No peace or stability can emerge in West Asia through occupation, subjugation, and the military slaughter of civilians.
29 July 2006
The Hindu
Beware the 'new order' Israel is imposing
Siddharth Varadarajan
ON JULY 28, 1989, a detachment of heavily armed Israeli commandos descended upon the southern Lebanese village of Jibchit. The time was 2 a.m. They burst into the home of Sheikh Abdul Karim Obeid, leader of the Hizbollah militia, beat up his wife, and shot dead a neighbour before bundling the Sheikh and two other men into a helicopter. One of those seized was a young man named Hashem Fahaf who had no connection to Hizbollah, the other was the Sheikh's bodyguard.
According to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which carries a helpful if damning account of the kidnapping on its website, "Israel had hoped to use the sheikh as a card to affect an exchange of prisoners and hostages [held by Hizbollah] in return for all Shiites held by it."
So brazen was Israel's action that the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed a resolution (No. 638) calling for the "immediate safe release of all hostages and abducted persons, wherever and by whomever they are being held." Needless to say, Tel Aviv ignored the resolution. After all, kidnapping non-combatants, including minors, and holding them hostage, was an integral part of Israel's military strategy. In May 1994, Israeli soldiers abducted a prominent Lebanese businessman and former commander of the Shia Amal militia, Mustafa al-Dirani, and brought him into Israel. The aim of that kidnapping was to try and get information about the location of Ron Arad, an air force navigator who had been shot down over Sidon in 1986 during Israel's ongoing aggression against Lebanon.
Mr. Fahaf, whose presence Israel refused to recognise for years, spent 11 years in jail before the Supreme Court finally ordered his release. He was allowed to return home along with 18 other Lebanese nationals who — the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in August 2003 — had been held "according to the official version ... as `bargaining chips' for Ron Arad". Two of those released had been kidnapped as boys and had grown into adulthood in captivity.
Sheikh Obeid and Mr. Dirani were finally released in 2004, after being held hostage by the Israeli government for 15 and 10 years respectively. Both men spent extended periods of time at Camp 1391, dubbed Israel's Guantanamo, a prison whose existence the Israeli authorities do not freely admit to. There, Mr. Dirani was raped, sexually abused, and tortured by Israeli soldiers. A lawsuit filed by him against the State of Israel is currently pending before a judge in Tel Aviv. He is claiming NIS 6 million ($1.5 million) in damages.
The 2004 release was part of a general prisoner swap brokered by the German government in which Hizbollah released an Israeli businessman and reserve colonel seized in 2000 in order to force Tel Aviv to free Sheikh Obeid. Hizbollah also returned the bodies of three Israeli soldiers killed in action. In exchange, Israel set free the Sheikh, Mr. Dirani, and 33 other Lebanese and Arab hostages, as well as 400 Palestinian prisoners. It also returned the bodies of 59 Lebanese nationals killed by its security forces over the years.
It is necessary to recall this entire sordid episode in order to put in perspective Hizbollah's foolish action of seizing two Israeli soldiers across the blue line dividing Lebanon from Israel. Thanks to Israel, kidnapping and hostage-taking — as well as the targeting of non-combatants and even children — have become "acceptable" military tactics in the region though one would be hard pressed to come across any reference to Sheikh Obeid or Mr. Dirani in the international news coverage that followed Hizbollah's action. The Shia militia wants Tel Aviv to free the handful of Lebanese prisoners still in Israeli jails who were promised freedom in 2004 but never released. Most prominent among them is Samir Kuntar, captured in 1978 during a guerrilla raid on an Israeli settlement near the Lebanese border. Kuntar was found guilty of killing a civilian man and his young daughter and sentenced to more than 500 years in prison by an Israeli court. The Israeli authorities may baulk at releasing a "convicted child killer." But in rejecting the possibility of a negotiated settlement and indiscriminately bombarding Lebanon, Tel Aviv has turned its own soldiers into the executioners of children. When a well-marked United Nations post takes a direct hit and ambulances are struck — according to a recent dispatch by Robert Fisk — with missiles that pierce the Red Cross and Crescent symbol right at the centre, it is hard to accept the Israeli claim that all civilian deaths were unintended.
Real war aims
Recalling the recent history of kidnappings is also necessary for another reason: To puncture the myth that the disproportionate and utterly criminal Israeli military response that is pulverising Lebanon and its people today is somehow driven by an urge to free its two kidnapped soldiers.
Read what Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former U.S. National Security Advisor, told a small gathering in Washington last week about this. "I hate to say this but I will say it. I think what the Israelis are doing today for example in Lebanon is in effect — maybe not in intent — the killing of hostages. The killing of hostages ... Because when you kill 300 people, 400 people, who have nothing to do with the provocations Hizbollah staged, but you do it in effect deliberately by being indifferent to the scale of collateral damage, you're killing hostages in the hope of intimidating those that you want to intimidate. And more likely than not you will not intimidate them. You'll simply outrage them and make them into permanent enemies with the number of such enemies increasing."
On a par with the fantasy that the latest Israeli aggression against Lebanon is about protecting the legitimate security interests of Israel is the demand being raised in various quarters for a NATO peacekeeping force to be deployed on the Lebanese side of the border in order to disarm Hizbollah. Frequent reference is made to Security Council resolution 1559 of 2004, which called on the Lebanese government to assert its sovereignty over the whole of its territory and disarm the Shiite militia. When it suits Israel and the United States, United Nations resolutions such as 242 and 338 on Palestine or 638 on releasing hostages can be ignored for years on end. But other resolutions acquire a Biblical patina and instant compliance is required of them. By grossly interfering in Lebanon's internal affairs, Resolution 1559 was clearly ultra vires of the U.N. Charter. That is why it passed with the barest possible majority. Russia and China chose to abstain rather than exercise their veto because the resolution envisaged no enforcement mechanism. In any case, it is absurd for Israel — which is bombing Lebanon at will and sending in its troops — to speak in favour of a resolution that calls for the Lebanese government to assert its sovereignty.
As the Israeli peace bloc, Gush Shalom, has said, the current offensive against Lebanon — like the 1982 invasion which led to two decades of occupation — was prepared in advance in anticipation of a suitable provocation. Hizbollah's kidnap raid provided the Olmert regime the excuse it needed to launch a war for the physical elimination of the militia and the eventual installation of a pliant regime in Lebanon that would do Israel's — and the U.S.' — bidding. In many ways, the script is not that different from the manner in which the abduction of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian guerrillas gave Tel Aviv the pretext to do something it was itching to do ever since Hamas won the elections.
In both cases, Israel and its principal international backer, the U.S., have proved how bogus is their vision of a "New Middle East" centred around respect for democracy and human rights. By attacking Gaza and Lebanon, that too with such overwhelming and disproportionate military force, Israel has decisively turned its back on the possibility of a negotiated peace settlement with the Palestinians and Syrians. The Olmert regime has no intention of relinquishing its illegal control over land and aquifers that belong to others. The U.S. does not want democracy to flourish in the region. Nor does Israel. What it wants are partners who are too weak, isolated or pliant to insist on their rights. What it has in mind are unilateral outcomes, imposed through gunboat negotiations if possible or through war if necessary. In both cases, the active support of the Bush administration and the silence of the rest of the world are essential.
The refusal of the U.N. to condemn the Israeli aggression against Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority, its failure to bring about an immediate ceasefire despite the mounting civilian toll, and its inability to get Israel to lift its inhuman blockade of Gaza and release the Hamas Ministers and MPs it kidnapped last month are paving the way for a human tragedy of monumental proportions. As long as the world continues to appease Israel in this manner, the people of the region — and especially the Israelis — will never know peace.
29 July 2006
28 July 2006
So southern Lebanon is now in Israel?
After first bombing a clearly-marked United Nations observation post at Khiyyam in southern Lebanon, killing four international observers from the UN Truce Supervision Organisation, Israel is now saying they will not let the UN be part of any probe into whether the bombing was deliberate as Kofi Annan has alleged. At a Security Council meeting to discuss the issue, Jane Lute, the U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping -- who also happens to be an American national -- formally briefed ambassadors that cil that the outpost came under Israeli fire 21 times, including four direct hits. Prior to the disastrous bombing, the UN had also told Israel to stop dropping bombs in the vicinity of the post.
So why can't the UN join the probe? This is what Dan Gillerman, Israel's ambassador in New York was quoted by Ha'aretz as saying:
So why can't the UN join the probe? This is what Dan Gillerman, Israel's ambassador in New York was quoted by Ha'aretz as saying:
Israel has never agreed to a joint investigation, and I don't think that ifNice going, Dan, except the UN post was not in Israel but in Lebanon.
anything happened in this country, or in Britain or in Italy or in France, the
government of that country would agree to a joint investigation.
Nuclear Deal: Questions arise on reprocessing restrictions
Spent fuel treatment will require separate U.S. consent. And Congress will not waive Section 129 of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act, as the Bush administration had promised India in March.
28 July 2006
The Hindu
Questions arise on reprocessing restrictions
Siddharth Varadarajan
EVEN AS the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday night passed a bill authorising nuclear exports to India under a specific set of conditions, fresh doubts have surfaced about the extent to which the Bush administration intends to fulfil its side of the bargain struck with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last July.
Under the U.S. Atomic Energy Act of 1954, Sections 128 and 129 prohibit nuclear sales to countries that fall foul of a number of conditions. These include agreeing to place all nuclear facilities under international safeguards [128], not testing a nuclear weapon [129 (a)(1)(A)], not abrogating or violating IAEA safeguards [129(a)(1)(B) and (C)], not possessing nuclear weapons [129(a)(1)(D)], and not exporting reprocessing equipment and technology to a non-nuclear weapons state except as part of an international programme which the U.S. is a part of or approves of [129(a)(2)(C)].
The original draft Bill seeking to amend the AEA to allow nuclear sales to India — shared with New Delhi in March and submitted to Congress — envisaged the waiving of Sections 128 and 129 in their entirety. But in the version passed by the House on Wednesday and due to be passed by the Senate, the exemptions have been limited only to Section 128 and to the single clause of Section 129 which prohibits a recipient state from engaging in a nuclear weapons programme. Tests prior to July 18, 2005, are exempted but not subsequent ones.
According to senior Indian officials familiar with the proposed law, Washington is seeking to impose on the Indian civil nuclear industry a restriction on participating in any multinational fuel cycle initiative in which the U.S. is not a part or even from meaningfully collaborating with non-nuclear weapons states that have already mastered the fuel cycle.
Officials say the July 2005 agreement only committed India to refrain from "transfer of enrichment and reprocessing technologies to states that do not have them and supporting international efforts to limit their spread." There are several non-nuclear weapons states that currently possess these technologies, including Japan and Brazil. If tomorrow, India decides to collaborate with Brazil on reprocessing or enrichment, either by itself or through an international initiative to which the U.S. does not belong, it is likely to fall foul of Section 129(a)(2)(C). This means a future American administration can end nuclear cooperation with India. Officials say that with the Senate Bill explicitly prohibiting U.S. exports of reprocessing technology to India — a far cry from the original commitment of "full" civil nuclear cooperation — an attempt is being made to squeeze the Indian involvement in fuel cycle technologies from both ends.
"The U.S. is pushing its own Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) but there are several other international fuel cycle proposals pending before the IAEA. By limiting the waiver of Section 129 in this way, there will be pressure on us to look at GNEP as the only alternative," an official told The Hindu.
Senior officials are also concerned that the envisaged legislation contains no provision for the reprocessing by India of spent fuel produced by imported reactors or fuel.
