On Hokkaido time

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.

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”.

Given their manic obsession with the United States, the communists have been unwilling to see that the Indo-US civil nuclear initiative — in its conception, scope and consequences — was global. It was about changing the current international rules on nuclear commerce to allow India to regain access to the global high technology market. This in turn meant getting almost all the major countries in the world to accept India as a legitimate nuclear partner.

Nor was the deal only about India’s energy security, the size of its future nuclear programme and its contribution to the nation’s electric power generation. In its essence, the deal was about redefining India’s position in the international hierarchy. The current nuclear non-proliferation regime decrees by law that India is a nuclear pariah. There was no way India could not have accepted this fate as a permanent condition. The deal is about giving India its rightful place in the management of the global nuclear system and the high technology trade.

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