Congress’s choice

That the BJP’s opposition to the nuclear deal is bereft of all principle is no secret. We now have it from the horse’s mouth. The former US deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott, who negotiated the nuclear question with the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government during 1998-2000, suggests the BJP might have grabbed any nuclear deal from the Clinton administration similar to the one on offer today for the Congress-led government from President George W. Bush. (See Op-Ed Page.) Talbott says the “BJP would have been astonished given what they knew about our position on the issues involved”.

Unfortunately for the BJP, President Bush’s “astonishing offer” was not available during his first term, when the NDA government did make some advances with the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership unveiled in January 2004. It was only when he returned to power in January 2005 that Bush was ready to embark on a genuine transformation of Indo-US relations.

If the BJP was unprepared to put the national interest above the egotism of its leaders, who were sour that the Congress was taking credit for an initiative they had launched, the CPM’s very definition of national interest has always been out of sync with that of the national mainstream.

Unlike the Congress, which laid the foundation for a nuclear weapons programme and exercised the option in the late 1980s and the BJP which conducted the tests in May 1998 and declared India a nuclear weapon power, the CPM has consistently opposed India’s nuclear weapons programme. For the party, the communist nukes in Russia and China were ideologically kosher, but the Indian nukes were “impure”. The communists were the only major national political formation that denounced India’s nuclear tests in May 1998.

Only the very naive in the Congress can assume that the communists can be brought around to accepting the nuclear initiative through the charade of a committee process. Insofar as CPM General Secretary Prakash Karat is concerned, the safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency is dead on arrival. His concerns are ideological; he has no time for the technical trivia that have so transfixed the textualists in India.

Ever since the CPM rejected the carefully crafted 123 agreement last August, the choice before the Congress was simple: should it risk the withdrawal of communist support to the government or celebrate a rare diplomatic triumph? Prime Minister Manmohan Singh answered this question one way, when he told the Left to “take it or leave it”. A few weeks later, Congress President Sonia Gandhi changed the answer.

To be sure, the Congress flip-flop underlined the gravity of the choice: political survival or national interest. Nine months since the CPM threatened to pull the plug on the UPA government, the choices begin to look different. Karat’s threat loses its potency with every passing week in the political life of the UPA government. Should a government on its death-bed worry sick about being stabbed? If the Congress wants to continue as a major political force, it should want to bestir itself and control the end game for the ruling UPA coalition rather than cede the initiative to the Left.

The “whether” question is no longer about the nuclear initiative. It is about the Congress party’s state of mind. The Congress has presided over four consecutive years of unprecedented economic performance, has ensured a measure of communal harmony, has helped create a new sense of national self-confidence, has not been tainted by any major political scandal, and is about to walk India into the elite nuclear club. It could go out to the electorate reaffirming its claim as the only national party capable of leading India. Or it could lay bare its new addiction to masochism at the hands of a whip-cracking CPM.

That brings us to the “when” question. Anyone familiar with the further procedural detail in implementing the nuclear deal — approval of a safeguards agreement by the IAEA, the endorsement of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the final mandate from the US Congress — and above all the political calendar for the impending regime change in Washington knows the clock is ticking.

The international timetable for the nuclear initiative, however, might be less important than the domestic timeline for the Congress to decide on the future of its increasingly hurtful coalition with the Left and a strategy for returning as the single largest party in the next Lok Sabha. The Congress, hopefully, believes that the shape of the next ruling coalition should depend on its strength rather than its weakness.

A Congress that chooses to act in its own self-interest would also serve the national interest on the nuclear initiative. A resolute Congress will find that there is plenty of international goodwill and some time yet to clinch the nuclear deal. For a timorous Congress, bogged down by self-doubt, no amount of time will be enough.

The writer is a professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

iscrmohan@ntu.edu.sg