Although the perennial critics - some opportunistic, many ideological and others simply habitual — will pick nits in the historic waiver written exclusively for India by the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group last Saturday, New Delhi should go beyond triumphalism and ponder over the lessons learnt. India should have no illusions that it was sweet reason — for example, the argument that India has “impeccable” non-proliferation credentials — that ultimately silenced New Delhi’s opponents in the NSG. It was Washington’s brutal exercise of power that forced the recalcitrant members of the NSG, including China, to stand down. That every member of the NSG had a veto, and India had little leverage over them meant New Delhi needed all the high-level intervention it could mobilise from Washington.

US President George W. Bush’s willingness to spend so much political capital in promoting the nuclear deal with India was itself rooted in power calculus. The Bush administration recognised three years ago that rapid economic growth was improving India’s relative power position in the international system. For Bush, the nuclear deal was about investing in India’s rise and working with New Delhi to create a new framework of great power relations in the twenty-first century. If improved economic performance is making India the pivot of the Asian balance of power, its political class and security establishment have found it difficult to shed the inherited third world mindset.

The nit-pickers who pore over the text of India’s recent nuclear agreements fail to appreciate the changed geopolitical context. If text was all that mattered, the UN Security Council should have been hounding India to give up its nuclear and missile programmes, as per the unanimous resolution 1172 passed in June 1998 in the wake of Pokharan II. What has changed since then are India’s relative gains in the international system and its new strategic partnership with the US. No wonder then, the sceptics turned out to be wrong at every turn of India’s nuclear drama. If official India had been sensitive to the logic of power, it might have fared a lot better in its campaign a few years ago for the permanent membership of the UNSC. Then, China easily undercut India, thanks to US neutrality. This time, strong US support trumped Beijing’s attempt to block India’s entry into the nuclear club. As it reflects on the NSG experience, Indian diplomacy should lose no more time in moving decisively from its traditional emphasis on the power of the argument to the more effective argument of power.