The Senate’s ringing endorsement of the deal is not just a diplomatic triumph for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the UPA government but for India as a whole. Successive governments in New Delhi over the decades have sought to square the circle of international non-proliferation law which prohibited civilian nuclear energy cooperation with India.

Until now, the world was telling India that it can either keep its nuclear weapons or have civilian nuclear energy cooperation. Bush was the first leader who broke this rigid paradigm by saying India can have both. With the Senate vote last night, Bush is now close to keeping the first part of his promise, which many considered an impossible task, to change American domestic non-proliferation law and the international non-proliferation regime to facilitate full civilian nuclear energy cooperation with India.

As Bush prepares to wrap up his success with the Congress, critics in India are sure to wring their hands. Similar to their previous argument that the Congress will never approve the deal, they will now insist that some of the language in the draft bills approved by the House and the Senate is not acceptable. The UPA government itself had conveyed many of its reservations on the language of the draft legislation. Some of these relate to prohibition on the transfer of uranium enrichment, plutonium reprocessing, and heavy water production technologies to India, stringent end use verification, the nature of fuel supply assurances in the event of a termination of the Indo-U.S. deal, and a commitment to avoid nuclear testing in future.

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