Nukes wrangle threatens Indian
government By Praful Bidwai
NEW DELHI - As India's coalition
government tries to complete the controversial
nuclear cooperation deal with the United States,
it finds itself caught between domestic opposition
to the agreement from its left-wing allies and
pressure from Washington to seal the deal.
For the agreement to be completed, it
needs to be approved by the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA), and must receive
unconditional exemption from the rules for nuclear
commerce set by the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers'
Group (NSG), before it is put
up
for ratification by the US Congress.
At
stake is the survival of India's United
Progressive Alliance government, which needs the
support of the left for a parliamentary majority.
After a second round of talks between the UPA
coalition and the left in a 15-member committee
three days ago, the two sides seem no closer to
reconciling their differences on the deal.
The Communist Party of India (Marxist),
India's largest leftist party, has asked the UPA
government to put off all talk of completing the
deal by six months.
And in a sign that the
ruling Congress party could be readying for early
elections, Rahul Gandhi, scion of India's famed
Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty, was named general
secretary of the Congress. Rahul's mother Sonia is
the powerful president of the party.
Rahul's great-grandfather Jawaharlal
Nehru, grandmother Indira Gandhi and father Rajiv
were all prime ministers, and his appointment
comes after calls from within the party that he
play a greater political role.
The present
government has a mandate until 2009, but many
believe that elections will come earlier if the
deadlock over the landmark nuclear deal is not
settled.
India's leftist parties oppose
the deal because they see it as it a way of
bringing India into the US strategic orbit and of
compromising sovereign decision-making on foreign
policy, security and nuclear matters. They also
have reservations about the economic viability of
nuclear-generated electricity, which the deal
seeks to promote in a big way.
Other
critics of the deal stress that it would weaken
the global non-proliferation norm and help India
build up its nuclear-weapons arsenal, and hence
trigger a dangerous nuclear-arms race in the
subcontinent and Asia as a whole.
Meanwhile, the US is setting the timetable
for the negotiations process at the IAEA and the
NSG. The chief US technical negotiator for the
deal, Richard Stratford, has said: "The US wants
to meet the entire prerequisites of the
operationalization of the deal by the end of this
year."
Washington has told India that it
wants to present the deal formally for approval at
the NSG's meeting in South Africa on November 11.
This means that India will have to negotiate a
special inspections (safeguards) agreement with
the IAEA well before that.
The sequencing
and timing of the process are being largely
determined by the domestic political calculations
of the US administration, which is heavily
invested in the deal. The administration of
President George W Bush would like to present the
agreement for the US Congress's ratification soon
after its winter break.
"This only leaves
a narrow window of opportunity for pushing the
deal quickly through Congress," said M V Ramana,
an independent nuclear-affairs analyst at the
Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in
Environment and Development in the Indian city of
Bangalore.
"Clearly, the Bush
administration feels that it can use the deal
before the next presidential election in favor of
the Republican Party by touting it as a major
foreign-policy achievement - in contrast to Iraq
and Afghanistan. That's why it seems to be in a
hurry to speed up the negotiations process."
Added Ramana: "There may be yet another
calculation, too. President Bush's advisers know
that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh faces serious
domestic opposition to the deal, and they probably
want to help him by building countervailing
pressure against the left."
However, the
United States' pressure tactics may have the
opposite effect. They could well precipitate a
major confrontation between the UPA and the
leftist parties, leading to the unraveling of the
government. So far, the left has desisted from
threatening to topple the government.
Last
month, the UPA and the left agreed to set up a
joint committee to resolve differences on the
deal.
They have focused, in particular, on
a special law called the Henry J Hyde Act passed
by the US Congress last December, and the "123"
agreement signed between the two governments this
past July to amend Section 123 of the US Atomic
Energy Act so as to permit nuclear cooperation
with India, although it has not signed the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty and is a de facto
nuclear-weapons state.
The UPA has made no
specific commitment to stop taking steps to
complete the deal until the committee completes
its deliberations, but it was agreed that "the
operationalization of the deal will take into
account the committee's findings".
A
speeded-up negotiation process with the IAEA and
the NSG is likely to muddy the waters of the
UPA-left talks and might lead to their collapse.
The Communist Party of India recently warned that
if the government held talks with the IAEA on a
safeguards agreement at its general conference in
Vienna, the CPI would regard it as a "breach of
trust".
Indian Atomic Energy Commission
chairman Anil Kakodkar did address the IAEA
meeting last week, but refrained from making a
specific mention of the US-India nuclear deal
during his speech. However, he held informal
consultations with IAEA director general Mohamed
ElBaradei and nuclear officials from different
countries.
It is uncertain, however, if
the deal will sail smoothly through the IAEA, and
especially the NSG.
Although the IAEA
bureaucracy, and ElBaradei in particular, is
sympathetic to the deal, the agency's board of
governors may not be unanimous in conceding
India's demand for a special safeguards protocol,
which limits inspections on Indian facilities to
the period during which they receive imported
supplies. Typically, the IAEA demands safeguards
in perpetuity.
Indian officials are
hopeful that along with their US counterparts they
will be able to persuade the board.
"Securing exceptional exemptions for India
from the NSG might prove even more difficult,"
argued Achin Vanaik, professor of international
relations and global politics at the University of
Delhi. "Several members of the group have
reservations about making a special, indeed
unique, exception for India because that will
damage the global non-proliferation regime. Some,
such as New Zealand, Ireland and the Nordic
states, have expressed their opposition.
"Even countries like Germany, the
Netherlands and Japan seem inclined not to grant
an unconditional exemption to India. It is hard to
tell if combined lobbying by India, the US and
other supporters of the deal like Britain, France
and Russia will bring the fence-sitters on board.
And what position China will adopt remains the
greatest unknown," Vanaik said.
Beijing is
known to favor a "criteria-based" generic
approach, rather than a country-specific one, to
the question of exempting de facto nuclear-weapons
powers such as India and Pakistan from the tough
regime of NSG rules. It also enjoys a remarkably
friendly relationship with Pakistan, and would not
like to see India acquire more nuclear weapons as
a consequence of the US deal.
However,
China may not want to be the sole NSG member state
to be seen to be opposing the US-India nuclear
deal. It will probably wait to see how other
countries play their cards before revealing its
own hand.
Said Vanaik: "If the NSG
negotiations get significantly delayed because of
opposition or reservations, the deal might get
jeopardized. The US Congress will soon get
preoccupied with domestic issues as the
presidential election approaches. And it is far
from clear if Bush will have the political capital
or the ability to push the deal through once he
becomes a proper lame duck."
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