Section 123 of the U.S. AEA prohibits an importing country from reprocessing spent fuel without the prior consent of the U.S. "Our understanding was that India would be exempted from this section too," said an official. "Use of spent fuel is integral to the Indian nuclear programme and all our plans are based on this rather than storage or disposal, except for the high level nuclear waste left after reprocessing", he added. India, he said, would have to apply for U.S. consent each time, consent which may either not be forthcoming or be revoked in the future. "The spent fuel storage tanks at Tarapur are living proof of this problem," the official said, with the U.S. neither agreeing to cart the waste away nor allowing India to reprocess it.
Officials say "full" civil nuclear cooperation without India having the right to reprocess spent fuel is meaningless. "So far, the Administration has told us, `Look, its Congress which is tampering with the exemptions.' But the original draft of the Bill drawn up by the White House itself chose not to amend the Section 123 requirement of case-by-case consent to reprocessing," an official said.
During the question-and-answer session following a lecture on the nuclear deal on July 14, Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran said India would be free to reprocess the spent fuel produced from safeguarded reactors.
Since the White House is not keen to permit this through legislation, the only other route would have to be include this consent in the nuclear cooperation agreement (the `123 agreement') currently under negotiation. But that agreement, too, will have to pass the Congressional gauntlet.
28 July 2006
The Hindu
Questions arise on reprocessing restrictions
Siddharth Varadarajan
EVEN AS the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday night passed a bill authorising nuclear exports to India under a specific set of conditions, fresh doubts have surfaced about the extent to which the Bush administration intends to fulfil its side of the bargain struck with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last July.
Under the U.S. Atomic Energy Act of 1954, Sections 128 and 129 prohibit nuclear sales to countries that fall foul of a number of conditions. These include agreeing to place all nuclear facilities under international safeguards [128], not testing a nuclear weapon [129 (a)(1)(A)], not abrogating or violating IAEA safeguards [129(a)(1)(B) and (C)], not possessing nuclear weapons [129(a)(1)(D)], and not exporting reprocessing equipment and technology to a non-nuclear weapons state except as part of an international programme which the U.S. is a part of or approves of [129(a)(2)(C)].
The original draft Bill seeking to amend the AEA to allow nuclear sales to India — shared with New Delhi in March and submitted to Congress — envisaged the waiving of Sections 128 and 129 in their entirety. But in the version passed by the House on Wednesday and due to be passed by the Senate, the exemptions have been limited only to Section 128 and to the single clause of Section 129 which prohibits a recipient state from engaging in a nuclear weapons programme. Tests prior to July 18, 2005, are exempted but not subsequent ones.
According to senior Indian officials familiar with the proposed law, Washington is seeking to impose on the Indian civil nuclear industry a restriction on participating in any multinational fuel cycle initiative in which the U.S. is not a part or even from meaningfully collaborating with non-nuclear weapons states that have already mastered the fuel cycle.
Officials say the July 2005 agreement only committed India to refrain from "transfer of enrichment and reprocessing technologies to states that do not have them and supporting international efforts to limit their spread." There are several non-nuclear weapons states that currently possess these technologies, including Japan and Brazil. If tomorrow, India decides to collaborate with Brazil on reprocessing or enrichment, either by itself or through an international initiative to which the U.S. does not belong, it is likely to fall foul of Section 129(a)(2)(C). This means a future American administration can end nuclear cooperation with India. Officials say that with the Senate Bill explicitly prohibiting U.S. exports of reprocessing technology to India — a far cry from the original commitment of "full" civil nuclear cooperation — an attempt is being made to squeeze the Indian involvement in fuel cycle technologies from both ends.
"The U.S. is pushing its own Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) but there are several other international fuel cycle proposals pending before the IAEA. By limiting the waiver of Section 129 in this way, there will be pressure on us to look at GNEP as the only alternative," an official told The Hindu.
Senior officials are also concerned that the envisaged legislation contains no provision for the reprocessing by India of spent fuel produced by imported reactors or fuel.
Section 123 of the U.S. AEA prohibits an importing country from reprocessing spent fuel without the prior consent of the U.S. "Our understanding was that India would be exempted from this section too," said an official. "Use of spent fuel is integral to the Indian nuclear programme and all our plans are based on this rather than storage or disposal, except for the high level nuclear waste left after reprocessing", he added. India, he said, would have to apply for U.S. consent each time, consent which may either not be forthcoming or be revoked in the future. "The spent fuel storage tanks at Tarapur are living proof of this problem," the official said, with the U.S. neither agreeing to cart the waste away nor allowing India to reprocess it.
Officials say "full" civil nuclear cooperation without India having the right to reprocess spent fuel is meaningless. "So far, the Administration has told us, `Look, its Congress which is tampering with the exemptions.' But the original draft of the Bill drawn up by the White House itself chose not to amend the Section 123 requirement of case-by-case consent to reprocessing," an official said.
During the question-and-answer session following a lecture on the nuclear deal on July 14, Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran said India would be free to reprocess the spent fuel produced from safeguarded reactors.
Since the White House is not keen to permit this through legislation, the only other route would have to be include this consent in the nuclear cooperation agreement (the `123 agreement') currently under negotiation. But that agreement, too, will have to pass the Congressional gauntlet.
27 July 2006
"Safeguards, end to U.S. restrictions must be interlocking actions"
M.R. Srinivasan, member of the Atomic Energy Commission, spells out his worries about new conditions being imposed on India by the U.S. Congress in its draft law authorising the resumption of civilian nuclear cooperation. Excerpts from an interview.
27 July 2006
The Hindu
"Safeguards, end to U.S. restrictions must be interlocking actions"
Siddharth Varadarajan
M.R. Srinivasan, member of the Atomic Energy Commission, spells out his worries about new conditions being imposed on India by the U.S. Congress in its draft law authorising the resumption of civilian nuclear cooperation. Excerpts from an interview.
Do you feel the draft Bills being considered by the Senate and House of Representatives in the U.S. represent a shift in goalposts as far as India's obligations under the July 2005 agreement are concerned?
There is little doubt that the draft bills being considered by the two houses of the U.S. Congress have shifted the goalposts from India's obligations under the July 2005 agreement. The July agreement looked like an agreement between two equal parties, with reciprocal obligations. The draft bills appear like an imposition of a superior party over an inferior party. The July agreement recognised India as a responsible state with advanced nuclear technology, similar to the U.S. itself. The Indian side, at the highest level, has maintained that the agreement in no way affects India's freedom to pursue its strategic nuclear programme and only concerns Indian access to civilian nuclear technology. However, in the statement of policy in both the House and Senate resolutions, it is stated that U.S. policy is "to achieve a moratorium on the production of fissile material for nuclear explosive purposes by India, Pakistan, and the People's Republic of China at the earliest possible date," in the House Resolution and it was "to achieve as quickly as possible a cessation of the production by India and Pakistan of fissile material for the nuclear weapons and other nuclear explosive devices" in the Senate resolution. In the July agreement, India undertook to join in good faith the negotiations on a fissile material cut-off treaty, to be universal in nature. India supports now, as in the past, all measures towards universal nuclear disarmament, including an FMCT, but is opposed to a regional or segmented approach.
Which to your mind are the most dangerous new conditions being raised by the U.S.?
In the Senate resolution, there is a provision that any waiver on nuclear transfers to India "shall cease to be effective if the President determines that India has detonated a nuclear explosive device after the date of the enactment of this Act." It is true that this condition is consistent with the U.S. Atomic Energy Act. India voluntarily agreed to a moratorium on tests in 1998 and this position has been reiterated in the July agreement. It is clear that India does not wish to embark on a future test unless the circumstances are compelling. However, a totally new situation would arise if the U.S. itself or China or Pakistan or some other country conducts a nuclear test. The disruption that would follow if the supply of nuclear fuel imported from the U.S. or an NSG party were to be suspended for reactors that India may have imported would indeed be serious. The linkage of supplies to non-conduct of a test is understandable in the case of non-nuclear weapon states. If India as a de facto nuclear weapon state carries out a test under compulsions of ensuring its supreme national interest, there must be an opportunity of reviewing the situation between the U.S. and India prior to any suspension of supplies. In the House resolution there is a further provision that if nuclear transfers to India are restricted pursuant to this Act, the Atomic Energy Act 1954, or the Arms Export Control Act, the President should seek to prevent the transfer to India of nuclear equipment, materials or technology from other governments in the NSG or from any other source. This provision targets India unfairly even under unusual or exceptional circumstances when India is compelled to carry out a nuclear test, in response to actions of the U.S. or some other nuclear weapon state carrying out a nuclear test.
Indian officials claim that whatever additional conditions are being imposed will not be binding on India. Do you agree?
Such an assertion by some Indian officials is incorrect. Some examples illustrate the point. The July 2005 agreement has promised full civilian nuclear cooperation. However, the Senate resolution states that "the Nuclear Regulatory Commission may not authorise pursuant to part 110 of title 10, code of Federal Regulations, licences for the export or re-export to India of any equipment, materials or technology related to the enrichment of uranium, the reprocessing of spent fuel, or the production of heavy water." Some exceptions for this embargo are provided namely for a multinational facility participating in an IAEA approved programme to provide alternatives to national fuel cycle capabilities. India has developed its own home-grown technologies in these areas; however, it cannot accept a quarantine of this nature not applicable to other responsible countries with advanced nuclear technology.
How much of a limitation is the proposed Senate restriction on the sale of enrichment, reprocessing and heavy water technology and material to India?
In the case of the heavy water technology, India is amongst the small number of countries that have experience on an industrial scale with a number of processes. In the case of reprocessing, India has fairly large-scale plants, which have operated for several decades. In the case of enrichment, a medium scale plant has been operating for over a decade. When India expands its civilian nuclear programme manifold, it expects to take advantage of global advances to gain the best economics and operating reliability. After all, whatever input it may receive will be under IAEA safeguards. Hence the exclusion of these technologies not foreseen in the July 2005 and March 2006 agreements violates the spirit of these agreements.
U.S. officials are saying Indian scientists should not worry that the U.S. is out to trap them, that there is nothing wrong in IAEA safeguards entering into force before the U.S. lifts all restrictions. What is your opinion on the sequencing of steps?
The sequencing of actions under the July 2005 agreement is very important. India cannot agree to IAEA safeguards entering into force on the civilian segment of the Indian nuclear programme prior to the U.S. lifting its restrictions and the NSG deciding on an exemption for India. All these three actions must take place simultaneously. As a person who negotiated the Tarapur Agreement of 1963 and lived with its vicissitudes for some 30 years, I would strongly advise the Government of India not to accept any U.S. suggestion to de-link the three mutually interlocking actions. If any one of these actions is not taken, clearly all the three actions would be unimplementable.
What kind of safeguards agreement and Additional Protocol should India sign with the IAEA that will safeguard its R&D and national security interests from intrusive inspections? Would these be acceptable to the U.S. Congress?
The safeguards applicable under the standard IAEA Additional Protocol has been drawn up specifically for non-nuclear weapon states and is highly intrusive and comprehensive. India has experience with IAEA safeguards on reactors (TAPS 1&2, RAPS 1&2) fuel fabrication at NFC where imported enriched uranium is processed, fuel reprocessing on a campaign mode when treating spent fuel from RAPS 1&2 and the Away from Reactor Storage of spent fuel at Tarapur. India has had no problem with the implementation of these IAEA safeguards. India cannot accept any obligations to inform the IAEA about activities undertaken at the R&D centres or manufacturing on production facilities not notified as civilian. Naturally no information on activities connected with national security can be shared with any outside organisation such as the IAEA or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Congress is aware that other nuclear weapon countries also do not share such information with outside organisations or entities.
Some critics in India say the deal will increase our dependency on imported fuel manifold and that in the future, the country will be even more susceptible to external pressure. Do you agree with this view?
