Missing the spirit for the letter

When the Nuclear Suppliers Group met last month to consider the US proposal to waive the stringent rules that prevented nuclear trade and commerce with India, reservations were expressed and amendments proposed by many participating countries. It would appear that few actually objected to the exceptionalisation of India per se; in fact some of the major suppliers were positively in favour of the waiver.

The US, as the originator of the proposal, agreed to take into account the various concerns voiced at that meeting in a revised draft and the NSG agreed to meet again to consider a fresh draft. With a tacit approval from India, that draft is now being considered by the NSG. The non-proliferation lobby, disconcerted that the proposal was not rejected outright, mounted a last-ditch attack, using the not-inconsiderable resources at their disposal, by prevailing on the current chairman of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, a known opponent of the Indo-US Agreement, to release to the public what was apparently privileged information, in the form of the administration’s answers to 45 fairly technical and non-proliferation related questions.

This ill-advised action, by its very timing, a day before the NSG was scheduled to reconvene in Vienna, had clear mischievous intent and was meant to influence the doubters and fence-sitters in the NSG to propose amendments to the US draft that would certainly kill the deal, and embarrass the US delegation in the process. It seems however, to have achieved other, perhaps unwanted results — the revival of the domestic opposition in India and provoking Indian doubts of America’s bona fides. An examination of the letter and its enclosure would seem to indicate that a storm in a teacup is being interpreted as a tsunami — to quote a feverish TV channel, “a nuclear shock”.

Firstly, Indian newspapers had, several months ago, reported not only the fact of the US state department responding to a series of questions from the House committee, but also that the correspondence was being kept from the public domain since some of the language might have been found embarrassing by the Indian government. So why the surprise? On the substantive side, there does not appear to be anything new in the answers provided, whether on testing, on enrichment and reprocessing technology or on dual use items for the ‘design, construction or operation of sensitive nuclear technologies’.

To start with, in an eerie echo of a debate which has taken place in India, a question was posed by the Committee “Does the Administration believe that the nuclear cooperation agreement with India overrides the Hyde Act?” In response, the answer is that “the proposed Agreement is consistent with the legal requirements of both the Hyde Act and the Atomic Energy Act.” There is no direct response to the issue of what overrides which piece of legislation; clearly the last ‘expression of sovereignty of the US will prevail, according to their own Constitution — if the 123 Agreement is approved by the US Congress, that would obviously be the ‘last expression’; till that time, it is the Hyde Act and the Atomic Energy Act, as amended by the Hyde Act.

... contd.

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