: deal. If we suppose that the favourable interpretation given to the agreement will depend upon the contingencies of the administration in the US rather than upon the structural logic of the deal, then this attenuates the deal’s attractiveness. This would have mattered less if we had put in place the other contracts and legislative protections that would have operationalised this deal while the supposedly favourable Bush administration was in office. But now the case of those who think that the deal should be reconsidered in light of the new political winds blowing in the US becomes more plausible.
On the Indian side, the benefits of the deal depend on our capacity for follow-up: how we nurture our indigenous scientific establishment, how we manoeuvre our foreign policy independence, and how we create the regulatory framework that will enable a nuclear industry to take off. On the first, we have been a dismal failure, progress on the second is debatable, and the prospects of getting an appropriate domestic regulatory framework for exploiting the full potential of nuclear power domestically look thin for the next few years. Domestic uranium mining and potentially giving access to the indigenous private sector remain a distant gleam. In short, the Government consistently gave signals that it was more interested in the deal than it was in doing all the things that secure independent nuclear power. It is its lack of initiative on so many other related fronts over the past couple of years that leads people to wonder whether the deal is more important to us, or the objectives it is meant to serve. Have we not confused ends and means?
This question becomes more pressing in light of the fact that there has not been a single issue of abiding national importance on which the prime minister has asserted his authority. The prime minister’s own agenda was consistently sidelined, whether it was administrative reform, new paradigms of delivery of services to the poor, further push on economic reform or fiscal responsibility. He was a silent spectator on issues of overwhelming national importance, like the handling of the poison of caste, or the decimation of higher education. Even his potentially interesting initiatives on Pakistan or Kashmir are threatening to unravel because of a lack of follow- through. In short, it was naive of the prime minister to suppose that he could abdicate an assertion of power on other issues...
