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BY virtually concluding the nuclear cooperation or “123 agreement” on July 20, India and the United States have for all intents and purposes sealed the deal they inked two years ago. Although neither government has made public the contents of the agreement, credible reports say it meets the two main Indian concerns on which there was a stalemate. These are India’s “right” to reprocess fuel burnt in imported reactors and guaranteed nuclear supplies if the agreement is terminated – as would happen if India were to conduct another nuclear explosion. On both counts, Indian negotiators got what they wanted. The agreement grants India “prior consent” to reprocess spent fuel produced by U.S.-supplied equipment/fuel. It also formalises the fuel-supply assurances offered by the U.S. in March 2006. Washington will ensure the “continuous operation” of the reactors it sells to India. The agreement affirms the U.S’ right to demand the return of the equipment it exported – in case India tests. But the exercise of this right is hedged in by a commitment to hold mutual consultations and by the “continuous operation” assurance. Besides, India will be free to obtain nuclear supplies from other sources. These clauses are designed to ensure that “the Tarapur experience” is not repeated – that is, the U.S. response to an Indian test will not be to suspend supplies suddenly, which would cripple Indian reactors. This should quell substantially the anxieties of the agreement’s right-leaning critics, in particular nuclear scientists and engineers. Indeed, the agreement even goes beyond India’s power reactors, to be placed under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections (safeguards). It says its purpose is not to impede India’s nuclear weapons programme or hinder its acquisition of strategic materials through unsafeguarded or military facilities. This assurance goes beyond anything India is publicly reported to have demanded in the 300 hours of talks held with the U.S. negotiators. We do not yet know through what processes this was agreed upon, or why the U.S. departed so far from at least one part of the rationale it advanced domestically for the deal – namely, that it would promote nuclear restraint and bring India “into the non-proliferation tent”. However, we can hazard a reasonable guess. There was intense – apparently unprecedented – lobbying for the deal by the U.S.-India Business Council and giant corporations keen to get a slice of the economic opportunities in “emerging India”, including a major chunk of the energy technology and nuclear-power market. Besides, U.S. negotiators knew and were reminded that India has little wiggle room in drafting the agreement given Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s assurances to Parliament. Insisting on the tone and language of the Hyde Act would risk losing the deal, poisoning India-U.S. relations.
There may have been additional inducements through lucrative military contracts: it was no coincidence that the first person National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan called on in Washington was not his counterpart but Defence Secretary Robert Gates. More than $10 billion is at stake in India’s plans to buy 126 multi-role warplanes and nearly 200 helicopters. Anyhow, the deal has cleared its biggest hurdle. It still must go through the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group, and India must negotiate a special safeguards agreement with the IAEA. Those barriers might prove easier to overcome – although China’s position remains unknown and some European member-states are reluctant to make a special exception for India. It is wrong to criticise the 123 agreement as a “sell-out” or unacceptable compromise of India’s sovereignty, as the Bharatiya Janata Party does. In reality, the deal will not cap India’s nuclear weapons programme or impose intrusive inspections, under which, as a former Atomic Energy Commission chairman famously said, you cannot even move a stool without IAEA inspectors objecting. However, the deal is open to criticism precisely because it will allow India to expand its nuclear weapons programme substantially and do nothing to promote nuclear restraint, leave alone disarmament. India can use scarce indigenous uranium exclusively for weapons while importing uranium for power reactors. India will only subject 14 of its 22 operating/planned power reactors to inspections. It can continue to produce weapons-grade material in the remaining reactors as well as in fast breeders and dedicated weapons facilities. Together, these can yield enough fuel for several hundred weapons. This exceeds any notion of a “credible nuclear deterrent”. Signing the deal would render utterly incredible any Indian pledge, demand or initiative for global nuclear disarmament, an agenda to which the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) committed itself in the National Common Minimum Programme. The programme captures the common ground between the UPA and the Left, without which the government would become unviable. India cannot ask to be admitted to the global nuclear club and then demand a change in its rules, let alone its dissolution. The deal will reduce India’s ability to exert moral-political pressure on the U.S. or international institutions in favour of sober, non-militaristic, unhegemonic conduct. The deal cannot be detached from its larger context – an increasingly intimate India-U.S. relationship, which now operates at unprecedented levels and frequencies of military exercises, strategic coordination, logistics support, arms purchases and efforts at inter-operability of military hardware. As India’s two IAEA votes against Iran showed, a “partnership” with Washington can erode room for independent action. It is equally wrong to be sanguine about the claim that the deal will promote energy security. Nuclear power is a dubious route to security because it is fraught with grave problems of operational safety, accident-proneness, routine radioactivity releases and, above all, high-level wastes that remain radioactive for centuries. India’s nuclear power plans have always been marked by utopian targets. India was projected to generate 43,500 megawatts of nuclear electricity by 2000. Today, India produces less than 1/10 that amount. But even if India’s plans fructify, atomic energy’s contribution to total electricity generation will rise to 6 per cent by 2030. That cannot be a source of energy security.
It bears repeating that the nuclear deal was never about nuclear power or weapons alone. It was about building a new relationship with the U.S. as part of Washington’s larger scheme, defined by the U.S. Right in recent years. The U.S. initiated the deal for that very reason. Its logic lies in the containment of China and a U.S.-dominated strategic matrix in Asia, including West Asia, with India, Japan and Israel as its pillars. This logic can be traced all the way from U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s famous 2000 Foreign Affairs article to Ashley Tellis’s Carnegie Endowment paper proposing the deal, which says: “If the U.S. is s
erious about advancing its geopolitical objectives in Asia, it would almost by definition help New Delhi develop strategic capabilities such that India’s nuclear weaponry and nuclear forces could deter against the growing and utterly more capable nuclear forces Beijing is likely to possess….” The U.S. offered the deal as a means of assuaging “Indian hurt” at what Manmohan Singh called “three decades of iniquitous restrictions”, and the supposedly bitter “Tarapur experience”, followed by “technology denial”. At least some of the hurt is self-inflicted or concocted. Consider this: The Tarapur reactors were 100 per cent donations from the U.S., built on a turnkey basis. Although they used a technology that was the odd-man-out in India’s indigenous nuclear programme, they were constructed because the programme had faltered. India did not pay a cent for them. After India’s 1974 Pokharan test, the U.S. took years to terminate fuel supply and arrange for France to replace it. The provocation for the suspension was the source of the plutonium used in Pokharan. This came from CIRUS (Canada-India Reactor, U.S.), designed and built by Canada, to which the U.S. donated heavy water. India signed agreements with the two countries pledging that CIRUS’ products would only be used for “peaceful purposes” – and promptly proceeded to separate plutonium from its spent fuel and fashion it into a bomb. To complete the deception, and evade legal liability, India cynically called Pokharan-I a “peaceful nuclear explosion”. Given this, India’s complaint of having been unfairly punished for Pokharan-I sounds hypocritical. It reeks of a holier-than-thou attitude that demands and takes from the world, without giving. The Indian elite has convinced itself for decades that it deserves to be treated differently from the rest of the world in matters nuclear. Only injured innocence, coupled with monumental arrogance, can explain this “Indian exceptionalism”. U.S. policymakers astutely understood this and indulged the elite by offering it the nuclear deal as a token of a qualitative change in their attitude towards India. In reality, the U.S. perspective on India has not changed radically. Washington does not treat India even remotely as equal. But the deal is likely to foster that illusion. We should all critically reflect on the roots and consequences of “Indian exceptionalism” and its impact on the perceptions the deal has generated. Only then can we deal with the world in a principled, balanced and mature fashion.
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