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OPINION

Who Is Right About Nuclear Deal?
ALLABAKSH

Impressive though his performance was it cannot be said that in his reply to the Indo-US nuclear deal, after the debates in Parliament, Prime Minister had really said anything substantive that he had not before in response to the spate of criticism of the nuclear deal from both the right and the left in the country. Manmohan Singh left no one in doubt that if there was any deviation in the text of the July 18, 2005 agreement that went against national interest India would not hesitate to walk away. He emphasised that there was no question of India’s civilian and military nuclear programme being capped or dictated by the US, much less the country’s foreign policy.

Yet, the debate, or the controversy, over the nuclear deal may still be kept alive, at least till the motions of the last legislative act in the US are completed. Concerns in India will continue to be voiced till then, maybe out of ultra nationalist concerns or perhaps because of instinctive anti-Americanism for which sections of politicians in India are well known. It can barely be denied that mistrust of America remains widespread in the country and perhaps for good reasons. At the same time, there appears to be a strong desire to have close relations with the US.

The main stated reasons why Manmohan Singh and US president George W. Bush had signed the nuclear deal were that it will help India meet its huge energy needs. A more significant aspect of the deal, as many in India had noted, was that it would mark the end of over three decades of India’s ‘nuclear’ isolation when the US lifts the restrictions imposed in 1974 after the first nuclear tests were carried out at Pokharan. These restrictions had failed to meet the American objective and India was able to conduct another nuclear test at Pokharan in 1998 to testify the strides it had made in the nuclear field with purely indigenous efforts.

Many in India find it difficult to understand whether the American ban on transfer of any nuclear material to India was a boon or a curse. It is the scientific community, or at least some sections of it, which had said that the US restrictions did place the country at considerable disadvantage. The tightening of US proliferation laws since Pokharan I did not stop Pokharan II. So, if the country can make nuclear strides without the US help will India gain from the removal of restrictions imposed on India 30 years ago? The answer from the majority of the scientific community is said to be ‘yes’.

The July 18 agreement, it has been claimed, will open the doors that had remained shut on India for long and were not otherwise going to be opened. The prospect seemed to please much of the Indian scientific community but the powerful non-proliferation lobbies in the US started to ring alarm bells. The nuclear deal would considerably enhance India’s bomb making potential, they warned. The critics at home said just the opposite!

Efforts are still on, as they will always be, to deny India what it legitimately expects if the July deal is followed in letter and spirit. Many in India do not want to see that critics in the US and the West (not to forget Pakistan and China) fear that India might be able to enjoy most of the fruits available to the nuclear ‘haves’ without budging from its position of not signing the NPT. The most persistent and vociferous objection in the US against the nuclear deal is that it will not restrict India’s military nuclear programme. It cannot be that the critics of the deal both in India as well as the West, including the US, are right simultaneously when one of them says that it will cap India’s military nuclear programme and the other says just the opposite.

While the CPI (M) has somewhat mysteriously taken a U-turn to express satisfaction with the reply by the prime minister on the points they had raised against the nuclear deal, the continued BJP protests seem to be nothing but a peevish reflex action of condemning anything that the government does or says. The BJP wants to be known as the party that brought about a major ‘thaw’ in Indo-US relations and also for having done some groundwork that led to the nuclear deal. Now that it is actually the Congress party that is going to get the credit for the deal, the BJP is upset.

Among all the major political parties, it is the BJP which has been known to be the closest to the US. When the US threw a tantrum after Pokharan II in May 1998, the BJP leadership went out of its way to placate the Americans with ‘Lord’ Jaswant Singh pursuing a US assistant secretary of state, much lower to him in the order of protocol, all across the globe to be lectured on the need for India to sign the NPT. The force of Indian public opinion did not allow the BJP-led NDA regime to sign the NPT though the then prime minister, A. B. Vajpayee, did give an assurance that India would not conduct further nuclear tests. The same BJP icon today opposes India repeating his assurances.

It may be that the nuclear deal is not the best thing to have happened to India. To carry that conviction the country needed a more dispassionate debate on the nuclear deal, free of political rhetoric. A question that should have been debated and answered unambiguously is whether nuclear power would play a leading role in meeting the undoubtedly huge energy needs of the country. Though nuclear fuel was almost on the verge of rejection in the West, lately a great deal of interest has been revived in it because fossil fuels, already condemned for contributing to global warming, are depleting and frequent global conflicts are also making their supplies more and more unreliable, if not prohibitive.

Do the critics of the nuclear deal in India feel that the country should not to be dotted with nuclear energy plants because of safety hazards or pollution concerns? These critics, it may be presumed, will rather see the country give a huge push to hydel generation capacity. The CPI (M) says that India can generate 55,000 mw of power from its rivers. India can also profit from alternative sources of energy like the sun and air.

The trouble is that even after years of research and experiment, the alternative sources of energy have not been found to be very economical. More importantly, there is also an equally determined opposition in the country to taking up ‘big’ hydel projects. In fact, many of the critics of the nuclear deal double up as environmentalists and sit on dharna and stage demonstrations against ‘big’ hydel projects.

It can be argued that it is not necessary to take up ‘big’ hydel projects. Even small ones will need money and the states endowed with the rivers and streams that can generate power are either too poor to raise funds for setting up a string of hydel electricity projects or are not willing to take up these projects on a priority basis. How does India meet its future energy requirements if for one reason or the other the present available sources are unacceptable to one set of politicians or the other?


Courtesy : Syndicate Features

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