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.)