Having acted decisively at home, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh can walk tall at the G8 summit in Hokkaido this week. Nothing gets you more respect at the global high table than the demonstration of political courage and tactical guile that have let the prime minister have his deal and save the government.

It is not just his stock as a leader that has gone up in the last two weeks. In defying the conventional wisdom in New Delhi and putting his own political future on line, Manmohan Singh has underlined India’s will to power. Mere accretion of resources — military, economic, technological — does not a great power make. The final ingredient in the cocktail is the capacity of a nation’s political elite to think big and act bold.

New Delhi’s waffling on the nuclear deal for nearly a year had not just damaged the political reputation of the Congress and the UPA government, but the very international perception of India. The India-sceptics were quick to gloat, “We told you so.” Their theme song — that India can never say “yes” to anything, even if it is in its own interest — acquired a fresh ring of believability.

If India’s friends were frustrated at its meandering ways, its enemies were delighted. The cumulative effect was to suggest that India is not ready for global prime time; that it is too deeply divided at home to ever emerge as a great power.

Having outwitted the CPM adventurists and the BJP opportunists, the prime minister now has a bigger task at hand in Hokkaido. He must begin selling the Indo-US nuclear deal to the rest of the world. Until now, India, in true middle kingdom fashion, has deluded itself that the problem of implementing the nuclear deal is only about convincing one Prakash Karat. The rest, it has held, was simply on “auto pilot”.

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