There is no doubt some substance in this concern. It is for this reason that India is keen to shift as early as possible to relying on thorium as a source of energy. However, some two or three decades are required before the country can reach that stage. We need an adequate base of heavy water and light water reactors to produce enough plutonium to start a series of fast breeder reactors. The limitation on availability of uranium in the country experienced recently has acted as a damper on faster growth of heavy water reactors though the industrial and manpower infrastructure can support a faster growth. Light water reactors imported from overseas along with the needed enriched uranium can augment the nuclear capacity in the near term and also give plutonium for starting some more fast reactors. We must also intensify exploration of uranium in India using the latest technology. Also India must access natural uranium from other countries and to the extent possible acquire `equity uranium.' An energy basket consisting of a mixture of different fuels, obtained both from internal and external sources and diversified countries, where import is involved, would minimise the potential for energy insecurity and strengthen the country to withstand external pressures.
27 July 2006
The Hindu
"Safeguards, end to U.S. restrictions must be interlocking actions"
Siddharth Varadarajan
M.R. Srinivasan, member of the Atomic Energy Commission, spells out his worries about new conditions being imposed on India by the U.S. Congress in its draft law authorising the resumption of civilian nuclear cooperation. Excerpts from an interview.
Do you feel the draft Bills being considered by the Senate and House of Representatives in the U.S. represent a shift in goalposts as far as India's obligations under the July 2005 agreement are concerned?
There is little doubt that the draft bills being considered by the two houses of the U.S. Congress have shifted the goalposts from India's obligations under the July 2005 agreement. The July agreement looked like an agreement between two equal parties, with reciprocal obligations. The draft bills appear like an imposition of a superior party over an inferior party. The July agreement recognised India as a responsible state with advanced nuclear technology, similar to the U.S. itself. The Indian side, at the highest level, has maintained that the agreement in no way affects India's freedom to pursue its strategic nuclear programme and only concerns Indian access to civilian nuclear technology. However, in the statement of policy in both the House and Senate resolutions, it is stated that U.S. policy is "to achieve a moratorium on the production of fissile material for nuclear explosive purposes by India, Pakistan, and the People's Republic of China at the earliest possible date," in the House Resolution and it was "to achieve as quickly as possible a cessation of the production by India and Pakistan of fissile material for the nuclear weapons and other nuclear explosive devices" in the Senate resolution. In the July agreement, India undertook to join in good faith the negotiations on a fissile material cut-off treaty, to be universal in nature. India supports now, as in the past, all measures towards universal nuclear disarmament, including an FMCT, but is opposed to a regional or segmented approach.
Which to your mind are the most dangerous new conditions being raised by the U.S.?
In the Senate resolution, there is a provision that any waiver on nuclear transfers to India "shall cease to be effective if the President determines that India has detonated a nuclear explosive device after the date of the enactment of this Act." It is true that this condition is consistent with the U.S. Atomic Energy Act. India voluntarily agreed to a moratorium on tests in 1998 and this position has been reiterated in the July agreement. It is clear that India does not wish to embark on a future test unless the circumstances are compelling. However, a totally new situation would arise if the U.S. itself or China or Pakistan or some other country conducts a nuclear test. The disruption that would follow if the supply of nuclear fuel imported from the U.S. or an NSG party were to be suspended for reactors that India may have imported would indeed be serious. The linkage of supplies to non-conduct of a test is understandable in the case of non-nuclear weapon states. If India as a de facto nuclear weapon state carries out a test under compulsions of ensuring its supreme national interest, there must be an opportunity of reviewing the situation between the U.S. and India prior to any suspension of supplies. In the House resolution there is a further provision that if nuclear transfers to India are restricted pursuant to this Act, the Atomic Energy Act 1954, or the Arms Export Control Act, the President should seek to prevent the transfer to India of nuclear equipment, materials or technology from other governments in the NSG or from any other source. This provision targets India unfairly even under unusual or exceptional circumstances when India is compelled to carry out a nuclear test, in response to actions of the U.S. or some other nuclear weapon state carrying out a nuclear test.
Indian officials claim that whatever additional conditions are being imposed will not be binding on India. Do you agree?
Such an assertion by some Indian officials is incorrect. Some examples illustrate the point. The July 2005 agreement has promised full civilian nuclear cooperation. However, the Senate resolution states that "the Nuclear Regulatory Commission may not authorise pursuant to part 110 of title 10, code of Federal Regulations, licences for the export or re-export to India of any equipment, materials or technology related to the enrichment of uranium, the reprocessing of spent fuel, or the production of heavy water." Some exceptions for this embargo are provided namely for a multinational facility participating in an IAEA approved programme to provide alternatives to national fuel cycle capabilities. India has developed its own home-grown technologies in these areas; however, it cannot accept a quarantine of this nature not applicable to other responsible countries with advanced nuclear technology.
How much of a limitation is the proposed Senate restriction on the sale of enrichment, reprocessing and heavy water technology and material to India?
In the case of the heavy water technology, India is amongst the small number of countries that have experience on an industrial scale with a number of processes. In the case of reprocessing, India has fairly large-scale plants, which have operated for several decades. In the case of enrichment, a medium scale plant has been operating for over a decade. When India expands its civilian nuclear programme manifold, it expects to take advantage of global advances to gain the best economics and operating reliability. After all, whatever input it may receive will be under IAEA safeguards. Hence the exclusion of these technologies not foreseen in the July 2005 and March 2006 agreements violates the spirit of these agreements.
U.S. officials are saying Indian scientists should not worry that the U.S. is out to trap them, that there is nothing wrong in IAEA safeguards entering into force before the U.S. lifts all restrictions. What is your opinion on the sequencing of steps?
The sequencing of actions under the July 2005 agreement is very important. India cannot agree to IAEA safeguards entering into force on the civilian segment of the Indian nuclear programme prior to the U.S. lifting its restrictions and the NSG deciding on an exemption for India. All these three actions must take place simultaneously. As a person who negotiated the Tarapur Agreement of 1963 and lived with its vicissitudes for some 30 years, I would strongly advise the Government of India not to accept any U.S. suggestion to de-link the three mutually interlocking actions. If any one of these actions is not taken, clearly all the three actions would be unimplementable.
What kind of safeguards agreement and Additional Protocol should India sign with the IAEA that will safeguard its R&D and national security interests from intrusive inspections? Would these be acceptable to the U.S. Congress?
The safeguards applicable under the standard IAEA Additional Protocol has been drawn up specifically for non-nuclear weapon states and is highly intrusive and comprehensive. India has experience with IAEA safeguards on reactors (TAPS 1&2, RAPS 1&2) fuel fabrication at NFC where imported enriched uranium is processed, fuel reprocessing on a campaign mode when treating spent fuel from RAPS 1&2 and the Away from Reactor Storage of spent fuel at Tarapur. India has had no problem with the implementation of these IAEA safeguards. India cannot accept any obligations to inform the IAEA about activities undertaken at the R&D centres or manufacturing on production facilities not notified as civilian. Naturally no information on activities connected with national security can be shared with any outside organisation such as the IAEA or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Congress is aware that other nuclear weapon countries also do not share such information with outside organisations or entities.
Some critics in India say the deal will increase our dependency on imported fuel manifold and that in the future, the country will be even more susceptible to external pressure. Do you agree with this view?
There is no doubt some substance in this concern. It is for this reason that India is keen to shift as early as possible to relying on thorium as a source of energy. However, some two or three decades are required before the country can reach that stage. We need an adequate base of heavy water and light water reactors to produce enough plutonium to start a series of fast breeder reactors. The limitation on availability of uranium in the country experienced recently has acted as a damper on faster growth of heavy water reactors though the industrial and manpower infrastructure can support a faster growth. Light water reactors imported from overseas along with the needed enriched uranium can augment the nuclear capacity in the near term and also give plutonium for starting some more fast reactors. We must also intensify exploration of uranium in India using the latest technology. Also India must access natural uranium from other countries and to the extent possible acquire `equity uranium.' An energy basket consisting of a mixture of different fuels, obtained both from internal and external sources and diversified countries, where import is involved, would minimise the potential for energy insecurity and strengthen the country to withstand external pressures.
25 July 2006
A Call to Honour: Not exactly total recall
Jaswant Singh provides a partial account of a key period in Indian diplomacy. He may have been answering a call to honour but there are clearly events and decisions that are not an honour to recall.
25 July 2006
The Hindu
Not exactly total recall
A CALL TO HONOUR — In Service of Emergent India: Jaswant Singh; Rupa & Co., 7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj,New Delhi-110002. Rs. 495.
Unique among Indian politicians, Jaswant Singh has had the fortune of holding four key portfolios during a period when the country had to confront some of its most complex challenges on the international front. First as Deputy Chairperson of the Planning Commission and later as Minister for External Affairs, Defence and then Finance, Singh was called upon to firefight India's way out of a number of crises. Some of these, like the sanctions following the Pokran-II nuclear tests of 1998, were self-induced, but others like the Kargil war, the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane to Kandahar and the terrorist attack on India's Parliament in 2001 were thrust upon an unsuspecting nation by others.
The six years Jaswant shuttled between South and North Block also saw the deployment of American military might in Afghanistan following 9/11 and the cataclysmic invasion and destruction of Iraq by the U.S., events which have irrevocably altered the security environment in India's neighbourhood.
Negotiating India's way through these treacherous challenges is precisely the "call to honour" the author refers to in the title of his book but the story he tells is a partial one. Both lay readers looking for "revelations" and scholars interested in India's foreign policy are likely to find his account fascinating and infuriating in equal measure. The book adds interesting details to certain events which are already very well known — like the Lahore summit or Kargil — but precious little to those which are opaque. By the time she or he turns the last page, a diligent reader will have learnt as much if not more about Jaswant Singh the man — his origins, worldview and even linguistic foibles — as about the crucial events in which he was often the star performer.
At one level, this is hardly surprising of a political memoir. If Jaswant and his Government acquitted themselves well in the aftermath of Pokhran-II and in Kargil, the record is less flattering elsewhere. There was a call to honour but there are also events and decisions that are not an honour to recall. Perhaps this accounts for Singh's somewhat incomplete treatment of the Kandahar hijacking, the Operation Parakram fiasco following the attack on Parliament and the blanking out of the dangerous debate within the Vajpayee Government on sending Indian troops to help enforce the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
A fuller, less restrained account of these years would have enriched the book immeasurably. It might also have helped Jaswant build a better case for his endeavours, even when describing such disasters as the IC-814 hijacking, which ended with him flying out to Kandahar accompanied by three terrorists. Singh provides us no details of the arguments made within government at the time, the weighing of pros and cons, no analysis of how India allowed the plane to leave Amritsar airport, no pointers for how to deal with such a crisis again. Those details he does provide differ in some respects from other published accounts, such as that of G. Parthasarathy, who was India's High Commissioner in Pakistan during the hijacking (Diplomatic Divide, Roli Books, 1994).
At variance
If Jaswant Singh can take the liberty of publishing lengthy extracts from a confidential cable sent by A.R. Ghanshyam on the aftermath of the hijacking, he might equally have made public some other cables sent from the Indian mission in Islamabad which would help to reconstruct a fuller picture of the options available to India at the time. Perhaps that picture might not paint such a flattering image.
On the Agra summit too, Singh's version is at variance with other detailed accounts published in recent years.
A.G. Noorani reproduced the portion of the scuttled draft agreement with Jaswant's handwriting in Frontline in 2005. This belies the tendentious claim — reiterated yet again in this book — that all Singh did in that draft was to correct his Pakistani counterpart's "Punjabi English". Noorani's account suggests that the major textual differences on Kashmir and terrorism had been overcome at Agra. He has yet to be refuted by anyone.
