Looking Back at the Historic Indo-US Nuclear Agreement

Ten years since signing the deal, credit must be given to Manmohan Singh for redressing India’s strategic isolation.

• In the 1960s, five world powers - US, USSR, UK, France and China -  established nuclear weapons capable states (NWS).
• Under Indira Gandhi in 1974, India carried out a peaceful nuclear explosion which resulted in technological sanctions against India.
• Further ahead in 1998, India successfully conducted nuclear tests to acquire the NWS status.
• Starting negotiations in 2001, India and US finally signed the civil nuclear deal in July, 2005.

The ‘historic’ India-US civilian nuclear agreement was signed on July 18, 2005. Ten years later, an objective cost-benefit analysis would suggest that India is in a better strategic orientation, vis-a-vis the global community, than it would have been if this agreement had not been mooted, and concluded in late 2008.

Much of the credit for this radical breakthrough must go to the top leadership of India and the US — the then PM Manmohan Singh and President George Bush, both reviled then and, alas, even now, in certain domestic constituencies.

Estranged Indo-US Relations Over Nuclear Deal

To briefly recap, India-US relations had remained bitterly ‘estranged’ for more than three decades, over the contentious nuclear issue. The US and the former USSR joined hands in the mid-1960s to create a cartel of nuclear weapons capable states (NWS), which at the time included the two super-powers, the UK, France and China. In a determined bid to stringently prevent the emergence of any more NWS, the major powers introduced the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) unilaterally, and facilitated a division of the world into the five NWS, with the rest as non-NWS in perpetuity. At the time, the unstated objective of the US and the USSR was to ensure that the three Axis powers of World War II — Germany, Japan and Italy — did not ever acquire this apocalyptic capability, and they succeeded.

India refused to be part of this partisan arrangement, given the inherently iniquitous nature of such impositions and steadfastly remained outside the NPT. The normative ethical aspect apart, India’s strategic interests were adversely impacted by a nuclear China which had acquired this capability in October 1964. A nuclear armed neighbour in the aftermath of October 1962 added to India’s deepest insecurity and hence there was more than one reason for Delhi’s strategic discomfiture.

India Asserts Technological Competence

In May 1974, India, under PM Indira Gandhi, carried out what is described as a ‘peaceful nuclear explosion’ (PNE) and having demonstrated its technological competence — in a very anomalous and unprecedented decision — chose not to weaponise its nuclear capability. India in essence had chosen to cross the NWS chasm in two leaps and consequently remained suspended in a strategic twilight zone.

The US and its allies decided to impose technological sanctions against India and in 1978 the US Congress enacted a nuclear non-proliferation act that specifically targeted India. Thus began the estrangement, and Washington sought to assiduously box India on matters nuclear, though it did not sever relations or stop the development and food aid that it was providing at the time.

India Acquires De-facto NWS Status

The period 1978 to 2005 had significant punctuation, including the end of the Cold War and the implosion of the USSR. India had to review its global strategic orientation wherein the US was the dominant power. In the early 1990s the US led by President Bill Clinton and the NPT evangelists brought a new zealotry to implementing the NPT and the determined attempt to lasso India was encapsulated in the pithy ‘cap-rollback-eliminate’ stratagem.

However the sagacious Narasimha Rao-Vajpayee continuum ensured that India was not inveigled into a less than optimum nuclear status and in May 1998 India conducted its nuclear tests thereby acquiring a de-facto NWS status. The immediate aftermath was that India-US relations nosedived and it took the political perspicacity of both sides to bring about a fragile rapprochement in early 2000 when Clinton visited India though the estrangement over the N-word remained deeply embedded.

George Bush and Manmohan Singh Sign the Historic Agreement

This was the backdrop to the bilateral when Bush assumed office in January 2001 and it has since been revealed that the relatively inexperienced Texan Republican brought commendable lucidity to how he envisaged the US-Indian relationship. The world’s largest democracy, he concluded, which posed no threat to the US, ought to have a stable normal relationship and directed his officials to redress the estrangement. This was in mid-2001 but the enormity of September 9, 2001, resulted in the White House focus shifting to the war on terror and it was only in early 2005 that the Bush team came back to the unfinished business of improving relations with India.

To Manmohan Singh’s credit, despite his limited political mandate, he stayed the course and negotiated the July 2005 agreement in such a manner that the complex and long festering nuclear issue was resolved in a mutually acceptable manner. The modus-vivendi wherein the nuclear circle was squared accorded India an exceptional status to stay outside the NPT and maintain its strategic autonomy through a self-restraint commitment and thereby allow the US to review its India-related legislation such that nuclear commerce could be enabled in the civilian sector. This was finally achieved in a nail-biting finish towards the end of the Bush tenure in late 2008.

In retrospect, the net benefit to both India and the US has been more in the strategic and geo-political domain and less so in nuclear power commerce. The Fukushima accident of March 2011 has led to a slowing down of nuclear energy projects and India’s Nuclear Liability Bill remains mired in the arid zero sum game of Indian politics. But absent the July 2005 agreement, India would have still been deemed an outsider in the global nuclear fraternity and any government in Delhi would have had to contend with a brittle US bilateral and all its allies (the EU, Japan and Australia among others) as also manage an uneasy strategic subalternity with China. And the greater irony would have been that having arrived at a tentative nuclear rapprochement with Iran, the US and its NPT zealots would have redoubled their efforts to quarantine India.

In retrospect, the Bush-Manmohan Singh determination of July 2005 is to be acknowledged and applauded for redressing India’s untenable strategic isolation.

(The writer is Director, Society for Policy Studies in New Delhi)