The desire to salvage a few remaining slivers of self respect may still impel the Congress to push for the Indo-US nuclear deal. But it is important to be clear about the nature of this push. To call the pushing for the deal at this stage an act of statesmanship is to engage in something of a hyperbole that only a politics with as low expectations as ours can let pass. A willingness to give up a mere few weeks in power is hardly a great sacrifice. It would have been something to have pushed for a faster follow-up to the deal a few months ago. The Government has had more than two years to bring this deal to fruition: to change people’s minds, to court new allies, to cut new deals. But it has postponed these decisions till the last minute, where the risk of losing power has very few consequences.
It is hard to decide whether the Congress’s courting the Samajwadi Party is a case of intentionally risking something or a typical piece of political misjudgement. On the surface, aligning with the SP will further diminish the Congress’s chances of expanding its base amongst Dalits and the poor and will contribute to its longer term decline. And it is more likely that this alignment will be remembered for the opportunism it represents more than the good it might do.
The Congress’s postponing the moment of reckoning has already compromised the deal in several ways. First, it is not entirely clear that India will approach the NSG with the strongest possible hand. Contrary to official spin, our standing amongst NSG countries has already been compromised. Second, the Congress’s argument that the last weeks of the Bush administration are the last chance we have for this deal is, in a peculiar way, paradoxical. For, as everyone knows, the really contentious issues are not the text of the 123 Agreement itself. They have to do with the surrounding context in which it is embedded. On the US side, it is the political price the United States intends to extract for the deal and the ambiguity over how the agreement will in future be interpreted in relation to other US legislation.
A case could be made that these are not matters that can be resolved through legal nit picking; they essentially turn on how future American administrations interpret and follow up on the...
