A signal achievement

The nuclear agreement that prime minister Manmohan Singh signed with president Bush in Delhi last week is probably the most important diplomatic success that this country has ever recorded. Commentators have, almost without exception, praised the government's negotiating skills for having kept eight out of the 22 reactors that are operational or under construction within the military programme and preventing restrictions from being placed on adding to the military list in the future. But the concessions India has won in the military sphere are the less important of its achievements.

India's greater success lies in the civilian sphere. Although public attention has been focussed mainly upon the access to civilian nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel that the agreement will ensure, India will gain far more in the long run from the removal of the embargo on dual use technology. India does not have any immediate, or even medium term need for nuclear power.

Admittedly, its own uranium deposits are sufficient only to meet the needs of 10,000 MW of 'pressurised heavy water reactors' during their lifetime, but it has abundant reserves of coal and endless access to imported, high grade coal. The government only recently floated bids for five 'ultra-mega' power plants pf 5,000 to 10,000 MW capacity each, based upon coal. It is difficult to see nuclear power generation growing at such a pace even after the signing of the agreement.

But the embargo on the sale of dual use technology and products had already begun to hurt. After its 1974 'peaceful nuclear explosion' India had become the target of a battery of international agreements whose sole purpose was to deny it access to so-called dual use technology. These were immeasurably reinforced after the Pokharan tests in 1998. Today, the Nuclear Suppliers' Group has 45 members and the list of dual-use technologies has expanded till it has become a serious roadblock to the acquisition of new technology in fields totally unrelated to nuclear weapons. If President Bush can persuade the US Congress to remove this roadblock, civilian nuclear energy will be only one of the benefits that India will derive. It may not even be the most important one.

The economic benefits that are likely to flow from the agreement are, however, dwarfed by its political significance. In a nutshell it marks the US' acceptance of India as a partner — a member of a nascent governing board - in the management of a world rendered chaotic by globalisation, the end of the cold war, and the rise of new threats to international peace and stability that were scarcely imagined two decades ago.

That is why the US took such pains to emphasise that the July 18 deal was a 'one-time exception' and not the first step in the creation of the a third-tier of nuclear states between the haves and have-nots of the NPT. This means that when the dust kicked up by this seismic shift in global alignments settles down; when the US Congress has amended its domestic laws and the Nuclear Suppliers' Group has lifted the embargo on the sale of dual use technology . India's status will gradually become indistinguishable from that of other members of the five nuclear weapon states.

Two developments have brought about this still somewhat surprising convergence. The first is the US' progressive loss of the hegemony it had enjoyed since the end of the WWII. Two days before Bush left for India, the Pew Research Centre released a survey of global attitudes toward the US in 17 countries which showed that 10 countries had an overall unfavourable impression of the US; 15 expressed a lack of confidence in Bush and 17 believed that the US made policy solely in its own interest. Every country in the poll, with the unsurprising exception of the US itself, believed that the world would be safer if there was another military power to rival it.

The cause is the invasion of Iraq. The Pew survey showed that in 18 of the 21 countries a majority ranging from 53 per cent in Canada to 70 per cent in France, believed that removing Saddam from power had made the world a more dangerous place. The Pew survey had been carried out in June last year, but its findings were echoed by those of a 35-country survey carried out by the BBC ten days before President Bush arrived in India.

Bush and his advisers became aware of the need to rebuild US hegemony more than a year ago. Hegemony, they were aware, could not be based on military power: to last it needed the consent of the governed, and that meant their voluntary acceptance of the goals espoused by the hegemon. Bush spelt these out in his second inaugural speech.

"The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. …So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world".

It is this vision of a democratic peaceful world thriving under the benign tutelage of the US, that draws Bush to India like a magnet. As globalisation continues to knock down the walls of the nation state and chaos continues to grow, the need to find a model of global governance that will enable the world to live in peace becomes steadily more urgent, India's stable, multi-ethnic, federal democracy seems to fill that bill.

While the European Union is another such model, what makes India unique is its success in engaging its vast Muslim population in the nation building process. The secret of its success - reflected dramatically by the fact that there is not a single Indian Muslim at Guantanamo - lies in the way that democracy has empowered the Muslims in India and given them allies in other communities when they seek to redress their grievances. Bush's unstinting praise of India's multi-ethnic democracy at Purana Qila was therefore not diplomatic fluff. It reflected his realisation that India was an exemplar of the 'post-national, global state'.

This role, in which India seems increasingly to be cast, places an immense burden of responsibility upon Dr. Manmohan Singh's government. Its first task is to ensure that nothing damages its stable multi-ethnicity. And that, paradoxically, requires it not to fall in line with America's way of dealing with recalcitrant Muslim nation and proto-nation states like Iraq, Iran and Palestine.

The only way that the Bush administration knows of dealing with nations that flout its will is through unrelenting confrontation. And that policy has brought nothing but disaster. Had it done otherwise it might have found out that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. It might also have realised that Saddam, for all his many thuggish vices, was running a staunchly secular state. It certainly would not have brought about that very fusion between religious fanaticism and nationalism that it faces in Iraq today.

Were it to do otherwise in Iran today it would agree to the Russian proposal to leave that country with the right to conduct research in uranium enrichment, because that is the only way in which the Ahmdinejad regime can reconcile Iranian nationalism with the demands of the IAEA and the international community. But instead it is forcing Iran and therefore itself into a corner where it will be left with no option but to bomb Iran.

Lastly, were it to do otherwise in Palestine it would be persuading Israel to engage with Hamas without preconditions instead of joining it in starving the Palestinians into disowning it.

India, by contrast, owes its stability and communal harmony to an equally unswerving policy of engagement and political accommodation. It has mastered four insurgencies and all but defused a fifth by constantly engaging in a dialogue with the insurgents and offering them a political compromise. Its political system forces all aspirants to power to seek an accommodation with religious and ethnic minorities. Bush's approach to global governance is therefore the absolute opposite of the Indian approach. If New Delhi can use its influence to nudge the US towards engagement instead of confrontation it will do both the US and the world an immense service.

* The author, a noted analyst and commentator, is a former editor of the Hindustan Times, The Economic Times and The Financial Express, and a former information adviser to the prime minister of India. He is the author of several books including, The Perilous Road to the Market: The Political Economy of Reform in Russia, India and China, and Kashmir 1947: The Origins of a Dispute, and a regular columnist with several leading publications.