Bridging the nuclear divide

The Bush team has concluded that the more abiding strategic
determinant is nuclear energy, and its role in fuelling prosperity,
says C Uday Bhaskar

One of the challenges of writing a monthly column is in finding the right balance in trying to anticipate events without being quite overtaken by them. On occasion, in sticking one's neck out, there is the danger of being proved wrong, but in this case when the Bush visit is upon us (at the time of writing), one hopes that the cautious position I am taking will indeed be overtaken by more positive developments on the nettlesome nuclear issue that has punctuated and soured the bilateral relationship for more than half a century. Post-May 1998, India's own nuclear status has altered, adding to the complexity of the global nuclear weapons domain—and now Iran is also part of the tangle.

The Bush visit is the fifth time that US Air Force One will alight in Delhi with the US president on board, and follows almost 47 years after President 'Ike' Eisenhower's first visit in 1959. What is different about this visit is the fact that in all earlier visits—Nixon (1969), Carter (1979) and Clinton (2000)—the nuclear issue was deeply contested and there was a sharp divergence in the perceptions of Raisina Hill and the White House. The US represented the global nuclear weapons haves and India was perceived as being the have-not challenger that did not accept the prevailing norm as represented by the NPT.

However, the Bush presidency has taken a radically bold position in tacitly accepting India as a state with “advanced nuclear technology” even while seeking to bring India into the fold of global nuclear commerce and related hi-tech trade, subject to Delhi accepting certain provisions. This was the spirit of the July 2005 Bush-Manmohan Singh agreement and there has been considerable disquiet expressed in both countries by those who are opposed to this kind of nuclear rapprochement between India and the US. In the US, the non-proliferation zealots see this as a sell-out to Indian obduracy and its defiance of the NPT regime. For George W Bush to proceed forward, US Congress will have to support change in US legislation on the subject—and this is where the issue is delicately poised in late February. Within India, there have been deep concerns expressed about the Bush initiative being part of a much larger devious US gameplan to fetter India's strategic autonomy in the nuclear field. This opposition has already been reflected in the domestic political debate.

It merits recall that the nuclear nettle and relevant US law has been part of the backdrop of India-US relations since the 1950s in a variety of ways. In 1953, under Nehru's orders, India exported thorium nitrate (used for producing uranium) to China. However, under the provisions of the US Battle Act, the US was forbidden to give aid to any country that exported strategic goods to Communist China. Consequently, a legal interpretation of the Act mandated that the US stop supplying aid to India. When this matter was brought to Nehru's attention, he refused to budge and the US finally accepted an innovative interpretation of the law, and a major rupture in the bilateral relationship was avoided.

The US and India remained on opposite sides of the nuclear divide for almost six decades, since their respective security and strategic objectives were diametrically different. The prevailing global systemic was driven by the compulsions of bipolarity and the Cold War. The term 'strategic' was interpreted in a narrow exclusive manner and referred in the main to nuclear weapons. However, in the five years that have followed the terrorist tragedy of September 2001, the nature of the global systemic has undergone a complex transmutation and the US while being the pre-eminent military and economic power has accepted the need to operate in and manage a polycentric world with five other major nodes of relevance—the EU, China, Russia, Japan and India.

In this matrix, the Bush team has come to a conclusion that the more abiding strategic determinant is nuclear energy, and the manner in which this technology can be harnessed to fuel global economic prosperity on which individual national security and the collective environment is predicated. Both Singh and Bush have shown the political perspicacity to 'think out of the box'. One can only hope that the cynics and the doubting Thomases on both sides do not prevail and that a degree of calibrated boldness will propel the India-US relationship into the 21st century following the Bush visit.