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Into the home stretch

Having secured the backing of key committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate, the India-U.S. agreement on civil nuclear cooperation can be expected to overcome its final legislative hurdle — passage before a full sitting of both houses of Congress — some time next month. A junior Senator has threatened to come up with a filibuster but given the decisive support for the Bill at the committee stage, getting the 60 ayes needed in the Senate to overcome such irritants may not prove difficult. Why has opposition melted away in the U.S. legislative branch? The deal with India is seen in Washington as providing the U.S. enormous strategic leverage in Asia; and the White House has shrewdly kept the focus on this big picture. A little bit of textual jugglery ensured that every major congressional critic's pet bugbear was reflected in the preambular language. The Bill bristles with offensive demands on subjects such as Iran and non-proliferation. After the U.S. Atomic Energy Act is amended, Washington will have to move the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) for a change in its rules to enable nuclear commerce with India. While work on the India-specific safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency can proceed alongside the NSG's deliberations, the in-perpetuity safeguards envisaged must not enter into force until the nuclear cartel formally changes its rules.

Once this happens, cooperation with technology-supplying countries such as Russia and France, or uranium suppliers like Kazakhstan, can begin immediately, although purchases from the U.S. will need to await the formal clearance by Congress of an additional agreement on nuclear cooperation. To the extent the preambular portions of the U.S. Bill have no binding legal validity, Indian officials have been able to suggest that this is no big deal. But the fact remains that in trying to secure the deal on civilian nuclear cooperation, the Manmohan Singh Government let down the country badly by caving in on the Iran nuclear issue. Aside from the shameful negative vote against Iran at the IAEA in September 2005, New Delhi has been boxing under its weight on the world stage in an effort to please the Bush White House. When the civil-military nuclear separation plan was settled in early March, this newspaper took the editorial stand that while the technical misgivings about the deal had more or less been addressed, a close watch needed to be kept on the political and strategic costs that were likely to follow. Four months later, as we enter the home stretch, the warning is eminently worth repeating. New Delhi would like to treat the nuclear deal as a standalone agreement but Washington has a host of collateral expectations in the strategic and economic field. India must come out of the foreign policy trap and reassert the independence of its external policy. Else, the nuclear deal will turn out to be an albatross round its neck.

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