Opinion - Interviews   

‘Nuclear deal will have little effect on broad framework of bilateral ties’

— Photo: V. Ganesan

David Mulford … the deal isn’t dead.

U.S. Ambassador to India David Mulford says time may be running short for the nuclear deal. However, business, education and political links will cement the relationship beyond any changes in the leadership of both countries. He was speaking to senior journalists at The Hindu in Chennai on Monday. Excerpts.

Opening remarks of Ambassador Mulford:

I’m coming up to almost four and a half years in India now, which will shortly make me the second longest serving ambassador in the history of the United States in India. And India is a place that I think you’ll probably agree requires some time to understand — I won’t say master, but to understand. And so I’ve developed a number of perspectives.

Oddly enough, one of them is very much the same as when I arrived. Which is — and I think it’s because I come from a private sector background — I see the U.S.-India relationship essentially as a massive civil private sector relationship.

The U.S. and India have a comprehensive relationship [that] extends into virtually every area of human activity.

And this has been a continuing process and it has continued right along without any interruption. The only difference is that in the last year or two, the civil nuclear issue has, in a way, sucked the oxygen out of everything else. And the media has focussed mainly on that. All these other things, they get reported and they get discussed but not as a comprehensive unit.

That is understandable, but I always take a moment to emphasise that, because it is a very, very durable relationship, a people-to-people, company-to-company, university-to-university, city-to-city… It is a very diverse and durable relationship.

And what this means is that in the official bilateral relationship where the two governments do not always see eye to eye on a variety of issues — and indeed, in the case of the civil nuclear agreement, we have not yet completed that agreement — and people say, “Well, isn’t that going to damage the relationship?”

The answer to that, I think, is that it will have very little effect on the broad exterior part of the relationship. I think at the heart of the relationship, it’s unlikely to have a significant impact, but I don’t think you can say it won’t have any, simply because there is a level of trust that is built up between the two partners on things and both sides have degrees of discretion in what they can do. So whether or not the same breakthrough feeling on discretionary issues will persist, or will suffer a period of setback or pause, I just don’t think anybody can really know.

But none of this will, in my view, change the essential direction and health of the relationship.

No, no the deal isn’t dead. It’s very hard to manage this process in public and therefore what we did was, we indicated to people that we needed to have the decision by India to go forward fairly early in this year. And the reason for that was the Congressional timetable that the Congress had prescribed when it passed the Hyde Act for bringing the 123 package back to Congress for final processing. And as time has gone on, it’s become clear that we can no longer meet that timetable and that Congress will not be able to meet that timetable in accordance with those procedures. But the United States Congress is an institution which has a small core of leaders who can decide to approach something differently. And in more recent times, when we’ve had various Congressional visitors, you’ve seen people like Mr. [Joseph] Biden (U.S. Senator) indicate that we understand the delay and we’re patient with local process in India and we respect that process and it looks as if, you know, we get something by June, we can still process it.

So that’s where things stand. I think we’re down to the last days, practically speaking, but nobody can be absolutely sure because the Congress could make a determination that something that’s so important, and do it on short notice, so nobody can be absolutely sure. But we’re clearly at the point where there is, practically speaking, only a very narrow window to complete the process.

Well, it’s all been determined that everything will stay in place. Because if India was going to buy uranium from somebody else — I mean, they could have done that anytime. The Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) of countries will not cooperate with that and nor will the major countries such as France and Russia, who have reached understandings about cooperating with India, but whose conditions for activating those understandings is that the current deal has to go through the IAEA, the NSG process, and be ratified by the full international community of civilian nuclear countries. So that would be regarded with disapproval.

If you talk to American universities, I think what you’ll find is that they have a huge interest in India. [It is] not just in the case of attracting more Indian students, but in exchanging students, exchanging professors, and in many cases, even thinking about investing capital in India, in the university system, either on a joint venture basis with other players here… There’s a lot of thinking going on. I think down the road, U.S. universities are going to be looking at different models of cooperation, all the way from exchanges to joint degrees, investment in a physical plant in India if possible. But I think that’s still to come, because it’s in the discussion and reflection stage.

