The past as a stumbling block in high technology cooperation is set to be finally laid to rest tonight as India and the US get ready to issue a joint statement that promises to lead both nations into a brave new world of civilian nuclear cooperation, space, high-technology commerce and missile defence. A week before External Affairs minister Yashwant Sinha begins his visit to the US on January 20, the joint statement is likely on the so-called ‘‘quartet’’ issues, which have otherwise been described as the ‘‘glide path’’ by US Secretary of State Colin Powell. Only three weeks ago, deputy National Security Advisor Satish Chandra and senior MEA officials had travelled to the US capital to sort out last-minute details of this highly complex but extremely significant agreement. Put simply, it ends the nagging distrust in the business of high technology that has been at the core of the Indo-US relationship at least for the last four decades. Even before the 1998 Pokharan tests threw bilateral ties into a downward spiral, before the 1984 MOU in Science & Technology attempted to rescue scientific interaction from the political quagmire and before India went nuclear the first time in 1974. The joint statement is called the ‘‘programme of enhanced strategic cooperation,’’ and formally declares the shift in the official US mindset from the ‘‘presumption of denial’’ to the ‘‘presumption of approval’’ that has been in the making at least since the visit of Bill Clinton in March 2000. Certainly, the ‘‘quartet’’ issues—the umbrella term itself does not find favour in the joint statement—has enormous scope, not least in the space department, for example in the launching of commercial satellites and producing them for third countries. Civilian nuclear cooperation, though, will be restricted to nuclear safety areas, at least for the time being. The agreement comes after four meetings of a bilateral High Technology Cooperation Group between the US undersecretary for commerce Kenneth Juster (who is also in charge of the Bureau of Industry and Security which issues licences for export of sensitive and dual-use technologies) and former Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal. The ‘‘glide path’’ goes beyond the state of play that pertained when post-Pokharan sanctions were lifted against India (and Pakistan) in 2001. At the time, export controls on major institutions like Bharat Electronics (BEL), Indian Institute of Science, BARC, Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research and Indian Rare Earths remained because the US feared that the transferred technology could be used in India’s nuclear and missile programmes. Over the last 14 months, both sides have grappled with the language of trust. While the US has demanded that India tighten restraint in its export control laws and clarify the ambiguity that exists in its defence procurement system, New Delhi has sought to portray a nuclear-missile responsibility that hardly exists outside the P-5. For a start, it has foolproofed the system against leakages to third countries, especially in the backdrop of reported Pakistani transfers to Iran and Libya.
