In anticipation of a Democrat-led US administration pushing for a tighter non-proliferation regime in less than a year’s time, India, for the first time after declaring itself a nuclear weapon state, has enunciated a comprehensive seven-point agenda for nuclear disarmament.

Listing its agenda of seven concrete proposals at the Conference of Disarmament — the lead global forum on these issues — in Geneva last week, India as a nuclear weapon state has formally proposed two multilateral agreements and two global conventions in a detailed framework for nuclear disarmament. This includes conveying India’s willingness as a nuclear weapon state to turn its policy of no-first use into a multilateral legal commitment.

With US seeking to build a new consensus on disarmament around the idea floated by the likes of Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and others, India has realised that it needs to move fast as the effective fallout of a US-led effort would be a far more restrictive technology-denial regime with universal disarmament still remaining a distant goal.

While the best way forward for India is to go ahead with the nuclear deal and still pursue its policy objectives, delay on the deal means New Delhi must come up with a back-up plan to ensure that it reclaims its position in setting the disarmament agenda than finding itself at the receiving end of stricter controls.

As a result, the Manmohan Singh government did not only seek to revive the 1988 Rajiv Gandhi plan for universal disarmament as the final objective, but also called for reducing the importance of nuclear weapons in security doctrines as one key step to this end.

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