At last, India has a nuke deal with US

JYOTI MALHOTRA

New Delhi, July 20, 2007 : It’s all over bar the shouting, and India is the world’s sixth nuclear weapons power in all but name.

Over lunch in Washington DC on Friday, exactly two years and two days after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US president George Bush agreed that India and the US would enter into a special, nuclear relationship, the deal was finally done.

With Pratibha Patil in Rashtrapati Bhavan and Hamid Ansari likely to soon lead the Rajya Sabha, the nuclear deal with the US is a major feather in Manmohan Singh’s turban.

Foreign Secretary Shivshanker Menon is flying back to India tonight and the Cabinet Committee on Security will meet over the next week to clear the deal. With that, the US government goes back to its Congress with the text. Its enough to make the deal public.

In the end, though, Delhi get exactly what it has wanted from the beginning : The right to reprocess spent fuel from civilian nuclear reactors, as well as a very delicately worded compromise on fuel assurances from the American side.

Still, when the story of the Indo-US nuclear deal is written, the award for the hero of the hour must go to Bush’s key aide and US national security adviser Steve Hadley.

It was with Hadley that NSA MK Narayanan has been confabulating for the last many months, to him that Naryanan made the proposal for a separately safeguarded storage facility to reprocess the spent fuel on the eve of the Heilingendamm talks in Germany in early June.

It was Hadley who called Narayanan on Thursday morning and said, ``On your way to meeting the Vice-President (Dick Cheney) at 2 pm, could you drop by my office please?’’

Narayanan dropped by, and the rest as they say, is Indo-US nuclear history.

It was in this meeting that Hadley and Narayanan broke the logjam of fuel assurances for India in perpetuity for India’s civilian nuclear reactors.

Narayanan had argued that the US must live up to the promise given by Bush in Delhi on March 2 that it would help India with its civilian nuclear programme, promising fuel in perpetuity in exchange for safeguards in perpetuity.

In the end, in his 30-minute meeting with Cheney, Narayanan and he spent only two minutes discussing civil nuclear issues.

The day before, the US side had already agreed to give India reprocessing rights, that is, Delhi would be allowed to reprocess the spent fuel from its reactors in the safeguarded storage facility.

Now with Hadley and Narayanan working out a delicate compromise on the US ``right to return,’’ which dictates all nuclear assistance to any country by law, and what would happen in a hypothetical situation if India tested, the deal was as good as done.

By Friday lunchtime, when all sides met and toasted each other, it transpired that the brasstacks negotiators, that is India’s S. Jaishanker and the US’ Richard Stratford had spent about 300 hours in negotiations.

A joint press release said ``the discussions were constructive and positive, and both undersecretary Burns and Foreign Secretary Menon are pleased with the substantial progress made on outstanding issues in the 123 agreement.’’

US diplomats argued that fuel supply guarantees for India were as important as giving India the right to reprocess. According to US law, if any offending country (such as India) conducts a nuclear test, then the US will have the right to invoke the ``right of return'' clause, that is, ask for all the nuclear fuel as well as all the equipment sent to India.

But top diplomats from Washington said the harsh reality was that even if India ever went nuclear, the US would never be able to invoke the requisite law.

``You can never put the toothpaste back into the tube. If the US gives India large amounts of nuclear fuel as well as a bunch of nuclear reactors, the truth is that a few billion dollars of US investment in India will effectively tie down America's hands,'' the diplomat said.

ENDS