Long after the sordid spectacle surrounding the trust vote on the Manmohan Singh government fades from our memory, the evening of July 22 will be remembered as the moment when a rising India demonstrated the political will to carve out a new place for itself in the world.

A booming economy and a large military do not a great power make. It is the will of its political elite to measure up to external opportunities that separates an emerging great power from merely a large nation.

Deep and internal divisions, more than external threats, often set India back in the past. Nearly three years of domestic political contestation on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s nuclear deal with US President George W. Bush suggested that India was reverting to form — that its internal wrangling might convert a rare diplomatic triumph into an incredible political defeat.

In overcoming the ideological obduracy of the communists and the mendacious opportunism of the BJP, the Congress has demonstrated that India will no longer shortchange itself. That the Congress leadership took the most tortuous route to implementing the nuclear deal does not in any way diminish the consequences of the messy but successful resolution of the crisis on Tuesday night.

The political blood that flowed from the Congress’s divorce with the communists and the muck spread over the floor of the Lok Sabha in the final hours of the nuclear debate merely underline the sweeping change that Manmohan Singh has wrought upon India’s worldview.

How India’s nuclear sausage was made is less important than the fact that it was assembled against great domestic political odds. And it was entirely appropriate that the man who has engineered a decisive transformation in India’s worldview was also the one who had launched the nation on the path of economic globalisation 17 years ago.

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