Trust but verify” is what United States President Ronald Reagan said famously when he began to repair relations with Moscow during Gorbachev’s spell. In a different era and context, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh faces a similar predicament. If all goes well at the US Congress by September 26, the last day for American lawmakers to leave town, the two leaders — Singh and President George Bush — would have signed and clinched the US-India nuclear agreement. This would restore nuclear power cooperation between Washington and New Delhi and would enable American companies to get a big share in the future Indian nuclear power-generation cake.
Washington played a crucial role at the time of concluding the new safeguards for Indian civilian nuclear plans and at the time of finalising the waiver with the 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). Bush and his staff have now left no stone unturned in their hurry to get the Congressional approval for the final 123 agreement, which is the legal scaffolding to conduct bilateral nuclear trade.
Of course, the final word on what it is going to contain is still far from certain. Already, the Bush administration has reportedly diluted the status of the 123 agreement by suggesting that its provisions are not legally binding. If that is the case, it will only remain a framework agreement. But no agreement on earth can be binding on all parties for all times to come. The moral of the story is that the day US or India want to go back on one or two provisions of the agreement, it will be difficult to stop them.
Besides, there are gnawing doubts whether the US — which played a crucial role in India securing the waiver from the NSG — has ensured that there would not be any hurdles for the unimpeded flow of nuclear material and sensitive technologies. A news report in the Washington Post last week suggested that the US officials who were instrumental in breaking the deadlock within the NSG in the face of sustained opposition from Austria, Ireland and New Zealand have agreed to ensure that the 45 members do not sell sensitive technologies to India. “In the discussions about how to handle enrichment and reprocessing, it was made clear that nobody had any plans to transfer such technologies to India in the foreseeable future,” the Post said, quoting a senior US official who commented on what went behind the scenes within the NSG. Though these are diplomatic exchanges within the NSG that do not ostensibly have any legal bearing, they do point towards certain step-motherly treatment that the NSG members will adopt if push comes to shove in their engagement with India.
That India is going to be under the international nuclear microscope and strict surveillance for its future security actions, particularly in the arena of arms development, is now a reality. External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s statement about voluntary moratorium on testing any nuclear weapons is as good as an “observance of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in spirit”, a senior United Nations disarmament official told Business Standard last week. Effectively, the Indian government has now agreed to a de facto CTBT and it will continue to be under pressure to sign other agreements, including the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
Also, how India will play its cards in other areas of international nuclear disarmament negotiations — the fissile material cutoff treaty (FMCT) and the prevention of arms race in the outer space (PAROS) — will indicate the pulls and pressures it will face because of the waiver that has been granted by the NSG and the US-India 123 agreement. In FMCT, which aims to ban the production of fissionable materials for non-weapons purposes, India and the US have had adopted differing positions on the issue of verification. While the US is opposed to verification after the treaty comes into life, India wants verification whether countries are genuinely adhering to the rulebook. Similarly, Russia and China want a strong PAROS, which is being vehemently opposed by the US. India, which has strong interests in the peaceful use of the outer space, is yet to take a position one way or the other. In a nutshell, India should trust Washington but verify whether it is going to secure all that was promised in the 123 Agreement!
