REACTIONS to the India-U.S. nuclear agreement have been generally muted in foreign capitals. Pakistan has been the only country that has expressed misgivings. Its National Command Authority, chaired by President Pervez Musharraf, said in a statement that the agreement would destabilise the Indian subcontinent and fuel a nuclear arms race. It said the deal would enable India to produce significant quantities of fissile material and nuclear weapons from unsafeguarded nuclear reactors.
The United States Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns was quick to assure the international community that the deal would put Indias planned nuclear reprocessing facility under international safeguards for perpetuity. He also gave the assurance that nuclear fuel shipped to India from the U.S. or any other country would be under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards. Burns said there was no reason why the India-U.S. agreement should become a divisive issue between Washington and Islamabad.
The response from Beijing was cautious. The Chinese leadership is fully aware that Washingtons game plan for the region is to build up an anti-Beijing alliance. Washington has also been exploiting the Indian establishments phobia against Chinas growing power. In 1998, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government sought to justify the nuclear tests India conducted in May that year on the grounds that India faced a threat from China.
However, since then, relations between the two countries have improved significantly. China may soon emerge as Indias biggest trading partner. The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, reacting to the India-U.S. agreement, said Beijing was prepared for creative thinking on the issue in tandem with the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).
China believes that countries can develop cooperation on the peaceful use of nuclear energy abiding by their respective international obligations, the spokesman said. Beijing has not indicated the stance it will take at the NSG meeting where the deal is likely to be on the top of the agenda. The spokesman only expressed the hope that creative thinking will help the international community to handle the issue properly.
Beijing has indicated that it will adopt a flexible attitude towards the deal. China had earlier been of the view that India should first be asked to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) before the international community gives the deal the go-ahead.
Russia had, from the outset, said it had no problems with the deal. Russian officials have maintained that India is a big market and there is considerable scope for the sale of Russian-made nuclear reactors. This seems to be the view of Germany and France too. Though American companies are likely to be given priority, New Delhi is expected to sign contracts with companies from Russia and Western Europe also for the construction of nuclear power stations.
However, Moscow and Beijing are worried about the growing strategic ties between India and the West. As recent developments in Eastern Europe have shown, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) seems to be on a collision course with Moscow. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) wants to build up a countervailing force in the Asian region. NATO forces are now all over Asia though it was meant to be confined to the Northern Atlantic region.
Leading neo-conservative figures in the U.S. have written about the need for the U.S. to project its military superiority to assert its hegemony over Russia and China. Vice-President Dick Cheney, a leading neo-conservative figure in the U.S. government, played a key role in clinching the nuclear deal. The Economist, in an editorial on the subject, wrote that the fundamental impulse behind the deal was the China factor.
An article in the Armed Forces Journal in the U.S. noted that the U.S., after its political and military fiasco in Iraq, needed new friends, especially in Asia, to deal with an increasingly assertive China and an unstable West Asia. Give New Delhi the nuclear technology it wants, our diplomats argue, and the U.S. gets access to India as a strategic partner of a billion citizens, writes Henry Sokolski, the author of the article.
India is now preparing to participate in the quadrilateral military exercises involving the U.S., Japan and Australia. Russia and China are also involved in a similar exercise. In the second week of August, under the banner of the SCO, the two countries, along with Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, participated in a massive military exercise.
Moscow is also worried that the nuclear deal would help the U.S. corner the lucrative Indian arms bazaar. India is currently on a shopping spree for big-ticket items like combat jets and ships. The President of the U.S.-India Business Council, Ron Somers, said the deal would provide a major opportunity for U.S. and Indian companies. Somers had earlier said the deal would create 27,000 high-paying jobs in the next 10 years in the U.S. nuclear industry, which has not been doing well in recent years.
Washington has assured New Delhi that it will lobby vigorously in forums such as the NSG to get international approval for the deal. But there still could be significant holdouts in the NSG. Countries like Finland and Sweden are known to be unhappy about the deal. The Prime Minster of Finland, while interacting with Indian journalists in Helsinki in June last year, was non-committal about extending support to the nuclear deal in the NSG.
South African officials told Frontline that they were studying the agreement carefully. They emphasised that the South African government was not against the peaceful use of atomic energy. South Africa is itself going ahead with pla ns to construct nuclear power stations. However, the officials said it would be difficult for their government to accept the agreement if it promoted weaponisation. South Africa will be chairing the next NSG meeting. New Delhi has started sending emissaries to different world capitals to lobby support. Washington has announced that it would use its influence to the maximum to get the NSG to approve the deal.
John CherianCOMMents
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