On other issues, Jaswant is honest enough to admit when his Government made a mistake. For example, he writes that it was a blunder to cite the China threat as the proximate cause for the Pokhran-II tests. This figured prominently in the letter Vajpayee wrote to President Bill Clinton, whose administration promptly leaked the same to the New York Times. Publication of the letter — which is said to have been drafted by Brajesh Mishra — unnecessarily infuriated the Chinese, Singh acknowledges. He also reproduces the letter, thereby providing the first official Indian acknowledgement of its authenticity in all these years.
Restraint
One subject where Jaswant has been reasonably frank is on Operation Parakram, where he reveals that he had doubts about the strategy pursued by the Vajpayee Government following the terrorist attack on Parliament. "The nation clamoured for immediate retaliatory action. I was not sure if that was what our response ought to be. But I was in a minority." Jaswant also reveals that after the terrorist attack on the army barracks in Kaluchak in May 2002, "the Army boiled with revengeful anger and was (almost rebelliously) bent upon retaliation."
He said that he himself counselled restraint because to retaliate would have been to fall into a classical military trap: "deliberate provocation launched for inviting a predictable retaliation; thus both time and place being of the adversary's choice."
Interestingly, when asked by a senior MEA official what India's aims were during the standoff, Jaswant identifies, "to contain the national mood of `teach Pakistan a lesson'," as one of them. Of all the challenges he faced during this time, Jaswant says, "the internal was the most taxing for it involved carrying conviction with colleagues... An adjunct of this was to carry the three service chiefs... with me, and for getting them to recognise `restraint' (in that context) as a strategic asset, for avoiding conflict. Again, this was not easy. The chiefs so wanted a chance, 'to have a crack', as the military would put it — I had not only to persuade but also to convince them otherwise." One gets the feeling Jaswant Singh is itching to convey rather more than he has in this book.
Though A Call to Honour is essentially about foreign policy, Jaswant Singh feels compelled to mount a shabby defence of the BJP's "cultural nationalism." But though he chooses his words carefully, especially on the Babri Masjid and the Gujarat killings of 2002, the mask of reasonableness occasionally slips. On page 89 he asserts, "There is only one culture in India. It is Indian, thus Hindu or Bharatiya — choose what name you will."
On the subject of communalism and the Partition, Jaswant traces the roots of Pakistan to Hali and Sir Syed Ahmed Khan but is unwilling to point out that the first use of the phrase "two nation theory" was made by V.D. Savarkar, a man the Vajpayee Government chose to honour by unveiling his portrait in Parliament House.
Current concerns
It is on certain substantive issues of current international concern that his book is something of a revelation.
In his concluding chapter, he makes a well-reasoned argument against the Bush administration's doctrine of pre-emption and preventive war. He also stresses that there is no way India should even think about emulating such an approach in its own fight against terrorism. Though his account of the lengthy negotiations with Strobe Talbott following Pokhran-II is nowhere near as detailed as the latter's own account (Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb, Viking 2005), Jaswant Singh is honest enough to accept that the July 18, 2005-March 2, 2006 India-U.S. agreements on civil nuclear cooperation are the logical culmination of efforts he had himself once led.
At the same time, he warns against the loss of India's strategic autonomy that the deal might entail. Jaswant points out how in the "arc of instability" around India stretching from Pakistan to a "post-Sharon, post-Abu Mazen Israel and Palestine," New Delhi does not really have much influence. "Currently, the principal forces that influence the situation in our neighbourhood are all extra-regional. Imperialism of the colonial variety is gone but its successor certainly lives, whether through the U.S. presence in Pakistan, Nato in Afghanistan, the Americans entangled in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon or now Iran."
As Foreign Minister, Jaswant offered the U.S. the use of Indian military facilities following 9/11 and as Finance Minister he is reported to have not been averse to India sending troops to Iraq. Now he is hinting that India and the United States have vastly different strategic interests in Asia. On this point, at least, he is certainly right. He has put his finger on a key problem that will haunt Indian foreign policy-makers in years to come.
For reasons of space, I deleted the following paragraph from the version which appeared in The Hindu:
There is one final though minor point that needs to be made, about the language. During his tenure as external affairs minister, Singh achieved a certain degree of notoriety for the floridness of his spoken English. Unfortunately, there are many passages in the book -- hideous and orotund -- which reflect this penchant for verbal circumlocution. In the first chapter itself, the author speaks of a "spatial recreation of past events that reappear randomly but in all their vivid, unfragmented entirety". His grand-daughter, born even as the crisis of IC-814 was emerging, is described as a "mutedly mewing baby". One wishes the editors at Rupa had made more use of their blue pencil.
25 July 2006
The Hindu
Not exactly total recall
A CALL TO HONOUR — In Service of Emergent India: Jaswant Singh; Rupa & Co., 7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj,New Delhi-110002. Rs. 495.
Unique among Indian politicians, Jaswant Singh has had the fortune of holding four key portfolios during a period when the country had to confront some of its most complex challenges on the international front. First as Deputy Chairperson of the Planning Commission and later as Minister for External Affairs, Defence and then Finance, Singh was called upon to firefight India's way out of a number of crises. Some of these, like the sanctions following the Pokran-II nuclear tests of 1998, were self-induced, but others like the Kargil war, the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane to Kandahar and the terrorist attack on India's Parliament in 2001 were thrust upon an unsuspecting nation by others.
The six years Jaswant shuttled between South and North Block also saw the deployment of American military might in Afghanistan following 9/11 and the cataclysmic invasion and destruction of Iraq by the U.S., events which have irrevocably altered the security environment in India's neighbourhood.
Negotiating India's way through these treacherous challenges is precisely the "call to honour" the author refers to in the title of his book but the story he tells is a partial one. Both lay readers looking for "revelations" and scholars interested in India's foreign policy are likely to find his account fascinating and infuriating in equal measure. The book adds interesting details to certain events which are already very well known — like the Lahore summit or Kargil — but precious little to those which are opaque. By the time she or he turns the last page, a diligent reader will have learnt as much if not more about Jaswant Singh the man — his origins, worldview and even linguistic foibles — as about the crucial events in which he was often the star performer.
At one level, this is hardly surprising of a political memoir. If Jaswant and his Government acquitted themselves well in the aftermath of Pokhran-II and in Kargil, the record is less flattering elsewhere. There was a call to honour but there are also events and decisions that are not an honour to recall. Perhaps this accounts for Singh's somewhat incomplete treatment of the Kandahar hijacking, the Operation Parakram fiasco following the attack on Parliament and the blanking out of the dangerous debate within the Vajpayee Government on sending Indian troops to help enforce the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
A fuller, less restrained account of these years would have enriched the book immeasurably. It might also have helped Jaswant build a better case for his endeavours, even when describing such disasters as the IC-814 hijacking, which ended with him flying out to Kandahar accompanied by three terrorists. Singh provides us no details of the arguments made within government at the time, the weighing of pros and cons, no analysis of how India allowed the plane to leave Amritsar airport, no pointers for how to deal with such a crisis again. Those details he does provide differ in some respects from other published accounts, such as that of G. Parthasarathy, who was India's High Commissioner in Pakistan during the hijacking (Diplomatic Divide, Roli Books, 1994).
At variance
If Jaswant Singh can take the liberty of publishing lengthy extracts from a confidential cable sent by A.R. Ghanshyam on the aftermath of the hijacking, he might equally have made public some other cables sent from the Indian mission in Islamabad which would help to reconstruct a fuller picture of the options available to India at the time. Perhaps that picture might not paint such a flattering image.
On the Agra summit too, Singh's version is at variance with other detailed accounts published in recent years.
A.G. Noorani reproduced the portion of the scuttled draft agreement with Jaswant's handwriting in Frontline in 2005. This belies the tendentious claim — reiterated yet again in this book — that all Singh did in that draft was to correct his Pakistani counterpart's "Punjabi English". Noorani's account suggests that the major textual differences on Kashmir and terrorism had been overcome at Agra. He has yet to be refuted by anyone.
On other issues, Jaswant is honest enough to admit when his Government made a mistake. For example, he writes that it was a blunder to cite the China threat as the proximate cause for the Pokhran-II tests. This figured prominently in the letter Vajpayee wrote to President Bill Clinton, whose administration promptly leaked the same to the New York Times. Publication of the letter — which is said to have been drafted by Brajesh Mishra — unnecessarily infuriated the Chinese, Singh acknowledges. He also reproduces the letter, thereby providing the first official Indian acknowledgement of its authenticity in all these years.
Restraint
One subject where Jaswant has been reasonably frank is on Operation Parakram, where he reveals that he had doubts about the strategy pursued by the Vajpayee Government following the terrorist attack on Parliament. "The nation clamoured for immediate retaliatory action. I was not sure if that was what our response ought to be. But I was in a minority." Jaswant also reveals that after the terrorist attack on the army barracks in Kaluchak in May 2002, "the Army boiled with revengeful anger and was (almost rebelliously) bent upon retaliation."
He said that he himself counselled restraint because to retaliate would have been to fall into a classical military trap: "deliberate provocation launched for inviting a predictable retaliation; thus both time and place being of the adversary's choice."
Interestingly, when asked by a senior MEA official what India's aims were during the standoff, Jaswant identifies, "to contain the national mood of `teach Pakistan a lesson'," as one of them. Of all the challenges he faced during this time, Jaswant says, "the internal was the most taxing for it involved carrying conviction with colleagues... An adjunct of this was to carry the three service chiefs... with me, and for getting them to recognise `restraint' (in that context) as a strategic asset, for avoiding conflict. Again, this was not easy. The chiefs so wanted a chance, 'to have a crack', as the military would put it — I had not only to persuade but also to convince them otherwise." One gets the feeling Jaswant Singh is itching to convey rather more than he has in this book.
Though A Call to Honour is essentially about foreign policy, Jaswant Singh feels compelled to mount a shabby defence of the BJP's "cultural nationalism." But though he chooses his words carefully, especially on the Babri Masjid and the Gujarat killings of 2002, the mask of reasonableness occasionally slips. On page 89 he asserts, "There is only one culture in India. It is Indian, thus Hindu or Bharatiya — choose what name you will."
On the subject of communalism and the Partition, Jaswant traces the roots of Pakistan to Hali and Sir Syed Ahmed Khan but is unwilling to point out that the first use of the phrase "two nation theory" was made by V.D. Savarkar, a man the Vajpayee Government chose to honour by unveiling his portrait in Parliament House.
Current concerns
It is on certain substantive issues of current international concern that his book is something of a revelation.
In his concluding chapter, he makes a well-reasoned argument against the Bush administration's doctrine of pre-emption and preventive war. He also stresses that there is no way India should even think about emulating such an approach in its own fight against terrorism. Though his account of the lengthy negotiations with Strobe Talbott following Pokhran-II is nowhere near as detailed as the latter's own account (Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb, Viking 2005), Jaswant Singh is honest enough to accept that the July 18, 2005-March 2, 2006 India-U.S. agreements on civil nuclear cooperation are the logical culmination of efforts he had himself once led.
At the same time, he warns against the loss of India's strategic autonomy that the deal might entail. Jaswant points out how in the "arc of instability" around India stretching from Pakistan to a "post-Sharon, post-Abu Mazen Israel and Palestine," New Delhi does not really have much influence. "Currently, the principal forces that influence the situation in our neighbourhood are all extra-regional. Imperialism of the colonial variety is gone but its successor certainly lives, whether through the U.S. presence in Pakistan, Nato in Afghanistan, the Americans entangled in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon or now Iran."
