the nuke deal, he wants tighter
controls.
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 and the more difficult it will be for Manmohan to get support
domestically for nuclear cooperation with the US.
There is concern that the deal might get caught in the crossfire of domestic
politics and the game of one-upmanship in the run-up to the 2008 US
presidential elections. This is also behind Delhi's anxiety that the deal be
considered by the current Congress.
However, Indian analysts do not believe that the deal must die even if its fate
is to be determined by the new Congress. C Uday Bhaskar, a leading security
analyst of the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses in New Delhi, says
the deal "might get delayed, perhaps, but the essence of the agreement, which
envisages closer cooperation between the US and India, will neither die nor be
rejected by the new Congress".
This view is echoed by C Raja Mohan, strategic-affairs editor of the Indian
Express. The Democrats taking control of Congress "could delay or complicate
the implementation of the nuclear deal", he argued, but "there is no reason to
believe that Democrats want to kill either the deal or the burgeoning political
relationship with India".
K Subrahmanyam, a noted security-affairs expert, dismisses fears that the
election outcome has darkened the prospects of the nuclear deal. "Let's not
forget that Democrats overwhelming voted in favor of the draft bill on the
nuclear deal in the House of Representatives recently. Eighty percent of these
Democrats are back," he said, adding that the same Democrats would now not vote
against the deal.
Sources in the MEA point out that right from the initial stages of the deal,
Indian diplomats and lobbyists in the US had reached out to Congress members
from across the political divide and sought to build bipartisan support for the
deal. In addition to the backing across party lines that the deal received in
the congressional committees, many senior Democrats, including Senator John
Kerry and Congressmen Tom Lantos, have endorsed the deal publicly.
It would be "misleading" therefore to view India's deal with the US as a
"purely Republican affair", argued Bhaskar.
Indian officials accept that Democrats are as committed to improving relations
with India as are the Republicans. But they insist that gushing over India's
democracy and verbally endorsing bilateral economic and security cooperation
are not enough. They want concrete evidence of this support. And they will wait
to see whether that happens next week.
Sudha Ramachandran is an independent journalist/researcher based in
Bangalore.
