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INDIA/US: Nuke Deal on Pause

Analysis by Praful Bidwai

NEW DELHI, Oct 12 2007 (IPS) - Stiff opposition from coalition partners in the ruling United Progressive Alliance, as well as hesitation within its own ranks, has compelled India’s Congress party to put on hold negotiations for completing the controversial nuclear cooperation deal with the United States.

This casts serious doubt over whether the agreement will be completed, or fall through owing to lack of domestic and international consensus.

If it goes through, the deal would allow India to import. nuclear fuel and reactors, despite the fact that India has nuclear weapons, has tested them, and has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Although there is no clarity yet about the duration of the suspension of the negotiation process, it is likely to last till the end of December, and possibly into early next year.

Matters will become somewhat clearer on Oct. 22, when a 15-member joint committee set up by the UPA and the Left parties meets after a 13-day break to discuss the deal, which the Communists vigorously oppose, but whose parliamentary support is crucial to the government’s survival.

The Left parties demand that further talks on the deal be put on hold; or they would withdraw support to the UPA, in all probability precipitating parliamentary elections ahead of the scheduled date of 2009.

Speculation about the next round of talks, expected to be held with the International Atomic Energy Agency, peaked this week thanks to the arrival of the agency’s director-general Mohamed El-Baradei in India. El-Baradei met various leaders but held no discussions on the nuclear deal here. He is partly on a private visit.

However, El-Baradei repeatedly expressed his support for the deal and said there is no time limit for India to approach the IAEA, and he would wait till India is ready to discuss the issue with the agency.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Friday that he hopes to complete his full five-year term and avoid mid-term elections. This signals that completing his tenure has become a higher priority than pushing through the nuclear deal.

“Elections are still far away. This government still has one-and-a-half years to complete its time,” Singh told a conference in New Delhi. “It is my hope and expectation we will stay the course.”

In another indication that the government could sacrifice the deal or put it at risk in order to save the coalition and avoid early elections, Singh said: “We are not a one-issue government…we have made changes in several areas. It is certainly true if the deal doesn’t come through, it will be a disappointment, but it will not be the end of life.”

Congress party president Sonia Gandhi echoed Singh’s comments and emphasised that the government does not want an early election and wants to fulfil its promises to the electorate.

This is the clearest official statement so far that the UPA is not averse to a rethink on the deal, into which Singh has invested a huge amount of energy.

“It would be fair to say that it is the UPA that blinked first in its months-long confrontation with the Left parties,” says Kamal Mitra Chenoy, a political analyst attached to Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. “Just a few days ago, it seemed as if the two were headed for a showdown, with Sonia Gandhi calling the Left ‘enemies’ of development and peace, and declaring that the Congress was prepared to meet the challenge of a mid-term election.”

The Congress this week pulled back from the brink of an election when it realised that the Left’s threat of withdrawal of support is not empty, and when its own UPA allies are loath to face an early election whose outcome seems uncertain.

Some of the regional allies openly voiced their opposition at the last meeting of the UPA-Left committee on Tuesday. This emboldened many Congress leaders too to warn against an early election in inner-party discussions.

“Clearly, the Indian political debate on the nuclear deal has moved away from its merits and demerits, to the practical implications of pushing it through in the face of domestic opposition,” argues Chenoy. “Most UPA leaders do not want to go into an election on a complex foreign policy issue like the deal, and that too with the U.S., which is hardly a popular power in India.”

UPA leaders, especially of the smaller parties, are uneasy at the prospect of risking their political future on this controversial agreement. Recent opinion polls show the deal is a low priority for most Indians.

The Left criticises the deal on “principled grounds” because it will draw India into the U.S. strategic orbit and erode her independence in nuclear decision-making, besides promoting nuclear power generation in costly imported reactors.

The Left’s opposition to the deal remained strong despite last-ditch efforts by Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee, last weekend, to moderate it through a conditional offer regarding talks to further its completion, mediated through senior Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader and former West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu.

The Left’s opposition confronted the UPA’s constituents with a stark choice: push the deal through and risk losing power; or put the deal on hold at least for some time in the hope that some reconciliation with the agreement’s critics might be possible.

The first option, argued some UPA leaders like Nationalist Congress Party chief and agriculture minister Sharad Pawar, would probably mean losing both the government and the deal – an expensive strategy that would extract a high political price.

In the event, they seem to have prevailed, at least for the moment, over the deal’s zealous supporters who would risk the government’s collapse to push through the agreement.

The domestic debate is unlikely to be the sole determinant of the fate of the nuclear deal. It has to clear three other obstacles: negotiation and approval by the IAEA of a special inspections (safeguards) agreement with India, unconditional exemption for India by the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers’ Group from its nuclear commerce rules, and ratification by the United States Congress.

“The first two hurdles could themselves prove difficult to cross if some IAEA and NSG members raise awkward questions about the rationale of making a special exception for India in the global non-proliferation order,” says M.V. Ramana, an independent nuclear affairs analyst based at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in the Environment and Development in Bangalore.

“There are indications that Ireland, New Zealand and the Nordic countries are gearing up to do so, especially in the NSG,’’ said Ramana. Others like Germany, the Netherlands and Japan might join them too. And then there is a China, which is known to be unhappy with the deal, although it might not want to be seen as its sole opponent.”

If the international community gets the impression that the deal does not enjoy broad support within India, and can even cause the fall of the Manmohan Singh government, its critics are likely to become more vocal in questioning it and delaying its completion.

“That’s where the time-horizon becomes crucially important,” says Ramana. “In the final analysis, the deal must get ready for approval by the U.S. Congress before President Bush becomes a total lame-duck. No one else can muster the political capital and will necessary to pilot the deal through Congress, many of whose members, especially Democrats, have reservations about it.”

The UPA, then, may only have time till next spring or so to get the deal approved in the IAEA and the NSG. And that may be cutting it extremely fine. The length of the current pause will be critically important. At any rate, the contestation over the nuclear deal promises to be a photo finish.