On 10 October 2008, the Government of India and the US Government signed an agreement on Civil Nuclear Energy Cooperation covering nuclear reactors and aspects of the associated nuclear fuel cycle, including enrichment and reprocessing. It contained a full reflection of the key understandings of the 18 July 2005 and March 2006 joint statements and India’s separation plan. The agreement sought to enable the creation of a strategic reserve of nuclear fuel to guard against any disruption of supply over the lifetime of India’s reactors. The agreement provided that all aspects of the nuclear programme would remain unhindered. It also provided for multi-layered consultations.
The agreement had overcome the disabilities created in the background of the Cold War particularly since India’s peaceful nuclear explosion in 1974 and its refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The prevailing regime was set by the nuclear states, who also happened to be the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – the US, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France and China. All of them had tested their nuclear weapons before 1 January 1967 as ordained by the NPT and signed on 12 June 1968, which came into force on 5 March 1970. Since the Indian test happened in 1974, and it had not signed the NPT, India was treated like a pariah by the self-proclaimed high priests of non-proliferation. An esoteric subject, it turned out to be a “problem” between India and the US for many years.
The US had adopted legislation which sought to contain and restrain India’s ambitions to develop a nuclear energy programme even if for its economic development. The NPT through its framework, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) through safeguards and the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG) through its trade regulations, created barriers for India’s access to nuclear technology. The restrictive regime was further enlarged by the technology control and restraint regimes established thereafter, like the Missile Technology Control Regime, Australia Group, Wassenaar Arrangement, etc. The US had taken an unfriendly attitude on Kashmir but India had taken it in its stride.
India’s defeat at the hands of China in 1962 and China’s nuclear test in 1964 had set India thinking of its security afresh. New Delhi which was an ardent supporter of disarmament and had asked for the abolition of all nuclear weapons in the early years of its independence was forced to give up its old policy in this respect. It then considered the pros and cons of going nuclear, but found its cost too prohibitive. It canvassed with the nuclear powers to see if they would give a collective guarantee against nuclear blackmail to non-nuclear states. The top leadership of the MEA – External Affairs Minister MC Chagla, Foreign Secretary CS Jha and Principal Secretary to Prime Minister LK Jha, separately visited Moscow, Washington, London and Paris but at the end were disappointed since none of them would subscribe to a statement which, in legal terms would amount to taking on indefinite and unlimited liabilities beyond the UN Charter. It was then that India had started thinking of an independent nuclear programme.
India conducted its first peaceful nuclear test in 1974 which attracted severe sanctions from the US. Unmindful of them, New Delhi continued to develop nuclear energy which culminated in a weaponised nuclear test in 1998. Pakistan not to be left behind and for parity with India conducted its test a couple of weeks later to the mortification of the US since its policy of preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons had gone for six. Washington mainly held India responsible for this profane development and enforced still stricter sanctions. India justified that its test was necessary for its security against China.
Be as it may, its weaponised nuclear test gave notice to the world, that India had unambiguously, unapologetically and irrevocably become a nuclear-armed power. US President Bill Clinton rejected India’s security justification and said that “it is not necessary to manifest national greatness by doing this.” Clinton’s perception that the tests were more a vanity affair than a “cold national calculation of its security needs” was seen in New Delhi as “insulting” and ill-informed. The New York Times editorially undermined the tests when it said on 13 May 1998 that “beyond minor border disputes, China had no hostile design on India.”
Upset by the United States’ reaction to India’s nuclear test, Jaswant Singh, who held various portfolios under PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s NDA-I government, such as finance, external affairs and defence, lamented in the US journal, Foreign Affairs, against nuclear apartheid. He made a case for India’s nuclear test and said India suffered because of the policies of the nuclear powers. He pointed out that after the end of the Cold War, little had been done to “ameliorate India’s security concerns”. The rise of China and continued strains with both China and Pakistan had made the 1980s and 1990s “a greatly troubling period for India”. Jaswant Singh regretted the extension of the NPT in 1995 “indefinitely and un-conditionally” and their perpetuation in the hands of five countries busily modernizing their own nuclear arsenal. He insisted that India was a nuclear weapon state without anyone granting it that status. India’s “weapons are of self-defence, to ensure that India is not subjected to nuclear coercion.” India while conducting the tests had vowed not to be the first to use its nuclear weapons.
In view of India’s nuclear test, any chance of the US relaxing restrictions now met with a hostile reception. Both the arms control organizations as well as non-proliferation high priests were outraged. The countries which were against giving India any access to nuclear technology argued that if India got nuclear fuel supplies from others, it would help it to free its domestic fuel for weapons while using the imported supplies for domestic use.
To India’s advantage, another dimension emerged which changed the strategic scenario altogether. The heydays of US-China relations appeared to be coming to an end. Washington, looking at the future appeared keen not only to roll back its cooperation with China, but looked for a counterweight in Asia. India suggested itself. As a big country, it had made sufficient progress since the days of 1962 to emerge as a strong power in Asia rivalling China. It was, therefore, perceived by many experts that Washington in loosening technology control in favour of India would try to trap India into an anti-China framework. The interests of both appeared to converge. Ashley Tellis, an expert in Security and South Asian affairs, and former Special Assistant to the US Ambassador in India, Robert Blackwill, had argued that continuation of the earlier policy of keeping India at bay would have worked against the US’s long-term interests.
At the beginning of the new millennium, some changes in the US posturing toward India were perceptible. Perhaps 9/11 had made Washington see India’s logic on terrorism more clearly. In the changed scenario, the contributions of the Indian diaspora too played an important part in the US thinking toward India. The economic liberalisation of the nineties had become attractive to American business and by the turn of the millennium 33 per cent of the cumulative foreign investments in India were from there. Interestingly, while Washington was trying to turn a new page, the Indian public continued to suffer from past prejudices, which took time to change. With all these developments, at the political level, the US was still holding on.
Washington, under President Clinton, after imposing sanctions had made its relaxation conditional on:
sign the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT),
establish a fissile material cutoff regime,
restrain its strategic missile capability,
establish stricter export controls, and finally
a solution of the Kashmir issue.
The genesis of the new policy of the US is to be found in the article that Condoleezza Rice, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and future NSA and Secretary of State to President George Bush, wrote for the American journal Foreign Affairs under the title, “Promoting the National Interest”. A committed Republican, Rice pointed out the alternatives for the US foreign policy under a Republican administration since she felt there were various drawbacks in the policy under the Democratic President, Bill Clinton. Making a concrete suggestion she pointed out the need to pay closer attention to India’s role in world affairs. She decried America’s “strong tendency conceptually to connect India with Pakistan and to think only Kashmir or the nuclear competition between the two states”. She said India was “an element in China’s calculations” but not in Washington’s. She insisted, it should “be in America’s too”. While conceding “India was not a great power yet” she asserted “it has the potential to emerge as one.”
Later, Rice in her book, No Higher Honour, recalled that the idea for a change in policy toward South Asia matured while campaigning for President George W Bush’s election. The change had become necessary she said, since the US was “fed up with trying constantly to defuse the situation between India and Pakistan” for terror attacks, which she said “came from Pakistani elements”. She saw Pakistan as a “troubled state, riddled with extremism in its mosques, its madrassas, and unfortunately, in its security services”.
Excerpted with permission from Negotiating India’s Landmark Agreement, AS Bhasin, Penguin India.
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