Over the last three years, as India endlessly argued with itself the entry-price into the elite nuclear club that was outlined in the July 2005 agreement with the United States, its chattering classes refused to appreciate the kind of strategic readjustment that was being asked of the rest of the world — recognise India’s nuclear exceptionalism, discard the notion of nuclear parity between New Delhi and Islamabad, and accept India’s strategic equivalence with China.

All governments in New Delhi in recent decades have pursued these seemingly impossible national objectives. It is the Manmohan Singh government, however, that finally provided the long-awaited geopolitical breakthrough for India in partnership with US President George W. Bush.

That it took a lot of arm-twisting to silence the churlish white knights of the West and stop China from throwing a monkey wrench into the works highlighted the difficulties in getting the NSG to accept a change of nuclear rules painstakingly crafted over the last four decades, for India, and India alone.

The NSG was also asked to do this at a time when non-proliferation has emerged as one of the principal international security concerns and rules on high-technology transfers are being tightened against other countries.

Since its first atomic test, Pokharan I, in May 1974, India has been trapped in a no-man’s land or a ‘nuclear trishanku’ under international law. India was neither a weapon-state nor a non-nuclear weapon state. India could either keep its nuclear weapons or develop a substantive atomic power programme. It could not have both. The NSG waiver now allows India to have its weapons programme and expand its civilian atomic power generation in cooperation with the rest of the world.

That there was little applause in the room in Vienna when the consensus was finally forced on the NSG is a reminder that the group, set up in 1975 to counter the systemic challenge posed by Pokharan I, had to reverse itself today to accept the reality of India’s nuclear weapons programme and agree to renew high technology civilian cooperation with India.

The international debate over the Indo-US nuclear deal was only in part about non-proliferation. More fundamentally it was about India’s rise. Without a recognition of India’s emergence as a great power, there was no prospect that the international system would have modified the nuclear regime in New Delhi’s favour.

Only a decade ago, in the wake of the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in May 1998, the United Nations Security Council, in a unanimous resolution No 1172 in June 1998, demanded that the two nations sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and end their nuclear and missile programmes. The history of international relations tells us that great powers agree to change the existing security norms only when they have to accommodate a rising power. The NSG decision to turn the solid international consensus in 1998 against New Delhi’s strategic programmes on its head is a bow to India’s rise.

The Bush Administration was the first to recognise India’s new strategic importance and the need to change the nuclear rules. It was not easy, however, selling the proposition to the powerful American non-proliferation lobby, the purists in the West and China.

Although it was small nations that raised all the noise, China had most to lose if the world began to differentiate between New Delhi and Islamabad in the nuclear domain. After all, without Chinese assistance, Pakistan could never have built a credible nuclear and missile programme. So Beijing had every reason to frown upon the international acknowledgement of India’s nuclear parity with China. Not surprisingly, it showed its hand at the very last minute in the NSG. While China always saw the Indo-US nuclear deal in terms of its consequences for the Asian balance of power, it had to fall in line.

It’s not entirely a coincidence that it was Manmohan Singh who, in the early 1990s, ended India’s international economic isolation and it’s Manmohan Singh who has now reconfigured India’s geopolictical standing. Thanks to the economic reforms which rebuilt India’s economic sinews, India has now successfully repositioned itself in the global order.

(Contributing Editor C. Raja Mohan is a professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and the author of the book, Impossible Allies: Nuclear India, United States and the Global Order, that traces India’s recent atomic diplomacy and its efforts to build a strategic partnership with the US.)