Today India is entering the big league

Editorial The N-deal debate Organiser Home > 2006 Issues > July 09, 2006

One need not take the Communist opposition too seriously. Ever since 1991 the Left has accused every government at the Centre of selling out to the US. Now they are talking of the deal as undermining India’s sovereignty. When India signed a strategic treaty of cooperation with the then Soviet Union, the Communists were in the forefront celebrating it, despite apprehensions in the anti-Communist bloc.

The deal has presented India with a new opportunity. The other option was to continue with its nuclear isolation, and perpetually be in competition with Pakistan. The Communists were always opposed to India’s nuclear status. To keep the pro-Pakistan lobby in the country happy, they even organised country-wide protest marches, and denounced India in all available international fora, when the NDA government under Atal Behari Vajpayee proudly declared India a nuclear power in 1998. That is a process which has culminated in the present deal. As a sovereign country, India is free to walk out of any deal citing supreme national interest.

Diplomacy is about the best possible options. Decades of non-alignment and commonwealth obsessions have not yielded India much global significance. Today India is entering the big league. If President George Bush, whose domestic ratings are touching rock bottom, makes the Indo-US nuclear deal as his most important foreign policy success and manages to get support even from skeptical Democrats, because they don’t want to be seen as voting against India, it only proves India’s growing clout as a world power. This should make India proud...

India had to suffer nuclear apartheid all these years which kept it from actualising its potential in nuclear technology. That the Bush administration could get the proliferation sensitive lobby in the US Congress to endorse the agreement in exchange for some non-binding clauses has come as a relief to India. The proliferation hardliners inspired by the Islamabad-Beijing nexus went all out in denouncing the deal.

The domestic political reaction is interesting to watch. The Congress cannot celebrate on the deal for fear of the Communists and the Muslims whom the party is cynically trying to propitiate. The Left and Muslim political opinion continue to back Iran’s nuclear ambitions... American companies and the NRIs lobbied hard with hostile Congressmen to make the deal possible. The bottom line is enlightened national interest.