The Praful Bidwai Column
The nuclear deal's true costs
ONLY weeks ago, members of India's Left parties would have said the United Progressive Alliance shouldn't be toppled on the issue of the US-India nuclear deal.
Rising prices, India's strategic alliance with the US, and the UPA's poor record on fighting communalism, they'd say, are more important. The deal, on which less than a fifth of the public has clear views, shouldn't be the main determinant of Left-UPA relations.
Today, the Left has bedfellows like the Bahujan Samaj Party and the remains of the United National Progressive Alliance minus the Samajwadi Party. It wants to vote the UPA out --just as the Bharatiya Janata Party does. The UPA, in turn, is allied with the SP for super-opportunistic reasons.
This shift can only be explained by the obsessive zeal with which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has pursued the deal.
The Left agreed in November to let the government go to the International Atomic Energy Agency secretariat to negotiate a safeguards agreement on condition that it wouldn't take the next step without the Left's approval.
The Left was betrayed by Dr. Singh, who approached the IAEA Board of Governors (BoG) for approving the agreement, thus directly contradicting Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee's promise that this would happen only after securing a Parliamentary confidence vote.
The UPA moved the BoG even before the Left withdrew its support, and fixed a briefing for it four days before the confidence vote.
The UPA has stooped low to subterfuge, stealth and deception, and mocked at democratic decision-making based on transparency, political honesty and honouring promises made to members of parliament.
Dr. Singh never had a popular mandate for the deal, which has huge implications for India's foreign policy, and nuclear and strategic stances.
Such a mandate cannot be conjured up through wheeling-and-dealing. Democracy requires that no paradigm shift in policy be executed without full public discussion and before a broad consensus is reached.
The UPA is devaluing and defiling democracy by resorting to sordid horse-trading, defection and bribery, and made the political process hostage to powerful corporate interests. With the BSP too using money power, Parliament has become an auction-house.
Even if the UPA wins the confidence vote, the new power-sharing arrangement will lack a programmatic basis. At its centre will be India's sleaziest and most criminalised party -- the SP -- with its links with shady business interests and musclemen and history of dirty "sweetheart deals."
The SP is backing the UPA not to isolate the BJP, but to counter the BSP. The SP is deeply compromised with the Sangh Parivar, which propelled it to power in UP in 2005 through defections, with a nod from governor and old RSS hand Vishnu Kant Shastri, and BJP-appointed Speaker Kesri Nath Tripathi.
Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav covertly followed the Parivar's script. He retained Tripathi, appointed/continued Sangh nominees as government pleaders and heads of commissions, donated crores to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and ensured that Mr LK Advani wouldn't be prosecuted for the Babri demolition.
It's shameful that the UPA has chosen to ally with the SP and pander to the outrageously parochial demands advanced by Mr Yadav's lieutenant Amar Singh on behalf of businessman Anil Ambani.
The SP will extract a horrible price for its support, which might turn out unaffordable. Even if the UPA terminates this alliance, the damage caused by the SP through its betrayal of the CPM, and undermining of the UNPA, will prove lasting.
The alliance will shift the centre of gravity of Indian politics to the Right, with damaging consequences for the masses. This shift can only facilitate the further rise of the BJP.
If the domestic costs of pushing the deal are high, the external costs will be onerous. The deal is inseparably linked to a close, unequal political-military partnership with the US.
This will erode India's foreign policy independence and make it complicit in Washington's ill-conceived Global War on Terror, its occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and its other hegemonic plans.
The IAEA safeguards agreement, which the government dishonestly claimed to be secret, but made public 10 hours after arms-control groups disclosed it, won't fly.
The UPA has failed to convince independent critics that it meets Dr Singh's commitments to Parliament regarding uninterrupted fuel supply, and rights to build a "strategic fuel reserve" and take "corrective measures."
These assurances are in the preamble, not in the agreement's operative part. Even if the preamble is charitably interpreted as setting its context and purpose, several clauses in the operative part mandate that the facilities put under inspections cannot be taken out even if the fuel supply is cut. "Corrective measures" are nowhere defined.
Besides non-compliance with Dr Singh's assurances -- a procedural criticism -- the agreement is flawed on substantive grounds. It detracts from the imperative of global nuclear disarmament. It legitimises India's nuclear weapons although India hasn't signed any nuclear restraint or disarmament treaty -- because the US wants to favour a new friend.
This will encourage nuclear wannabes to seek a similar deal and weaken the global non-proliferation norm. That cannot be in India's, or the world's, interest.
Under the agreement, India will only put 14 of its 22 civilian reactors under inspections. It can produce 200 kg of plutonium from the remaining eight reactors -- enough for 40 bombs a year, in addition to the 100 to 150 bombs India already has.
This makes nonsense of the professed "credible minimum deterrent," usually understood as a few dozen weapons. India already has 100 to 150 bombs. This rotten deal must be opposed on grounds of peace. In its energy component, it's another Enron in the making -- only costlier and more dangerous.
Part of the responsibility for letting the deal go this far lies with the CPM. Last November, it allowed the government to go to the IAEA.
The reason? The Nandigram violence, which made the CPM desperately anxious to avoid an early election. Such are the wages of pro-rich policies. Will the CPM learn its lesson?
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