After heralding the last lap of its current political tenure at the national helm with a hugely popular budget last week, the Congress leadership must now decide on how and when to proceed with the implementation of the historic civil nuclear initiative. Whether the Congress should at all go ahead with India’s single most important foreign policy initiative in the last few decades, meanwhile, is an over-arching question that has not gone away.

First, the “how” question. The BJP and the CPM have given no indication that they might reconsider their opposition to the nuclear initiative. If the BJP has been trapped by rank opportunism, the CPM is blindsided by its moribund ideology. The risks and rewards of going ahead with the nuclear initiative belong entirely to the Congress.

That the BJP’s opposition to the nuclear deal is bereft of all principle is no secret. We now have it from the horse’s mouth. The former US deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott, who negotiated the nuclear question with the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government during 1998-2000, suggests the BJP might have grabbed any nuclear deal from the Clinton administration similar to the one on offer today for the Congress-led government from President George W. Bush. (See Op-Ed Page.) Talbott says the “BJP would have been astonished given what they knew about our position on the issues involved”.

Unfortunately for the BJP, President Bush’s “astonishing offer” was not available during his first term, when the NDA government did make some advances with the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership unveiled in January 2004. It was only when he returned to power in January 2005 that Bush was ready to embark on a genuine transformation of Indo-US relations.

... contd.