As Foreign Minister, Jaswant offered the U.S. the use of Indian military facilities following 9/11 and as Finance Minister he is reported to have not been averse to India sending troops to Iraq. Now he is hinting that India and the United States have vastly different strategic interests in Asia. On this point, at least, he is certainly right. He has put his finger on a key problem that will haunt Indian foreign policy-makers in years to come.
For reasons of space, I deleted the following paragraph from the version which appeared in The Hindu:
There is one final though minor point that needs to be made, about the language. During his tenure as external affairs minister, Singh achieved a certain degree of notoriety for the floridness of his spoken English. Unfortunately, there are many passages in the book -- hideous and orotund -- which reflect this penchant for verbal circumlocution. In the first chapter itself, the author speaks of a "spatial recreation of past events that reappear randomly but in all their vivid, unfragmented entirety". His grand-daughter, born even as the crisis of IC-814 was emerging, is described as a "mutedly mewing baby". One wishes the editors at Rupa had made more use of their blue pencil.
24 July 2006
Indian Maoists criticise Prachanda
Say multiparty democracy, U.N. supervision a "dangerous" mistake.
24 July 2006
The Hindu
Indian Maoists criticise Prachanda
Siddharth Varadarajan
BELYING SPECULATION of a unified red corridor from "Pashupati to Tirupati," the Indian Maoist leadership has criticised Prachanda and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) for embracing multiparty democracy. It has also denounced as "dangerous" CPN (Maoist)'s decision to invite the United Nations in to supervise the ceasefire in Nepal.
Peoples' March, a publication which reports on the activities of the Indian Maoist movement, is circulating by email an interview it conducted recently on the situation in Nepal with Azad, spokesperson of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The CPI (Maoist) is the largest of all radical Left organisations waging armed struggle against the Indian government in several States. Indian security agencies allege that the CPI (Maoist) and Nepal Maoists have close organisational and military links, a charge both parties strongly deny.
While appreciating the "historic struggle" of the Nepali Maoists, Azad makes at least four specific criticisms of their leader Prachanda. He also stresses that the Indian Maoists have no intention of embracing multiparty democracy.
First, he says that the CPN (Maoist) leadership is making a mistake by agreeing to join an interim government "with the comprador bourgeois-feudal parties such as the reactionary Nepali Congress [and] revisionist CPN-UML." The Nepal Maoists, he contends, "are giving over-emphasis to the possibility of advancing the movement through the Constituent Assembly and in alliance with the seven parties." The interim government will not work out, he says, because of the "two diametrically opposed class interests." Referring to Prachanda's interview to The Hindu in February, Azad criticised the Nepali leader for saying he was ready to accept the people's verdict if they chose constitutional monarchy and multiparty democracy through the Constituent Assembly. Says Azad: "It is indeed a great tragedy to see the Maoist party finally ending up in these political positions in spite of having de facto power in most of the countryside."
Azad terms "even more dangerous" Prachanda's stated objective of merging the Maoists' 25,000-strong Peoples Liberation Army with the Nepal Army. "The army is one of the main instruments of class rule. How can two diametrically opposed classes have a single army? By merging the people's army with the reactionary army of the ruling classes [until now the faithful servant of the King] the people will become defenceless in case of a reactionary armed offensive by the enemy," he says, citing the example of Indonesia in the 1960s where the Communists were massacred in large numbers.
Thirdly, the CPI (Maoist) spokesman states that the Nepali Maoist decision to invite the U.N. to supervise the ceasefire is also "dangerous." "The U.N. is essentially an instrument of imperialism and particularly American imperialism. It is bound to work in the interests of the reactionary ruling classes of Nepal and imperialism." Taken together with the decision to dissolve its "people's governments" in the countryside, the merger of the PLA with the Nepal Army "will unfold an irreversible process of losing all the revolutionary gains achieved till now," says Azad.
Lastly, the Indian Maoist leader takes exception to the argument Prachanda made — in The Hindu interview — that his party's new line on multiparty democracy would have a "positive" impact on the Maoists in India. "It must have come as a great relief for the Indian ruling classes to hear Comrade Prachanda speak of his Party's commitment to multiparty democracy," Azad notes.
He adds: "It is really a matter of grave concern that Comrade Prachanda, instead of demanding the expansionist Indian ruling classes stop all interference and meddling in Nepal's internal affairs, only talked of how their tactics would bring about a change in the outlook of the Maoists in India. Needless to say, these remarks will not only be deeply resented by the revolutionary masses of our country who have seen the wretched system of parliamentary democracy in India but will also be proved totally wrong through their revolutionary practice."
The Maoist leadership in Nepal, says Azad, is creating illusions about the character of the parliamentary parties in Nepal and advocating the "dangerous thesis" of "peaceful coexistence with the ruling class parties instead of overthrowing them through revolution." Though made with "good intentions," the "idealist and subjective proposal of the CPN (Maoist)" will "ultimately become a convenient tool in the hands of the capitalist-roaders to seize power," charges Azad.
Postscript
Following this article and other reports, the Indian and Nepali Maoist parties issued a joint statement saying their differences should not be taken out of proportion:
24 July 2006
The Hindu
Indian Maoists criticise Prachanda
Siddharth Varadarajan
BELYING SPECULATION of a unified red corridor from "Pashupati to Tirupati," the Indian Maoist leadership has criticised Prachanda and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) for embracing multiparty democracy. It has also denounced as "dangerous" CPN (Maoist)'s decision to invite the United Nations in to supervise the ceasefire in Nepal.
Peoples' March, a publication which reports on the activities of the Indian Maoist movement, is circulating by email an interview it conducted recently on the situation in Nepal with Azad, spokesperson of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The CPI (Maoist) is the largest of all radical Left organisations waging armed struggle against the Indian government in several States. Indian security agencies allege that the CPI (Maoist) and Nepal Maoists have close organisational and military links, a charge both parties strongly deny.
While appreciating the "historic struggle" of the Nepali Maoists, Azad makes at least four specific criticisms of their leader Prachanda. He also stresses that the Indian Maoists have no intention of embracing multiparty democracy.
First, he says that the CPN (Maoist) leadership is making a mistake by agreeing to join an interim government "with the comprador bourgeois-feudal parties such as the reactionary Nepali Congress [and] revisionist CPN-UML." The Nepal Maoists, he contends, "are giving over-emphasis to the possibility of advancing the movement through the Constituent Assembly and in alliance with the seven parties." The interim government will not work out, he says, because of the "two diametrically opposed class interests." Referring to Prachanda's interview to The Hindu in February, Azad criticised the Nepali leader for saying he was ready to accept the people's verdict if they chose constitutional monarchy and multiparty democracy through the Constituent Assembly. Says Azad: "It is indeed a great tragedy to see the Maoist party finally ending up in these political positions in spite of having de facto power in most of the countryside."
Azad terms "even more dangerous" Prachanda's stated objective of merging the Maoists' 25,000-strong Peoples Liberation Army with the Nepal Army. "The army is one of the main instruments of class rule. How can two diametrically opposed classes have a single army? By merging the people's army with the reactionary army of the ruling classes [until now the faithful servant of the King] the people will become defenceless in case of a reactionary armed offensive by the enemy," he says, citing the example of Indonesia in the 1960s where the Communists were massacred in large numbers.
Thirdly, the CPI (Maoist) spokesman states that the Nepali Maoist decision to invite the U.N. to supervise the ceasefire is also "dangerous." "The U.N. is essentially an instrument of imperialism and particularly American imperialism. It is bound to work in the interests of the reactionary ruling classes of Nepal and imperialism." Taken together with the decision to dissolve its "people's governments" in the countryside, the merger of the PLA with the Nepal Army "will unfold an irreversible process of losing all the revolutionary gains achieved till now," says Azad.
Lastly, the Indian Maoist leader takes exception to the argument Prachanda made — in The Hindu interview — that his party's new line on multiparty democracy would have a "positive" impact on the Maoists in India. "It must have come as a great relief for the Indian ruling classes to hear Comrade Prachanda speak of his Party's commitment to multiparty democracy," Azad notes.
He adds: "It is really a matter of grave concern that Comrade Prachanda, instead of demanding the expansionist Indian ruling classes stop all interference and meddling in Nepal's internal affairs, only talked of how their tactics would bring about a change in the outlook of the Maoists in India. Needless to say, these remarks will not only be deeply resented by the revolutionary masses of our country who have seen the wretched system of parliamentary democracy in India but will also be proved totally wrong through their revolutionary practice."
The Maoist leadership in Nepal, says Azad, is creating illusions about the character of the parliamentary parties in Nepal and advocating the "dangerous thesis" of "peaceful coexistence with the ruling class parties instead of overthrowing them through revolution." Though made with "good intentions," the "idealist and subjective proposal of the CPN (Maoist)" will "ultimately become a convenient tool in the hands of the capitalist-roaders to seize power," charges Azad.
Postscript
Following this article and other reports, the Indian and Nepali Maoist parties issued a joint statement saying their differences should not be taken out of proportion:
ON RECENT DEBATES
The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and the Communist Party of India (Maoist) jointly re-assert their firm commitment to proletarian internationalism, mutual fraternal relations, on the basis of MLM. All tactical questions are being adopted in the respective countries are the sole concern of the parties operating there. Both parties will seek to learn from the positive experiences of the other party as also the experiences of the Maoists who comprise the ICM.
While doing so we shall continue debates on ideological, political and strategic issues on which we differ in the true democratic traditions of the international communist movement. These debates and discussions will take place bilaterally and occasionally, publicly. Such differences are inevitable as struggles in the sphere of ideas are inevitable in a class society, which, as Engels said, is a reflection of the class struggle in society.
Lately a section of the media has tried to blow out of proportion differences that have been expressed by the two parties publicly. It is in the interests of the reactionaries that Maoists divide and split continuously. It is then no wonder that a section of the media has sought to exaggerate the differences in India and Nepal.
The two parties once again re-assert their firm unity in the spirit of proletarian internationalism while continuing healthy debates and discussions on issues on which we differ.
While doing so we shall continue debates on ideological, political and strategic issues on which we differ in the true democratic traditions of the international communist movement. These debates and discussions will take place bilaterally and occasionally, publicly. Such differences are inevitable as struggles in the sphere of ideas are inevitable in a class society, which, as Engels said, is a reflection of the class struggle in society.
Lately a section of the media has tried to blow out of proportion differences that have been expressed by the two parties publicly. It is in the interests of the reactionaries that Maoists divide and split continuously. It is then no wonder that a section of the media has sought to exaggerate the differences in India and Nepal.
The two parties once again re-assert their firm unity in the spirit of proletarian internationalism while continuing healthy debates and discussions on issues on which we differ.
17 July 2006
Limit to tolerance, but options are limited too
Despite the Musharraf regime's equivocation on terrorism, India will gain nothing by allowing the authors of the Mumbai blasts to disrupt the peace process with Pakistan.
17 July 2006
The Hindu
Limit to tolerance, but options are limited too
Siddharth Varadarajan
THE WELL-COORDINATED terrorist attacks on commuters in Mumbai on July 11 have paved the way for the re-emergence of two facile arguments, neither of which offers a convincing way of ending this mindless, criminal violence once and for all.
In India, the blasts have led the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and many security analysts to fault the Manmohan Singh Government for engaging in a peace process with Pakistan, whose military regime has clearly not lived up to its promise of preventing terrorist organisations from operating from its territory. These critics also find fault with the repeal of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), claiming the police have been demoralised as a result. According to this discourse, most terrorist acts are a product of Pakistan's intelligence agencies; and India is a victim because of the government's inability to take Islamabad to task and allow tough measures against those suspected of involvement in terrorism. The BJP has also sought to communalise the debate by linking the "soft on terror" charge to "vote bank politics" and the so-called "appeasement" of Muslims, ignoring the fact that people from all faiths and regions in India sought the repeal of POTA because it was used against innocent persons.
