In My View

To be, or not to be

Shakespeare’s Hamlet faced the dilemma. India’s stated goal for the US-India civilian nuclear cooperation agreement is to tap into the substantial nuclear commerce that can help it build nuclear power. But its US partner has as its goal of bringing India into the nuclear non-proliferation dominant stream and strengthen it. India is thus caught on cleft stick, facing the Hamletian paradox.

Siddharth Varadarajan, reporting for the Hindu newspaper from Vienna’s Nuclear Suppliers’ Group meet, wrote in an opinion piece, “What happened at Vienna, however, was a coordinated attack in which the smaller states were encouraged to do Washington’s business for it.” He called it an American “double-cross.”

This space had earlier argued almost two years ago that the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers’ Group is really an organisation where the tasks are divided between the major powers and their ardent followers. The major powers and follower nations have evolved the group out of a consensus on the basis of maintaining the monopoly on nuclear weapons power and nuclear technology. While the major powers ensure the security of minor nations, the latter help them to clamp down on the proliferation of nuclear technology, so that any other nation outside the club cannot barge in through the barn door.

The BJP’s Jaswant Singh had understood this quaint principle quite literally. He had thus thought that India too could shut the barn door behind it, after entering the portals of the club. He had grown that belief on the basis of an understanding that the Indian elite have grown a unity of common interest with the global elite that could transcend the latter’s class consciousness, thus forging even deeper alliances between the two.

But what he failed to realise was that the alliance he, as a member of the Indian elite, sought might not be the alliance the USA sought from India. In the eyes of the USA, India is a ‘wannabe’ power, which could be pandered to only till its limited goals are satisfied.

Take the case of two US Democratic Party legislators. Edward J Markey is the co-chairman of the House of Representatives bi-partisan task force on nonproliferation. And, Ellen O Tauscher is the chairwoman of the House Strategic Forces Subcommittee. They co-wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times on 19 August, “India’s nuclear history is checkered at best, and New Delhi has been denied access to the international nuclear market for three decades. The reasons are well known: the country has never signed the nonproliferation treaty or the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, it misused civilian nuclear technology to produce its first nuclear weapon in 1974, and it continues to manufacture nuclear weapons to this day.”

They also wrote, “The Indian nuclear deal threatens international security not only by undermining our nuclear rules, but also by expanding India’s nuclear weapons program. That’s because every pound of uranium that India is allowed to import for its power reactors frees up a pound of uranium for its bomb program.”

To ameliorate that stated situation, the US had legislated the Hyde Act. Indian elite believes that they would circumvent the Act by the periodic exclusions that US presidential waivers would entail, as have been included in the presidential “signing statement” of the law. The Indian elite did not tell the Indian public the amount of discretionary power this devolves on the US president over the Indian nuclear programme.

This discretionary power would be wielded only when the interests of the Indian elite would be in line with the interests of the Western elite. In other words, India’s studied silence about the Georgian issue – considering that one of its closest allies, Russia is involved – would be the order of the day.

Another deadline has gone by unnoticed by most on the Iranian gas pipeline deal. India failed to conform to the desire of the Iranian government that the three governments – India, Pakistan and Iran – get together in August to hammer out the final details. Yet, the civilian nuclear deal, for which Manmohan Singh even besmirched his “Mr Clean” image by buying MPs of opposition parties in Parliament, remains undelivered.

New Zealand that is better known for the wool it produces than its nuclear concerns has emerged as the current storm trooper of the US and its other allies, to berate India on its nuclear nonproliferation record. It has now said that, “it wants limits on the scope of the technology that can be given to India and that could relate to nuclear weapons.” What it means in simple language are enrichment and reprocessing technologies, which are dual use technologies.

But what it reflects is the mistrust these nations have about a country that had earlier set aside the arrogance of the nuclear haves, and developed nuclear technology on its own. Now that same country is desperate for entering the ranks of a group that it had once called perpetrators of ‘nuclear apartheid.’ So there is got to be a cost that the Indian elite would have to pay. And that cost is India’s nuclear sovereignty.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhumi, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in