These Indian petitioners in the Western chancelleries would justify their appeal in the name of their fearless internationalism and opposition to national chauvinism. Their demands on the NSG, however, tell a different story. At a time when the Communists at home have raised questions about India’s freedom to test nuclear weapons under the Indo-US deal, their anti-imperialist friends are asking the NSG to make sure that in the event of such a test all cooperation with India must be cut off. While the CPM is attacking the 2006 Hyde Act, the US law facilitating nuclear cooperation with India, for limiting the sale of reprocessing and enrichment technologies to India, its comrades from the so-called independent left are demanding that the NSG impose a collective bar against cooperation with India in these sensitive areas. While our Communists oppose the CTBT and the FMCT as discriminatory treaties, their fellow-travellers are urging the international community to impose these very treaties on India.

None of these activists have had the intellectual integrity to make their case for nuclear constraints against India at home and challenge the logic of CPM’s opposition to the nuclear deal. Instead they have chosen to attack the nuclear deal, by hunting with the anti-imperialist Communist hounds at home and running with the anti-Indian nuclear ayatollahs abroad. Unable to convince their own governments to block nuclear cooperation with India, the Western opponents of the deal are trying to leverage our left to kill it. What better than get India to poke itself in the eye!