The second, equally problematic, argument revolves around the need to solve the so-called "root cause" of terrorism.
Khurshid Ahmed Kasuri, Foreign Minister of Pakistan, provided one variant of this when he suggested that the Mumbai blasts were linked to India's failure to resolve the Kashmir dispute. "I think the Mumbai incident — however tragic it may be and it is undoubtedly very tragic — underlines the need for the two countries to work together to control this environment, but they can only do so if they resolve their disputes," he told Reuters on Wednesday. His remarks drew a sharp rejoinder from India.
At a philosophical level, the idea that a lingering dispute can lead to violence is unexceptionable. Also unexceptionable would be the suggestion — though Mr. Kasuri did not make it — that the "collateral" victims of the Indian government's counter-insurgency campaign in Kashmir might feel driven to commit desperate acts of terror. But what Mr. Kasuri and other root cause-wallahs fail to appreciate is the nihilist nature of the premeditated attack on Mumbai's commuters. Like the London and Madrid bombings, and the atrocious attack on the World Trade Centre, the Mumbai bombings were a deliberate attempt to target non-combatants. The perpetrators do not feel the need to issue a statement or broadcast a charter of demands because the motive of the attack is not the redress of a grievance or the settlement of a dispute, but the creation of one.
The motive is to provoke more violence and insecurity and reduce the space that exists for dialogue, debate, and dissent in favour of the hawkish certitudes of the security establishment.
Though there is no evidence yet, Mr. Kasuri has chosen to make the link between Mumbai and Kashmir. But what he ought to have said is that those who have taken up arms in the name of a "freedom struggle" or jihad have no right to wage war against unarmed people. Political or religious-oriented groups that claim to resist oppression have as much of a responsibility to conduct their "struggle" according to the laws of war as do the security forces. No unresolved dispute, no human rights violation can ever give an individual — even if he or she happens to be a victim of injustice — the right to blow up innocent civilians on a train or elsewhere. "Root causes" are important and should be debated and addressed but the first priority has to be good police work, forensics, and intelligence so that the perpetrators are arrested. On their part, Mr. Kasuri and his colleagues in Pakistan need to speak out against such acts of terrorism. They must not seek refuge — as they often do — in the dishonest innuendo that all terror that targets civilians is really the handiwork of agents provocateurs or the Indian intelligence agencies.
In the case of Pakistan, there is a responsibility not only to condemn such incidents but also to act. In January 2004, General Pervez Musharraf promised his government would not allow individuals and organisations in Pakistan to plot, finance or launch acts of terrorism against India. Since then, cross-border infiltration by armed insurgents in Kashmir is down, as indicated by official Indian figures. At the same time, the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed — though banned in Pakistan — operate under a variety of assumed names. Both groups sprang to life in the aftermath of last year's earthquake in Kashmir and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest they continue to have links with the Pakistani military establishment.
As the Manmohan Government ponders over its options as far as engagement with Pakistan is concerned, it must ask itself two questions. First, can anything be done to get the Pakistani establishment to convert its half-hearted efforts against terrorism into a wholehearted one? And secondly, has India conceded anything in the composite dialogue that makes the country more vulnerable on the security front?
My answer is `no' to both but for all their criticism of the peace process, the BJP and its supporters do not have clear-cut answers to either question.
From the mawkishness of Lahore to the hawkishness of Operation Parakram, the erstwhile Vajpayee Government tried it all. Despite the deployment of troops on full alert for 10 months and half-baked theories of "coercive diplomacy," "surgical strikes," and "limited war," it became clear that there was no military solution to the problem of terrorists basing themselves in Pakistan. But if the threat of military action will not produce results, how can putting the peace process on hold or delaying a meeting of the two Foreign Secretaries do the trick? In any case, the peace process so far has been extremely positive from India's point of view. A number of confidence-building measures have been introduced, which allows India to bypass Gen. Musharraf and the army and build a constituency for peace in Pakistan's civil society, including its business community. And on Kashmir, the two sides have begun to articulate a common approach that acknowledges that borders cannot be redrawn.
Based on the record so far, India has nothing to lose from this process going ahead uninterrupted. If anything, it is in Pakistan that one hears concerns about the "CBM trap" India has laid to postpone a settlement on Kashmir.
Three scenarios
This conclusion is independent of the identity of the perpetrators of the Mumbai blasts.
Broadly speaking, there are three possibilities. First, Al-Qaeda — or some organisation linked to it — which is as much at war with the Musharraf Government as it is with India. The motive would be disrupt the peace process, foment a communal backlash by giving a boost to the sangh parivar, and send a message to the world, and the U.S. in particular, that the `war on terror' is far from over. Under such circumstances, surely the optimal Indian response would be to not hand the terrorists veto power over the peace process.
What if the authors of the blast turn out to be the LeT or JeM, operating in collusion with some section of the Pakistani state? If at all the government of Pakistan or one of its agencies is linked to the Mumbai blasts, this can only be because Islamabad is dissatisfied with the way the peace process is going. Perhaps the Mumbai blasts were designed to put pressure on India to make concessions on Kashmir. But the ISI must surely know that what little concessions India appears ready to make are largely the brainchild of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and are being opposed tooth and nail by the bureaucratic and security establishment. If anything, then, the Mumbai blasts make it even more difficult for the political leadership to grant concessions.
There is another point Indian policymakers should consider when assessing whether the Pakistani military establishment might have had a hand in the blasts. Pakistan claims a firewall exists between the anti-American, Al-Qaeda-linked extremists and the anti-India groups such as LeT and JeM. But the Mumbai blasts — their serial nature, the choice of public transport, their proximity to the anniversary of the London bombings — serve to strengthen the link between Kashmir and the `global war on terror' as far as the international community is concerned. They can only lead to even greater pressure on Islamabad to crack down on Kashmir-linked insurgents. It is hard to see how such an outcome — which would have been perfectly predictable to the terrorists who planned the Mumbai bombings — would serve the interests of the Musharraf regime or ISI.
Even so, assuming some element of official Pakistani complicity, India really has few options as far as mounting pressure on Pakistan is concerned. If there are areas where the peace process might make the country more vulnerable — the Army would argue Siachen is one such area — an unstated go-slow might be justified. But on other fronts, the process is clearly working to India's advantage and there is no sense in scuppering the gains.
There is a third scenario too, that the terrorists are neither Al-Qaeda nor Pakistan-backed but homegrown fanatics, whether Muslim, Hindu or of some other religious or political persuasion. But again, taking our national anger out on the composite dialogue process would be illogical.
Under all three scenarios, the most pressing task is to conduct a swift and professional investigation. Primary reliance must be on forensics and good detective work and not on knee-jerk crackdowns and special laws. In the Parliament attack case, the police produced spectacular arrests and `confessions' with ease but the real masterminds remained undetected. Mumbai must not go the same way.
© Copyright 2000 - 2006 The Hindu
17 July 2006
The Hindu
Limit to tolerance, but options are limited too
Siddharth Varadarajan
THE WELL-COORDINATED terrorist attacks on commuters in Mumbai on July 11 have paved the way for the re-emergence of two facile arguments, neither of which offers a convincing way of ending this mindless, criminal violence once and for all.
In India, the blasts have led the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and many security analysts to fault the Manmohan Singh Government for engaging in a peace process with Pakistan, whose military regime has clearly not lived up to its promise of preventing terrorist organisations from operating from its territory. These critics also find fault with the repeal of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), claiming the police have been demoralised as a result. According to this discourse, most terrorist acts are a product of Pakistan's intelligence agencies; and India is a victim because of the government's inability to take Islamabad to task and allow tough measures against those suspected of involvement in terrorism. The BJP has also sought to communalise the debate by linking the "soft on terror" charge to "vote bank politics" and the so-called "appeasement" of Muslims, ignoring the fact that people from all faiths and regions in India sought the repeal of POTA because it was used against innocent persons.
The second, equally problematic, argument revolves around the need to solve the so-called "root cause" of terrorism.
Khurshid Ahmed Kasuri, Foreign Minister of Pakistan, provided one variant of this when he suggested that the Mumbai blasts were linked to India's failure to resolve the Kashmir dispute. "I think the Mumbai incident — however tragic it may be and it is undoubtedly very tragic — underlines the need for the two countries to work together to control this environment, but they can only do so if they resolve their disputes," he told Reuters on Wednesday. His remarks drew a sharp rejoinder from India.
At a philosophical level, the idea that a lingering dispute can lead to violence is unexceptionable. Also unexceptionable would be the suggestion — though Mr. Kasuri did not make it — that the "collateral" victims of the Indian government's counter-insurgency campaign in Kashmir might feel driven to commit desperate acts of terror. But what Mr. Kasuri and other root cause-wallahs fail to appreciate is the nihilist nature of the premeditated attack on Mumbai's commuters. Like the London and Madrid bombings, and the atrocious attack on the World Trade Centre, the Mumbai bombings were a deliberate attempt to target non-combatants. The perpetrators do not feel the need to issue a statement or broadcast a charter of demands because the motive of the attack is not the redress of a grievance or the settlement of a dispute, but the creation of one.
The motive is to provoke more violence and insecurity and reduce the space that exists for dialogue, debate, and dissent in favour of the hawkish certitudes of the security establishment.
Though there is no evidence yet, Mr. Kasuri has chosen to make the link between Mumbai and Kashmir. But what he ought to have said is that those who have taken up arms in the name of a "freedom struggle" or jihad have no right to wage war against unarmed people. Political or religious-oriented groups that claim to resist oppression have as much of a responsibility to conduct their "struggle" according to the laws of war as do the security forces. No unresolved dispute, no human rights violation can ever give an individual — even if he or she happens to be a victim of injustice — the right to blow up innocent civilians on a train or elsewhere. "Root causes" are important and should be debated and addressed but the first priority has to be good police work, forensics, and intelligence so that the perpetrators are arrested. On their part, Mr. Kasuri and his colleagues in Pakistan need to speak out against such acts of terrorism. They must not seek refuge — as they often do — in the dishonest innuendo that all terror that targets civilians is really the handiwork of agents provocateurs or the Indian intelligence agencies.
In the case of Pakistan, there is a responsibility not only to condemn such incidents but also to act. In January 2004, General Pervez Musharraf promised his government would not allow individuals and organisations in Pakistan to plot, finance or launch acts of terrorism against India. Since then, cross-border infiltration by armed insurgents in Kashmir is down, as indicated by official Indian figures. At the same time, the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed — though banned in Pakistan — operate under a variety of assumed names. Both groups sprang to life in the aftermath of last year's earthquake in Kashmir and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest they continue to have links with the Pakistani military establishment.
As the Manmohan Government ponders over its options as far as engagement with Pakistan is concerned, it must ask itself two questions. First, can anything be done to get the Pakistani establishment to convert its half-hearted efforts against terrorism into a wholehearted one? And secondly, has India conceded anything in the composite dialogue that makes the country more vulnerable on the security front?
My answer is `no' to both but for all their criticism of the peace process, the BJP and its supporters do not have clear-cut answers to either question.
From the mawkishness of Lahore to the hawkishness of Operation Parakram, the erstwhile Vajpayee Government tried it all. Despite the deployment of troops on full alert for 10 months and half-baked theories of "coercive diplomacy," "surgical strikes," and "limited war," it became clear that there was no military solution to the problem of terrorists basing themselves in Pakistan. But if the threat of military action will not produce results, how can putting the peace process on hold or delaying a meeting of the two Foreign Secretaries do the trick? In any case, the peace process so far has been extremely positive from India's point of view. A number of confidence-building measures have been introduced, which allows India to bypass Gen. Musharraf and the army and build a constituency for peace in Pakistan's civil society, including its business community. And on Kashmir, the two sides have begun to articulate a common approach that acknowledges that borders cannot be redrawn.
