Silent fusion

In the U.S., there is almost no consideration of the ongoing debate in India over the 123 Agreement.

EACH day, my email inbox receives scores of messages about the 123 Agreement, the nickname for the India-United States nuclear deal. All the messages emanate from India or from overseas Indians who follow the deal carefully and have very strong opinions, one way or the other. Some messages extol the historical opportunity for India, given that to some it appears that a magnanimous U.S. is willing to welcome India into the fraternity of nuclear nations. Others dispute this view, arguing that India has given up its foreign policy independence, and this deal is one more nail in the coffin of the non-aligned posture that is South Blocks hallmark. Indias principled stand for global nuclear disarmament, these critics argue, is erased with this deal.

In the U.S., meanwhile, there is almost no consideration of the ongoing debate in India. The New York Times ran a story on August 14, but it was buried on Page 10 (it bears the headline, Defending Nuclear Pact, India Premier Faces Jeers). The article ends with a reminder that although the U.S. Congress has already had one look at the deal, it will have to approve it again after a series of international verifications. But all is not done, for, as the Tim es South Asia Bureau Chief Somini Sengupta pointed out, there are American critics in the picture who are concerned that the deal is an overly permissible exception for New Delhi, potentially allowing it to continue to advance its nuclear arsenal while refusing to sign the global non-proliferation treaty. This is a rare piece of reporting. Local papers and television have been utterly silent. Since the matter is not before the U.S. Congress yet, it is understandable that the editorial pages have not weighed in. The Chicago Tribune, a lonely exception, argued in favour of the deal, which despite its weakening of the global non-proliferation regime, is finally a weapon to smash the veneer of polite antipathy between the U.S. and India (August 11).

Stephen Schwartz, editor of the influential The Nonproliferation Review, offered four reasons for this relative quiet. The first two are related, and do not directly address either this agreement or India. To non-experts, the issues involved in the Agreement are esoteric and fairly complicated, Schwartz told me. This is the same sort of view that is taken with regard to international law. Rather than attempt to use the podium of the mass media to educate the public, politicians and journalists tend to avoid the minutiae of these issues unless there is an impending crisis (although, during the standoff with North Korea there was little discussion about the actual nuclear capabilities of the country). Because the media tends to entertainment or to stories that are not technical, Schwartz says, nuclear non-proliferation issues receive almost no media coverage. During the 2004 presidential election, Democratic candidate John Kerry tried to raise the question of loose nukes, but it was ignored.

Rather than go into the arcane details of laws and technology, the media tend to report enthusiastically on issues with an emotional connection to the average reader or television viewer. For this third reason, Schwartz uses the example of the current front-page sensation, the Chinese-made lead-painted toy controversy. The news reports have a personal impact, which is to say that the average consumer has an immediate and direct relationship to the story (ones children might be playing with these toys). Regarding a nuclear deal in an age when nuclear annihilation seems so distant to most people, the immediate impact of the story is negligible.

Finally, Schwartz points out that India is just not a country most Americans give much notice to. The U.S. press responds to the anxiety among the white-collar population over outsourcing of work to India, but otherwise there is only marginal interest in the high growth rates in recent years or of the transformation of urban India (the outlier is The New York Times Thomas Friedman, who, for a period of time, wrote regularly about India, Inc.) . According to Schwartz, apart from presidential visits, the last time India was front page news for more than a few days was back in 1998, following the nuclear weapons tests. Despite what many Indians want to believe, the U.S. public and its media does not regard India with more than marginal curiosity.

Stephen Cohen, the South Asia expert at the Brookings Institution, points to two other factors, one of which is that August is the month that most Americans go on vacation. When the Bush team worked up a case for the war on Iraq in 2002, they had their new message ready by late July. But they remained silent until September. As White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card put it, From a marketing point of view, you dont introduce new products in August. Even if this were not August, however, it is not likely that the 123 deal would supplant the fiasco in Iraq and Afghanistan, Cohens other obstacle.

Even when there has been some mention of the 123 Agreement, nonproliferation expert Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research says, there is almost no analysis here of why the United States is doing this other than passing references to an emerging strategic alliance. What would happen, for instance, when the U.S. and India disagree on developments in Central Asia, with Iran, and with China? Such strategic considerations, the heart of the critique with India, are absent in the U.S. media.

In a peculiar twist, the deal is treated as a special dispensation to India and the Indian American population, rather than as a major shift in both the U.S. policy in the region and in Indian foreign policy in general. Members of Congress who support the deal have not made their case to the general population, but they tout their support toward the Indian American community. India Abroad, the major newspaper of the Indian American community, keeps consistent tabs on the progress o f the deal, with laudatory articles about, and interviews with, those congressional members who are sold on the new arrangement. The New York Times ran a story in June 2006 with the headline, Indian Americans Test Their Clout on Atom Pact. The newspaper pointed out that the agreement is not just about geopolitics, but is something more personal: a confirmation of Indias emergence as a global power. And they see the increasingly contentious battle in Congress as a unique opportunity to demonstrate their budding political influence in their adopted homeland. By making this a demonstration of Indian American arrival, the pro-123 agenda have cleverly made this a referendum on India and Indian Americans rather than on what this agreement does to the global architecture of proliferation, or on the business interests it serves.

The main elements of the pro-123 lobby are the U.S. India Business Council (USIBC), the U.S. India Friendship Association, the two congressional pro-India caucuses, and Indian American lobbies. The commercial groups (such as the USIBC, which represents about 250 U.S. companies with interests in India, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerces Coalition for Partnership with India) have brought in top-flight lobbying firms such as Patton Boggs and Stonebridge International to push the deal through the back channels. They have a vested interest in the deal, because it will mean that U.S. firms will gain contracts in the Indian nuclear sector. In March 2007, the USIBC hosted a 230-member business delegation to India, particularly the Commercial Nuclear Executive Mission.

Tim Richards of General Electric (GE) gingerly said of the trip, We know Indias need for nuclear power. Ron Somers, president of USIBC, does not talk openly about the commercial benefits of the deal, but prefers to emphasise the need to bring India into the international mainstream of nuclear non-proliferation. This strategy is fairly obvious.

As GE Indias chief executive officer T.P. Chopra told a Wharton periodical, The last thing we want is to give ammunition to the Left-wing parties. They would love to project the U.S. as greedy capitalists selling the country for a few dollars more. Business will keep silent until its signed, sealed and delivered. It is, therefore, in the interest of the commercial lobbies to keep the contours of the deal and its benefits within the Washington beltway than to have broad, open debate in the town halls of the U.S.