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India and the NSG

The Nuclear Suppliers Group was always going to be the toughest hurdle for the U.S.-India nuclear agreement to get past but just how difficult an obstacle it is became clear after last week’s meeting of the cartel in Vienna. The United States went into the meeting with a draft waiver it had negotiated with India which met all the benchmarks the two sides had committed themselves to in their July 18, 2005 agreement. The burden of that agreement was that in exchange fo r a clearly enumerated set of non-proliferation commitments by India, Washington would work with its friends and allies to adjust international regimes to enable full civil nuclear energy cooperation and trade with New Delhi. Unfortunately, the U.S. failed to mount a proper defence of this waiver when it came under attack from diverse quarters on a range of irrelevant questions. Worse, its delegation assured the NSG that it would convey to the Indian side the concerns expressed at the meeting and develop a new draft waiver that would presumably satisfy the cartel’s naysayers. This new draft is to be presented for approval by the 45-nation group at a second extraordinary plenary meeting to be convened in the first week of September. With the Bush administration still keen to push the agreement through its final domestic stages before Congress goes into recess on September 26, chances are that American officials will do their best to hard sell the need for a ‘new and improved’ draft to the Indian side.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s attitude should be driven by one, and only one, point. The July 2005 agreement was based on a fine balance of reciprocal obligations and will get nullified if India is now going to be asked to make additional commitments. Or if the adjustment to the NSG’s rules the U.S. promised falls short of providing the country the benefits of full cooperation and trade. India cannot accept arbitrary limits on the scope of safeguarded cooperation, nor any prescriptive or post-facto conditions. These conditions stem from the same non-proliferation urges which the Hyde Act is shot through with and which Indian negotiators sought to neutralise through the 123 agreement and the Safeguards Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Evidently, what the U.S. could not achieve through the front door, it is now trying to do through a renewed push for changes to the draft waiver at the NSG. Washington’s calculation is no doubt that having come this far and even staked his government for the sake of the nuclear deal, Prime Minister Singh will have no choice but to settle for whatever terms are thrown his way. In a few days’ time, those terms will be known. And it will then be up to Dr. Singh and the Congress party to prove the American calculation wrong.

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