Since the Shakti series of nuclear tests in May 1998, under the government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the nation’s atomic project was identified with the colours of the BJP. Thanks to the bitter opposition of the BJP to the Indo-US nuclear deal, despite it being a logical outcome of Vajpayee’s political legacy, India’s atomic project is now a part of the mainstream agenda. (The communists, in any case, were always opposed to a nuclear India.)

India’s attempts to improve relations with the United States since the end of the Cold War too have been identified, wrongly, with the Indian right. After Tuesday’s vote, India’s America project is also under the ownership of the nation’s political centre.

For decades, the fear of being tarred with “pro-American” or “pro-Western” labels made India’s centrist leaders shun any political cooperation with the US. That a Congress prime minister chose to defy this iron law of Indian politics underlines the emergence of a self-assured India that no longer jumps out of its skin at meaningless slogans from the past.

In the last few months, the UPA government had repeated ad nauseam that the nuclear deal was not just with the US, but with the entire international community; that factoid was not enough to end the argument with the communists. What the Congress needed to do, and finally did, was to put faith in the emerging India that is not apologetic about engaging the US and is capable of pursuing the national interest with self-confidence.

Significant as the nuclear deal has been, it is not an end in itself. It was simply a means to put behind a long-standing dispute with the world on nuclear issues. Nor is India’s new foreign policy about merely building a strategic partnership with the US.

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