Twist in deal story

The controversy over a letter published in Wednesday’s edition of the Washington Post is one more twist in the tense drama of India getting a waiver from the private club of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), which is meeting this week, for the nuclear deal with the US to finally go through. The publication of the clarifications sent by a US state department official to the chairman of the house foreign relations committee in January this year is not a really a secret communication as such. It is part of the regular communication that always goes on between the legislature and the executive in any democracy.

From the manner in which this leak has assumed the proportions of an earth-shattering event, it appears to be a last-ditch attempt by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NT) supporters in Washington and elsewhere to scuttle the deal. This echo has been picked up here by the UPA’s political opponents who claim the government has ‘lied’ to the country, a charge not made for the first time, but one that has now lost its novelty.
But the domestic political fallout should not throw either the Manmohan Singh government or the Bush administration off balance.

What state department official Jeffrey Bergner wrote to the then house committee chairman of foreign relations, the late Tom Lantos, is straightforward. His communication said that the nuclear agreement will end the day India tests and that transfers of sensitive technologies were not part of the deal. That has been on the table from day one. India went into it with full knowledge, but gave a political spin to it saying that India was already observing a voluntary moratorium, declared by none other than the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government. Prime minister Manmohan Singh and his Congress colleagues has in fact emphasised that it was not Congress that had eschewed future testing. It was clear as daylight that as and when India chooses to conduct a nuclear test, it would be ready to face the consequences of global sanctions once again.

The implicit Indian assumption has been that India does not see the need for conducting Pokhran III in the near future, and that there is no need for facing up to the fallout of a hypothetical question. Singh has made it clear on more than one occasion.

Even the BJP and its prime ministerial hopeful LK Advani know that they will not conduct a nuclear test if they are returned to power because such a test does not add to the country’s military prowess. The Left’s opposition was the overriding anti-American sentiment. Whether the deal fails or succeeds, it is unlikely to be because of well-timed leaks such as this.