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.

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