Well, we have 84,000 Indian students in America and here, we have 1,700 Americans. So there’s a trade imbalance there of some considerable size and it seems to me remarkable that that should persist. In fact, I don’t think it will, because India’s arrival on the world stage — or if you want to put it that way, India’s arrival in the U.S. — is something that’s only three or four years old. Young people are fascinated by India and they’re going to be putting pressure on their universities to have an exchange programme here just as they have in Europe or Japan or China or wherever. In fact, I know that’s going on. So the universities are going to have to find a way to accommodate those demands because American students want to come here.

Yes, this is an issue that’s been very much on my plate because we’ve had enormous problems in the Fulbright programme. We have about 90 Fulbright scholars a year that come to India. The applications are processed and the announcements are made in April, and then the arrangement is that within three months, those scholars are to be processed and given visas and come to India for the school year. We actually got to the point two years ago, where, of our 90 scholars, only 10 or 12 were cleared. So I took this up with the government. There were two problems — getting the visas, [and] also rejection of projects without explanation for about 10 or 12 per cent of the applicants. Whereas for the Fulbright students from India coming to America, we process a Fulbright in an afternoon, we don’t care what subject he’s studying.

We then looked into the question of the Fulbright programme itself. When you look around the world at the Fulbright programme generally, most countries, over the years, have become contributors to the programme. So I approached the Indian government, and said I thought that the right thing to do here is two things — alter the agreement so that India put up half the money and therefore would be a participant and we could expand the programme. And secondly, that we should authorise them to go to private corporations and raise money on top of that, so that a programme which has about 150 scholars today, could easily have 600 or 700. And they have, at this point, agreed in principle to these things. We are in the process of, we hope, working these things through to the point where we can complete this and sign a new agreement.

Well, I issued a statement, which I think you saw, which was very short and to the point. President Bush is a great admirer and friend of India and he was making an observation among many that was taken out of context. I was surprised and I was not all impressed by the superficiality of the comments that came, especially from India. I think we have to focus on getting ahead with solving problems and move away from these really unpleasant vitriolic comments against Mr. Bush who has done a lot for India, he’s a great friend of India.

Well, that’s an issue that I think will take some time to really understand because biofuels were a fashionable solution for many, many years. It is now clear, it is having unintended consequences which are quite hard to measure in terms of prices. Economists put the effect at something like three per cent on food prices. My own instinct is that it must be higher than that. I think now people are looking to step back and I think they’ll look a little more intelligently into the range of the problem. And the United States is in the process of making what would be a very big change in its food programme, which is to buy food close to where the food is needed, instead of sending U.S. food.

I think of all the major relationships the U.S. has around the world, this is the one that will probably change least by a change in administrations in Washington. I say that because, Americans like India. They’ve discovered Indians in America in a much more pronounced way over the last few years. The Indian community in America is very popular, very admired, very respected. I think that India has in many ways captured the imagination of America and therefore I see the relationship continuing pretty well as it is today. That might change if there was a major rupture over something in the policy area but I don’t really see that happening, because between the United States and India, there is a body of fairly common interests. We have all the features of democracy that we share — a free press, the rule of law, individual freedom, religious tolerance, a secular state, a military that is under the control of political civilian leadership… there’s a long list of these things, and what they generate is a wide variety of similar values and similar interests, and after all this is what governs the relations between nations. And therefore, I think that the change in administration will not be a significant event.

(For the full text of Ambassador Mulford’s on-the-record session at The Hindu, see www.thehindu.com)

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

A glass half full
From slow poison to instant killer
To invoke or not to invoke R2P in Burma
How to shut up boring people
Reluctant Turks prepare for smoking ban
Corrections and clarifications
Indictment
On Sethusamudram
Jihadi manifesto
‘Nuclear deal will have little effect on broad framework of bilateral ties’

Copyright © 2008, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu