In nudging Communist China to acknowledge India’s standing as a de facto nuclear weapon state and agree on bilateral civilian atomic energy cooperation, Dr Manmohan Singh has exceeded all expectations about his maiden visit to Beijing as India’s prime minister. The seemingly simple joint formulation in Beijing on Monday — “as two countries with advanced scientific capabilities, the two sides pledge to promote bilateral cooperation in civil nuclear energy, consistent with their respective international commitments” — marks an important political triumph for Dr Singh. The new warmth he has generated with the Chinese leaders, marked by an unprecedented joint declaration on the shared vision between New Delhi and Beijing for the 21st century, should help get the Communist parties off his back at home. By injecting real strategic content into Sino-Indian relations, he has at once underwritten the enduring independence of India’s foreign policy and improved the prospects for the implementation of the nuclear deal with the United States.

Despite their confused technical objections to the Indo-US nuclear deal, the main political complaint of the Left parties was that the deal would subordinate Indian foreign policy to Washington’s whims. Dr Singh can now credibly demand that the CPM rethink its criticism of the UPA government’s foreign policy and nuclear diplomacy. To be fair to the Indian left, misperception that the Indo-US nuclear deal was about New Delhi getting into bed with Washington was indeed widespread. Unlike Russia, France and UK, the other three permanent members of the UN Security Council that quickly endorsed the Indo-US nuclear deal announced in July 2005, China made no secret of its political reservations. Dr Singh’s diplomatic team deserves all the credit for reassuring Beijing that India will never be party to the containment of China and signalling New Delhi’s readiness for an expansive partnership with Beijing.

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