Thanks Jacques, hello George

It is not often that two of the world’s leading powers, often the most bitter commercial rivals who also joust for political influence in all key capitals, simultaneously express support for changing the global nuclear rules to facilitate full nuclear energy cooperation with India.

But no one in Delhi should be under the illusion that either France or Russia, which has also supported the case for making a nuclear exception for India, are ready to break ranks with the US. It has also been well known that both Moscow and Paris have been working closely with Washington on the question of nuclear cooperation with India.

The good news is that the US Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns who is coming here this week has been reported as saying that 90 per cent of the negotiations on the separation plan have been completed. But the bad news, however, is that in all diplomatic negotiations it is the last 10 per cent that usually makes or breaks the deal.

If Burns and Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran are to overcome the last mile problem and create the right political atmosphere for President George W. Bush’s visit to India next week, they have to refocus on the basics that went into making the nuclear deal on July 18.

In the last few weeks the nuclear discourse in the two nations got directed to a range of technical issues and political sloganeering. Rather than concentrate on the mutual gains from the nuclear pact, the emphasis has been on who is giving more.

Our Department of Atomic Energy was not alone in finding it difficult to judge the long-term political and strategic significance of the Indo-US nuclear pact of July 18. The non-proliferation community in the US has been determined to kill the deal and used every possible argument to attack it. The New York Times has just echoed those arguments.

Opposition to the deal is not limited to those outside the government but also includes the non-proliferation establishment inside the Bush administration.

By bringing in concepts that were not originally in the July 18 pact, for example the insistence on a “credible” and “defensible” separation plan from India, American non-proliferation bureaucracy has stoked embers of suspicion in Delhi and Mumbai. It has provided political ammunition to those who see the US changing the goal-posts in the nuclear negotiations.

The notion that the US would have a veto over Delhi’s separation plan has complicated the bureaucratic politics within India and strengthened the hands of the conservatives, who never really believed America was serious about renewing civilian nuclear cooperation with India.

Once the public debate in India turned on to emotive questions of “equity” and “reciprocity”, the political attention would inevitably focus on process-related issues rather than the substantive elements of the nuclear pact. As opponents of the nuclear deal on both sides reinforce each other, the space for pragmatists in the two capitals who see the advantages of the nuclear pact has begun to shrink on the eve of President Bush’s visit to India.

President Bush does not see the nuclear deal in terms of how many reactors India would put on the civilian list and under safeguards. Bush is quite clear that India is a nuclear weapon power and he had no problem acknowledging it in the joint statement.

India’s separation plan is certainly important for the US in selling the agreement to the US Congress and the Nuclear Suppliers Group. But sensible political voices in the administration do not see any virtue in letting technical issues relating to separation cloud President Bush’s judgement on the importance of building a strategic partnership with India as part of constructing a new global balance of power.

In India, too, the pragmatists see that the nuclear pact is about burying the unsavoury past between the two countries; it is not an end in itself. Separation of the civilian and nuclear programmes has been long overdue and in India’s own interest and is by no means an unacceptable price to pay for ending the nation’s long nuclear isolation.

In the end, the purpose of separation, for India, is to bring greater efficiencies into both the civilian and military programmes and to assure the international community that nuclear energy cooperation with India would not be diverted to military purposes. But instead of a pragmatic approach to separation, both sides have allowed opponents of the nuclear deal to define the terms of discourse.

If India and the US do not quickly get their act together on the nuclear deal by reemphasising the primacy of politics, they are likely to face fresh complications. If India has allowed matters to drift in its nuclear negotiations with the US, Pakistan is pressing China for a nuclear agreement similar to that between New Delhi and Washington.

As India negotiates with France and the US this week, President Pervez Musharraf is in China demanding additional nuclear reactors from Beijing. While China appears to have tempered its opposition to the Indo-US nuclear deal, there is nothing stopping it from promising a similar deal to Pakistan. In the US, too, there are many who are demanding that the changes in American non-proliferation law should not be limited to India alone but should apply to Pakistan as well.

In diplomacy, timing is everything. Those who let the fears of the past overwhelm the prospects for the future will be condemned forever to regret lost opportunities.