Ejaz Haider on the India-US nuclear deal

India strikes nuclear gold

Ejaz Haider

"…the Indian government was, from the outset, disinclined to compromise. Its short-term goal was to resist precisely the sort of abnegation the United States proposed. Its strategy was to play for the day when the United States would get over its huffing and puffing and, with a sigh of exhaustion or a shrug of resignation, accept a nuclear-armed India as a fully responsible and fully entitled member of the international community….

“As one of the architects of the Indian strategy, Jaswant Singh came closer to achieving his objective in the dialogue than I did to achieving mine.”

Strobe Talbott, Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb; p5

albott, then deputy secretary of state and President Clinton’s special envoy for South Asia in the wake of Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests in May 1998, could not have got it more right. What India embarked upon with the tests and later with the dialogue – as opposed to negotiations with the US – came to fruition when the US signed the nuclear pact with India during Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent visit to Washington (July 18-21). The past seven years have been the story of growing US-India relations, with India remaining bang on target about its objectives and goals, seeing the US pare down its expectations to the point where it (US) has had to accept India as a responsible and legitimate nuclear-weapon state.

Any analysis of what India’s new partnership with the US means must be seen in relation to the patient policy New Delhi pursued after the tests and which has survived three changes of government since then. Consider.

The BJP government cast aside India’s policy of ambiguity and pulled the bomb out of the basement and put it on the shelf. It assessed correctly that the window for doing so was fast closing. But testing itself meant nothing; the hard currency of nuclear weapons in the world of realpolitik must translate into something concrete, and to India’s advantage.

Talbott’s book is the story of how India moved systematically and without remitting its efforts to that end. The tests brought India face to face with the US and “In that sense, the dialogue [became] its own reward, as both a means and an end”. While the unfolding of India-US relations following the tests is not merely a tale of engagement on the nuclear issue, the tests and the dialogue provided the unguent that helped the Cold War wounds heal, allowing the relationship to evolve in multiple dimensions.

The recent Indo-US Joint Statement takes the relationship to a level higher than the NSSP (Next Steps in Strategic Partnership) that was worked out between former Indian National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra and his US counterpart Condoleezza Rice. The Rice-Mishra dialogue, spread over 2001-4, was the continuation of the Talbott-Singh engagement of 1998-2000. The NSSP was the stepping-stone to the June 30 10-year defence pact signed between India and the US and the defence pact paved the way for Washington’s acceptance of New Delhi as a legitimate NWS.

Frankly, the deal is not about cooperation in nuclear energy or even extending dual-use technology to India, important though these factors are in a technical sense. It is about accepting India as a responsible state despite its having shot a hole through the non-proliferation agenda. It is also about conceding that what India has done cannot be reversed and if the US wants to partner India, it will have to legitimise India’s de facto status as a nuclear-weapon state by signing a bilateral agreement with it on nuclear cooperation.

This is the real significance of the agreement and begets India a prize that has not come the way of any other state that has defied the NPT (Israel is an exception but its programme, officially, still remains underground). Contrast the words of President Clinton, “We’re going to come down on those guys like a ton of bricks,” with the Bush administration’s acceptance of the parameters of strategic partnership that India was demanding even at the time Talbott was dialoguing with Singh.

While the Clinton administration remained firm on its four benchmarks, two broad aspects of the policy pursued by India, from the outset, are clear from Talbott’s own account: India kept dissembling on the nuclear question and bought time not only on that issue, but also used it to further the other evolving dimensions of India-US relations. Clinton’s 5-day high profile visit to India provided the plinth for the new relationship. As Talbott writes, another theme of his book is that “it is the story of the turning point in US-Indian relations”.

Critics argue that India will now have less room to play, having compromised its independence by getting into a strategic and defence partnership with the US. This assessment is wrong. India’s diplomacy has shown itself to be pegged on a clear assessment of what New Delhi wants. While a partnership does mean acting in tandem with another state and to that extent forfeiting some freedom of action, India has correctly assessed that it can play ball with the US, at least until it suits it, and that it can accept certain constraints as the price for acquiring other, longer-term capabilities essential for power projection.

It is easier for New Delhi to do so, having unmoored itself from its Nehruvian legacy. Space does not allow a point-wise reading of the defence pact or the agreement on nuclear cooperation but suffice to say that India has gotten more out of the agreements than the US. (The BJP’s cavilling about the deal is simply a case of sour grapes; it would have loved to cut this deal if it were in power.)

Disarmament activists do not like the deal because they think that the US-India pact would further damage the non-proliferation regime. That is Talbott’s read when, following the recent deal, he wrote an op-ed for YaleGlobal Online ( A bad day for non-proliferation ; July 23): “In fact, India and the United States have both shown a penchant for going it alone, and if their versions of unilateralism reinforce each other, it will work to the detriment of institutions like the United Nations and risk turning agreements like the non-proliferation treaty from imperfect but useful mechanisms into increasingly ineffectual ones.”

The only problem with this assessment is that it views the NPT as becoming increasingly ineffectual in the future The fact is that from the time the US senate refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to the stillborn Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty to the electoral win for the Republicans in 2000 to the Nuclear Posture Review in 2002 to the lifting of the 10-year-long ban by the US Congress on the development of tactical nuclear weapons to the impotent NPT RevCon last June, the non-proliferation regime, as understood and pursued by the Clinton administration, is already in the throes of death.

Robert Einhorn symbolised non-proliferation as pursued by the Clinton administration; John Bolton symbolised the attitude of the Bush administration. The difference between the two approaches, from treaty-based, normative acceptance of non-proliferation to force-based counter-proliferation is like hands across the sea. What India has done is to stick to its agenda and exploit the space provided by the Bush administration’s new approach to nuclear weapons.

This is of course a bird’s eye-view of the development. There are other dimensions of it to which we shall come next week.