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2 India splitting atoms over nuclear
deal By Zorawar Daulet Singh
NEW DELHI - Just at the apogee of the
India-US nuclear agreement saga, Indian domestic
politics are condemning its final conclusion to
another round of contentious debate. The outcome
of this eleventh-hour stumble, however, goes
beyond simply evaluating the technical parameters
of the recently negotiated bilateral agreement
with the United States over civilian nuclear
cooperation. The issue at stake is nothing less
than redrawing the fundamental premise of Indian
grand strategy and the role New
Delhi
seeks to carve out for itself in the emerging
international system.
An August 18
resolution by the left-wing parties - vital allies
for the ruling United Progressive Alliance central
coalition in New Delhi - exemplifies the domestic
political divide: "The politburo decided to take
the issue of the nuclear agreement and the dangers
of the strategic alliance with the United States
to the people through a nationwide mass campaign."
At the outset, it is useful to reflect on
the original logic of engagement with the US and
specifically on what the nuclear deal was meant to
achieve for Washington and for New Delhi.
Until the July 18, 2005, India-US joint
statement on the nuclear agreement, India's status
in the global non-proliferation system was that of
a pariah state. Since the 1974 nuclear test
(Pokhran-I) and the ensuing sanctions regime
imposed on India, New Delhi's goal was in essence
one of preserving its strategic weapons program
and insulating itself from an adverse external
diplomatic assault, prosecuted largely by the US.
Finally, in May 1998, India chose to
abandon its ambiguous posture by demonstrating a
declared nuclear-weapons capability (Pokhran-II).
This was a point of no return, and indeed India in
the ensuing couple of years endured yet another US
diplomatic onslaught, manifested in automatic
sanctions to compel New Delhi to reverse course.
Suffice it to say, New Delhi stayed the
course and by the early 2000s, most pragmatic
voices in Washington had accommodated themselves
to an India that would be permanently nuclear.
As the primary enforcer of the
non-proliferation regime, Washington chose to
pursue the next logical step of identifying a
solution to the Indian nuclear question - enabling
India to enter the nuclear system on an
exceptional basis and thus eliminating the most
contentious obstacle to the normalization of
US-India relations. But why would the US choose to
bestow such an extraordinary gesture on India?
Students of realpolitik and US foreign policy
would be acutely aware that altruism in
international affairs is as absurd as "to ravish a
woman for a purely moral reason".
This is
where the timing of the nuclear deal becomes
important. By 2005, it had become clear in
Washington that the fantasy of reshaping the
security structure of the Middle East had reached
an impasse. Geopolitical developments elsewhere
were equally disconcerting for Washington. Russia,
after more than a decade of internal upheavals,
was displaying signs of breaking free of the shell
that Washington's cold warriors had confined it to
since 1991. It will also be recalled that China
had gained from the strategic surprise of the
terror attacks of September 11, 2001, which had
diverted US strategic attention to the West Asian
theater, from President George W Bush's
pre-September 11 national-security goal of
expanding the scope of its East Asian containment
strategy.
In sum, by mid-2005, with the US
bogged down in Iraq and the two primary Eurasian
land powers, Russia and China, rapidly
accelerating their geo-economic profiles and
influence, America's unipolar triumphalism
appeared all but over. Indeed, China was seeking
to refurbish its own equation with India,
manifested most importantly by Premier Wen
Jiabao's April 2005 visit to New Delhi and the
mutual declaration of a "strategic partnership".
Russia's expanding military-technical
market share in India's modernization drive in the
same year again suggested that the US was being
excluded from a growing arms bazaar. Within South
Asia, too, there was a sense of deja vu. After the
initial exhilaration of New Delhi's elite in the
aftermath of September 11, one that had
anticipated a natural elevation of India-US ties,
the United States' geopolitically expedient
decision to ally with Pakistan as its frontline
state in Afghanistan implied that the India-US
honeymoon was over.
It is in such a
structural flux that Washington's subsequent
engagement with India must be considered. In
retrospect, the timing of Washington's decision to
revolutionize its relationship with New Delhi
appears to have immense geostrategic and
geo-economic logic, the latter arguably a critical
parallel driver for Washington eager to gain the
fruits of a belated Indian economic renaissance.
By dangling the nuclear deal, it offered
an irresistible instrument to New Delhi's
strategic elite and re-altered the incentives for
subsequent Indian foreign policy. The above
perhaps succinctly capture the larger US
incentives for the nuclear deal - gain a vital
strategic foothold in South Asia, one that it had
unsuccessfully sought over the entire course of
the Cold War.
What were the Indian motives
for the nuclear deal? This was obvious. As a
nuclear-weapon state, but one outside the
international system manifested in great-power
arrangements, New Delhi's security elite was
acutely aware that until its pariah status was
transformed, one that had lasted more than three
decades, India would remain condemned to the
periphery of the international system, without
access to high-technologies in the nuclear sphere,
and excluded from any subsequent modifications to
such arrangements.
Also cognizant of the
reality of India's lack of system-shaping
capabilities, Indian foreign policy chose to
engage with the
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