Based on the record so far, India has nothing to lose from this process going ahead uninterrupted. If anything, it is in Pakistan that one hears concerns about the "CBM trap" India has laid to postpone a settlement on Kashmir.
Three scenarios
This conclusion is independent of the identity of the perpetrators of the Mumbai blasts.
Broadly speaking, there are three possibilities. First, Al-Qaeda — or some organisation linked to it — which is as much at war with the Musharraf Government as it is with India. The motive would be disrupt the peace process, foment a communal backlash by giving a boost to the sangh parivar, and send a message to the world, and the U.S. in particular, that the `war on terror' is far from over. Under such circumstances, surely the optimal Indian response would be to not hand the terrorists veto power over the peace process.
What if the authors of the blast turn out to be the LeT or JeM, operating in collusion with some section of the Pakistani state? If at all the government of Pakistan or one of its agencies is linked to the Mumbai blasts, this can only be because Islamabad is dissatisfied with the way the peace process is going. Perhaps the Mumbai blasts were designed to put pressure on India to make concessions on Kashmir. But the ISI must surely know that what little concessions India appears ready to make are largely the brainchild of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and are being opposed tooth and nail by the bureaucratic and security establishment. If anything, then, the Mumbai blasts make it even more difficult for the political leadership to grant concessions.
There is another point Indian policymakers should consider when assessing whether the Pakistani military establishment might have had a hand in the blasts. Pakistan claims a firewall exists between the anti-American, Al-Qaeda-linked extremists and the anti-India groups such as LeT and JeM. But the Mumbai blasts — their serial nature, the choice of public transport, their proximity to the anniversary of the London bombings — serve to strengthen the link between Kashmir and the `global war on terror' as far as the international community is concerned. They can only lead to even greater pressure on Islamabad to crack down on Kashmir-linked insurgents. It is hard to see how such an outcome — which would have been perfectly predictable to the terrorists who planned the Mumbai bombings — would serve the interests of the Musharraf regime or ISI.
Even so, assuming some element of official Pakistani complicity, India really has few options as far as mounting pressure on Pakistan is concerned. If there are areas where the peace process might make the country more vulnerable — the Army would argue Siachen is one such area — an unstated go-slow might be justified. But on other fronts, the process is clearly working to India's advantage and there is no sense in scuppering the gains.
There is a third scenario too, that the terrorists are neither Al-Qaeda nor Pakistan-backed but homegrown fanatics, whether Muslim, Hindu or of some other religious or political persuasion. But again, taking our national anger out on the composite dialogue process would be illogical.
Under all three scenarios, the most pressing task is to conduct a swift and professional investigation. Primary reliance must be on forensics and good detective work and not on knee-jerk crackdowns and special laws. In the Parliament attack case, the police produced spectacular arrests and `confessions' with ease but the real masterminds remained undetected. Mumbai must not go the same way.
© Copyright 2000 - 2006 The Hindu
10 July 2006
The nuclear deal and 'minimum deterrence'
The Indo-U.S. nuclear agreement will raise the financial and political costs of the Indian nuclear weapons programme but it does not impose a legal bar on the production of fissile material or the testing of nuclear explosive devices by India.
10 July 2006
The Hindu
The nuclear deal and 'minimum deterrence'
Siddharth Varadarajan
BY NOW, the fact that the United States' offer of civil nuclear cooperation carries hidden political costs is well accepted within and outside the Indian foreign policy establishment. But if the political costs are tangible and have already begun to accumulate, what of the charge made by a section of the Indian strategic community — and echoed by the Bharatiya Janata Party — that the nuclear deal will compromise the "credibility" of India's "minimum nuclear deterrence?"
Right from day one, the Indian side has insisted the July 18, 2005, agreement is about energy and not arms control. For the Americans too, the deal is primarily about fashioning India's energy choices. But there is also a non-proliferation impulse, as reflected in the reference to India's unilateral moratorium on nuclear weapon testing in the joint statement issued that day. Accepting this without extracting a reciprocal reference to the United States' own moratorium was a serious error of tactics and principle. Today, it is this commitment that is proving the most difficult to work around as India resists U.S. efforts to convert its voluntary no-testing pledge into something more legally binding. Specifically, the U.S. is trying to tie the assurances of perpetual nuclear fuel supply — as envisaged by the Indian nuclear separation plan — into a "no nuclear testing" condition. These clauses form part of the "bracketed" portion of the Nuclear Cooperation Agreement (the so-called `123 Agreement') currently being negotiated by the two sides.
No fissile material cut-off
As matters stand, however, will the India-U.S. agreement lead to a cap or constraint on India's nuclear weapons arsenal in either quantitative or qualitative terms? In the `statement of U.S. policy' section, the House of Representatives Bill on nuclear cooperation says the U.S. should seek to achieve a moratorium on fissile material production by India, Pakistan, and China and promote the "reduction and eventual elimination" of nuclear weapons in South Asia. In the Senate version, the President is expected to report annually to Congress about U.S. efforts to get India and Pakistan to secure, cap, and reduce their fissile material stockpiles.
While this may be U.S. policy, there is nothing in any agreement India has signed that commits it to cap or reduce its weapons-grade fissile material stockpiles. Of course, Washington may cite its domestic legal obligations as a reason to pressure India on this point but New Delhi will itself be under no compulsion to obey. Truth to tell, much will depend on how the negotiations for the proposed Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT) proceed at the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva. If the U.S. is rapidly able to establish a consensus around its draft FMCT, India will find it harder to resist agreeing to an end to fissile material production. But if the American ploy of blackmailing the CD into accepting an FMCT by the end of this year fails — which it is likely to, since most countries want parallel progress on the proposed treaty preventing an arms race in outer space — then India would be off the hook.
If there is no constraint on the quantitative enhancement of India's nuclear weapons, what about qualitative "improvements?" The Senate Bill authorising nuclear commerce with India is explicit that the waiver of existing prohibitions for India will "cease to be effective" if India "detonate[s] a nuclear explosive device" after the Act comes into force. It is reasonable to assume the NSG rule change for India will also become null and void if India conducts an explosive test.
While there are good reasons for India not to test again, do these clauses amount to the decision being pushed down the country's throat, that too by a state that itself refuses to be bound by any legal no-test covenant? Here, three points are of relevance. First, India has already "bilateralised" its unilateral moratorium in a joint statement with Pakistan issued during Atal Bihari Vajpayee's visit to Lahore as Prime Minister in 1999. Any unilateral India test, therefore, would violate that agreement to begin with. Secondly, sub-critical tests and computer simulations of the kind the U.S. conducts in order to validate weapon designs would not attract any penalty. Thirdly, there would, in any case, still be no legal obligation on India not to conduct an explosive test.
Cost of a test
In the unlikely event of a situation arising where the government of the day felt obliged to abandon the moratorium on testing, it would be free to do so. Of course, the U.S. and the NSG would end their nuclear cooperation with India. Provided India were able to withdraw its civilian facilities from the "in perpetuity" IAEA safeguards, the clock, in effect, would be turned back to the status quo ante of July 2005. If withdrawal were not possible, however, even under some kind of force majeure clause, then a decision to test would not be costless.
India has agreed to in-perpetuity safeguards for its indigenous civilian nuclear facilities in exchange for U.S. assurances of perpetual fuel supply for all reactors that go under safeguards. It is hard to imagine a scenario where such assurances could withstand the heat of an Indian nuclear test. Thus, the greater the Indian dependence on imported safeguarded reactors for its electricity grid, the greater would be the costs associated with the suspension of nuclear cooperation that would inevitably follow any nuclear test. In the long run, therefore, while there would be no legal bar, the Indian Government would find the collateral economic costs associated with a nuclear test to be quite high. This is not to say that the absence of such a deal would make a fresh Indian test costless under current world conditions. That is precisely why the erstwhile Vajpayee Government sensibly announced a unilateral moratorium immediately after the tests it conducted at Pokhran-II in 1998.
There is another sense in which the nuclear deal will force greater attentiveness to costs as far as nuclear weapons is concerned. The fact that the Indian nuclear weapons programme has been embedded in the civilian one has given successive governments the "luxury" of building weapons without being unduly worried about the financial or opportunity costs. While the nuclear deal leaves intact the government's prerogative to accumulate fissile material and build bombs and even test them, it will, presumably, force policymakers to take into account the associated costs. To the extent that this has a rational effect on the size and structure of the country's nuclear weapons programme, this is not necessarily a bad thing.
There is, however, one last issue that needs serious consideration. The U.S. insistence on dictating the contours of the Indian separation plan and on in-perpetuity safeguards has led to a binary distinction between `civilian' and `military,' which runs the risk of sending wrong signals to the outside world.
Indian scientists wanted the fast-breeder programme out of safeguards not so much because they want to use it to build bombs but because they feared the effect inspections would have on civilian research. Under the terms of the India-U.S. deal, these facilities — and any others the Government wants — can be kept away from safeguards but only by being explicitly designated as non-civilian. Thus, a purely civilian facility that the Government may not want to place under in-perpetuity safeguards for a variety of "peaceful" reasons will be seen by the rest of the world — and by Pakistan and China, in particular — as military. In turn, this may trigger the construction of military nuclear facilities in those countries as they strive to "neutralise" this wrongly perceived Indian advantage. Such signalling problems could have been avoided if India had managed — as was earlier promised — to secure exactly the same rights and obligations as other nuclear weapons states, "nothing more, nothing less."
© Copyright 2000 - 2006 The Hindu
10 July 2006
The Hindu
The nuclear deal and 'minimum deterrence'
Siddharth Varadarajan
BY NOW, the fact that the United States' offer of civil nuclear cooperation carries hidden political costs is well accepted within and outside the Indian foreign policy establishment. But if the political costs are tangible and have already begun to accumulate, what of the charge made by a section of the Indian strategic community — and echoed by the Bharatiya Janata Party — that the nuclear deal will compromise the "credibility" of India's "minimum nuclear deterrence?"
Right from day one, the Indian side has insisted the July 18, 2005, agreement is about energy and not arms control. For the Americans too, the deal is primarily about fashioning India's energy choices. But there is also a non-proliferation impulse, as reflected in the reference to India's unilateral moratorium on nuclear weapon testing in the joint statement issued that day. Accepting this without extracting a reciprocal reference to the United States' own moratorium was a serious error of tactics and principle. Today, it is this commitment that is proving the most difficult to work around as India resists U.S. efforts to convert its voluntary no-testing pledge into something more legally binding. Specifically, the U.S. is trying to tie the assurances of perpetual nuclear fuel supply — as envisaged by the Indian nuclear separation plan — into a "no nuclear testing" condition. These clauses form part of the "bracketed" portion of the Nuclear Cooperation Agreement (the so-called `123 Agreement') currently being negotiated by the two sides.
No fissile material cut-off
As matters stand, however, will the India-U.S. agreement lead to a cap or constraint on India's nuclear weapons arsenal in either quantitative or qualitative terms? In the `statement of U.S. policy' section, the House of Representatives Bill on nuclear cooperation says the U.S. should seek to achieve a moratorium on fissile material production by India, Pakistan, and China and promote the "reduction and eventual elimination" of nuclear weapons in South Asia. In the Senate version, the President is expected to report annually to Congress about U.S. efforts to get India and Pakistan to secure, cap, and reduce their fissile material stockpiles.
