N-deal quivers

As the world becomes impatient with the UPA government’s vacillations on the nuclear deal so patently in India’s favour, there is mounting speculation that the Congress leadership might abandon it, following the Gujarat defeat. The Congress leadership has no one to blame but itself for turning a rare diplomatic triumph for the nation into a seemingly unbearable political burden at home. After letting bureaucratic opposition delay the deal, it let the Communists frame the issue as a political surrender to the US.

As the French Foreign Minister Bernand Kouchner, in an interview published in this newspaper, indicated Paris is eager to start civilian nuclear cooperation with India and is just waiting for the next steps in the implementation of the Indo-US nuclear deal. Kouchner was reminding India that the nuclear deal is not just about its ties with the US, but an opportunity to access nuclear technology from all suppliers — including Russia and France. Ever since the French president, Jacques Chirac, came to New Delhi in January 1998, Paris has been arguing the case for changing the international rules to facilitate civilian nuclear cooperation with India. It took the US seven years to pick up this bold idea.

If the Congress succumbs to self-doubt and Left pressure on the deal, it will just reinforce an old pattern. It did all the hard work on the nuclear weapons programme in the early nineties but did not have the gumption to conduct a test. The BJP walked away with the credit in May 1998, within six weeks of coming to power. If the Congress stops in its tracks at the finish line of the nuclear marathon, the BJP — should it come to power — would have no hesitation, despite its current opportunistic opposition, in quickly wrapping it up.

After all the Indo-US deal is about international recognition of India’s rise to power and not a political favour to the Congress.