Tough deal

If anyone thought that the Indo-US nuclear agreement would have smooth passage, reality has begun to bite. This is not surprising; from the beginning, it had been clear that getting the relevant approvals from multiple authorities would not be an easy task. Still, there are now some unexpected twists and turns. First, David Mulford, the US ambassador in New Delhi, denied that the US had tried to change the goal-posts after the July 2005 agreement had been worked out. In direct contradiction to that, the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, has more or less said that that is exactly what has happened. No specifics are available on what is sought to be changed, but it is evident that opposition in the US Congress and the non-proliferation lobby has begun to have impact.

Meanwhile, the timeframe for bringing the process to fruition has become more uncertain. The 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group meets next month, but the Indo-US deal is apparently not on the agenda. Nor has India engaged with the International Atomic Energy Agency on the issue. Whether, as a consequence, the necessary US legislation will be delayed (earlier reports had spoken of a May target) remains therefore to be seen.

Within India, opposition to the deal has become more focused, and hinges on two issues""both perhaps flowing from the claim (now belied) that, following the treaty coming into force, India will get the same rights and responsibilities as the nuclear haves. The first question is whether the unilateral declaration of conducting no more nuclear tests is being converted into a bilateral commitment that will have the same effect as signing the still-born test ban treaty, and which therefore can torpedo the nuclear supplies that the Indo-US agreement facilitates. Second, is the current stage of detailed negotiations and drafting being used to achieve the non-proliferation treaty objectives that India has refused to accept for nearly 40 years? Remember that President Bush's second term in office began with the promise of wanting to help India become a major power, and his broaching of the nuclear deal was part of that process, designed as it was to remove a longstanding bilateral irritant. Now if some other objectives have been tagged on, aimed basically at containing India's perfectly reasonable nuclear ambitions, the context begins to look a little different.

Without going into arcane nitty-gritty, it can be safely said the deal is worth salvaging in its original form""or Pakistan would not have sought a similar deal for itself. The Prime Minister's statement in Parliament in February makes clear why. But if India develops a major nuclear power programme that is linked to international supplies of uranium as raw material, and if those supplies are switched off if India tests again (assuming that pressing strategic reasons make that necessary), then India's energy sector and therefore its whole economy become vulnerable in a way that is not the case today. Whether private investment in nuclear power will materialise, in the face of such risks, is the other question.

If the government decides, on careful examination, that the deal is taking a shape that was not envisaged and one that does not look attractive, it should first make it clear to the US that this is unacceptable, and then seek to limit the fall-out of a failed agreement""perhaps by dragging out the whole process till everyone loses interest. However, even in that extreme scenario, it remains important to improve relations with the US on a number of other fronts, many of them envisaged in the July 2005 statement.