While this may be U.S. policy, there is nothing in any agreement India has signed that commits it to cap or reduce its weapons-grade fissile material stockpiles. Of course, Washington may cite its domestic legal obligations as a reason to pressure India on this point but New Delhi will itself be under no compulsion to obey. Truth to tell, much will depend on how the negotiations for the proposed Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT) proceed at the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva. If the U.S. is rapidly able to establish a consensus around its draft FMCT, India will find it harder to resist agreeing to an end to fissile material production. But if the American ploy of blackmailing the CD into accepting an FMCT by the end of this year fails — which it is likely to, since most countries want parallel progress on the proposed treaty preventing an arms race in outer space — then India would be off the hook.
If there is no constraint on the quantitative enhancement of India's nuclear weapons, what about qualitative "improvements?" The Senate Bill authorising nuclear commerce with India is explicit that the waiver of existing prohibitions for India will "cease to be effective" if India "detonate[s] a nuclear explosive device" after the Act comes into force. It is reasonable to assume the NSG rule change for India will also become null and void if India conducts an explosive test.
While there are good reasons for India not to test again, do these clauses amount to the decision being pushed down the country's throat, that too by a state that itself refuses to be bound by any legal no-test covenant? Here, three points are of relevance. First, India has already "bilateralised" its unilateral moratorium in a joint statement with Pakistan issued during Atal Bihari Vajpayee's visit to Lahore as Prime Minister in 1999. Any unilateral India test, therefore, would violate that agreement to begin with. Secondly, sub-critical tests and computer simulations of the kind the U.S. conducts in order to validate weapon designs would not attract any penalty. Thirdly, there would, in any case, still be no legal obligation on India not to conduct an explosive test.
Cost of a test
In the unlikely event of a situation arising where the government of the day felt obliged to abandon the moratorium on testing, it would be free to do so. Of course, the U.S. and the NSG would end their nuclear cooperation with India. Provided India were able to withdraw its civilian facilities from the "in perpetuity" IAEA safeguards, the clock, in effect, would be turned back to the status quo ante of July 2005. If withdrawal were not possible, however, even under some kind of force majeure clause, then a decision to test would not be costless.
India has agreed to in-perpetuity safeguards for its indigenous civilian nuclear facilities in exchange for U.S. assurances of perpetual fuel supply for all reactors that go under safeguards. It is hard to imagine a scenario where such assurances could withstand the heat of an Indian nuclear test. Thus, the greater the Indian dependence on imported safeguarded reactors for its electricity grid, the greater would be the costs associated with the suspension of nuclear cooperation that would inevitably follow any nuclear test. In the long run, therefore, while there would be no legal bar, the Indian Government would find the collateral economic costs associated with a nuclear test to be quite high. This is not to say that the absence of such a deal would make a fresh Indian test costless under current world conditions. That is precisely why the erstwhile Vajpayee Government sensibly announced a unilateral moratorium immediately after the tests it conducted at Pokhran-II in 1998.
There is another sense in which the nuclear deal will force greater attentiveness to costs as far as nuclear weapons is concerned. The fact that the Indian nuclear weapons programme has been embedded in the civilian one has given successive governments the "luxury" of building weapons without being unduly worried about the financial or opportunity costs. While the nuclear deal leaves intact the government's prerogative to accumulate fissile material and build bombs and even test them, it will, presumably, force policymakers to take into account the associated costs. To the extent that this has a rational effect on the size and structure of the country's nuclear weapons programme, this is not necessarily a bad thing.
There is, however, one last issue that needs serious consideration. The U.S. insistence on dictating the contours of the Indian separation plan and on in-perpetuity safeguards has led to a binary distinction between `civilian' and `military,' which runs the risk of sending wrong signals to the outside world.
Indian scientists wanted the fast-breeder programme out of safeguards not so much because they want to use it to build bombs but because they feared the effect inspections would have on civilian research. Under the terms of the India-U.S. deal, these facilities — and any others the Government wants — can be kept away from safeguards but only by being explicitly designated as non-civilian. Thus, a purely civilian facility that the Government may not want to place under in-perpetuity safeguards for a variety of "peaceful" reasons will be seen by the rest of the world — and by Pakistan and China, in particular — as military. In turn, this may trigger the construction of military nuclear facilities in those countries as they strive to "neutralise" this wrongly perceived Indian advantage. Such signalling problems could have been avoided if India had managed — as was earlier promised — to secure exactly the same rights and obligations as other nuclear weapons states, "nothing more, nothing less."
© Copyright 2000 - 2006 The Hindu
07 July 2006
Assessing the nuclear balance sheet
The U.S. wants a decisive say in the scripting of India's safeguards and additional protocol agreements with the IAEA but is withholding "full" civil nuclear cooperation.
7 July 2006
The Hindu
Assessing the nuclear balance sheet
Siddharth Varadarajan
WHEN INDIA signed a landmark agreement in July 2005 for "full civil nuclear cooperation" with the United States in exchange for a specific set of commitments, there were three sets of concerns that analysts on the Indian side raised. The first related to technology. Would the deal hamper India's indigenous three-stage plans in the civil nuclear field by increasing our import dependence and subjecting our reactors and research facilities to intrusive international inspections? The second set of concerns was linked to `national security.' To the extent to which nuclear weapons — rightly or wrongly — have come to occupy a central position in the country's security calculus, would the deal weaken or cap the Indian nuclear weapons capability? Finally, there were political and strategic concerns. What hidden costs did the U.S. offer of nuclear cooperation bring with it? Was India running the risk of getting drawn into a web of alliances the U.S. is building in Asia, thereby compromising its own strategic autonomy?
These questions — especially on the fast-breeder — were intensively debated in the past year and were perhaps a useful input into the difficult negotiations India and the U.S. had on the question of implementation. But with the deal now entering its final phases, it is useful to assess whether the three sets of concerns raised last year retain any validity.
Last week, a draft law allowing the U.S. President to authorise nuclear sales to India sailed comfortably through key Congressional committees in both the House and Senate. Its passage by a full sitting of the two Houses of Congress is now more or less assured. Simply put, the draft law envisages the President waiving existing restrictions on nuclear trade once he makes a "determination" that India has fulfilled a number of conditions. These conditions — which differ slightly and crucially in the Senate and House versions of the Bill — ostensibly spring from the July 2005 agreement but contain some additionalities that the Indian side might find problematic. Moreover, the grant of presidential waiver authority comes interwoven with other legislative directives to the President, some of which are harmless as far as India is concerned but some of which are definitely cause for concern.
To get a better sense of the additionalities, it is instructive to compare the operational section of the original draft of the proposed law — shared with India as part of the agreement on its separation plan, and tabled in both Houses in March as S2429 and HR 4974 — with the versions currently marked up. These spell out the conditions India must fulfil for the President to authorise nuclear commerce.
Problematic changes
On at least four counts, the changes made are problematic. Whereas the first draft spoke of India filing a declaration with the IAEA regarding its civil nuclear facilities, the Senate Bill says the declaration must be "complete" and include nuclear "materials" as well. The insistence on "complete" is odd since the word has been used internationally only in respect of the IAEA declarations filed by Iraq and Iran — countries accused of having a clandestine nuclear programme. Since the basis of the India-U.S. agreement is the de facto acceptance of India's military nuclear programme, it is meaningless to speak of a "complete" declaration. Perhaps the intention is to bring nuclear "materials" produced in the past by facilities going on the civilian list under the purview of safeguards. Either way, the wording of this clause is troubling.
Secondly, on safeguards, the original draft spoke of India accepting "IAEA practices." The Senate has amended this to add acceptance by India of IAEA "standards and principles" as well. Until now, the assumption was that the country would sign an "India-specific" safeguards agreement which would reflect the fact that India is not a non-nuclear weapons state (NNWS) under the NPT. Thus, not all nuclear facilities would be safeguarded and those that were offered would be on the basis of IAEA "practices" whose precise contours would be the subject of negotiation with the agency. The new insistence on adherence to IAEA "standards and principles," however, is intended to push India towards a tighter inspections regime for the facilities to be safeguarded, presumably in line with the intensity reserved for NNWS.
Thirdly, the original draft spoke of India making "satisfactory progress toward implementing an Additional Protocol that would apply to India's civil nuclear program." In the new Senate version, the reference to "India's civil nuclear program" has been deleted and "satisfactory progress" has been changed to "substantial progress." In the Senate Bill, the term "Additional Protocol" has been defined as a "protocol ... based on a Model Additional Protocol as set forth in IAEA information circular (INFCIRC) 540." Until now, the Manmohan Singh Government has insisted it would sign only "an" additional protocol rather than "the" additional protocol. But the Senate committee, by deleting the reference to India's civil nuclear programme, has raised a question mark over Washington's willingness to allow India to invoke — as the U.S. itself has done — national security exclusions to override the intrusiveness of INFCIRC 540.
Fourthly, in the original draft, India was expected, in line with the July 2005 agreement, to support "international efforts" to limit the spread of enrichment technology. The House version has changed this to "supporting United States and international efforts." One of "efforts" the U.S. is considering to limit the spread of enrichment technology, for example, is to sanction or bomb Iran. Another is the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), in which President Bush told the Asia Society in February that India would be treated not as a "fuel cycle state" but as a "recipient." Is India expected to support such efforts?
In any event, the reference to enrichment technology is especially problematic because of the Senate's insistence on explicitly ruling out the sale of enrichment-related technologies to India. The July 2005 agreement had spoken of the U.S. adjusting its laws to enable "full civil nuclear energy cooperation and trade with India" but what is being proposed is something less than "full." Indeed, in its `Declaration of Policy,' the Senate Bill decrees that it shall be U.S. policy "to work with members of the NSG, individually and collectively, to further restrict the transfers of such equipment and technologies, including to India." Elsewhere, the Bill explicitly prohibits the sale to India "of any equipment, materials or technology related to the enrichment of uranium, the reprocessing of spent fuel, or the production of heavy water" except if India joins the GNEP or a similar IAEA-sponsored programme.
Taken together, what does the addition and subtraction of a few words in the operational section of the Bill mean? It represents an attempt by the U.S. to dictate the parameters of the safeguards agreement and additional protocol India is to sign with the IAEA. Indeed, to underscore the point and ensure real-time monitoring of the evolving safeguards agreement, the House Bill explicitly tasks the President with not just submitting the final agreement to Congress for approval but also giving monthly reports to it on the "status of the negotiations ... between the IAEA and India."
Apart from safeguards, the Senate version of the Bill has grafted on a separate layer of supervision under the rubric of end-use monitoring. Any nuclear material, equipment and technology exported to India by the U.S. would be subject to not just IAEA safeguards but an end-use monitoring programme to be run by the U.S. The Senate is also insisting that this end-use monitoring should involve U.S. inspectors acquiring the same degree of access as IAEA inspectors "in the event [that] the IAEA is unable to implement safeguards."
The IAEA has a limited budget and would normally prefer to deploy its surveillance resources not in a country like India — which is known to possess nuclear weapons — but in NNWS suspected of having a clandestine nuclear programme. Thus, over a period of time, the periodicity and intensity of active safeguards implementation by the IAEA in India will likely come down. For example, hundreds of facilities in the five NPT-defined nuclear weapons states are safeguarded but the IAEA actively inspects no more than a dozen. It is precisely to guard against such an eventuality that the U.S. is insisting on a parallel unilateral inspections mechanism for any nuclear material it exports to India. And by insisting that the President prepare an annual report on third country nuclear exports to India which do "not meet the standards applied to [U.S.] exports," the attempt will be to force other suppliers and perhaps the NSG as a whole to insist on similar conditions just in case India decides not to purchase equipment from American vendors.
So far, the separation plan prepared by India has managed to exclude civilian experimental and research work vital for the success of the three-stage nuclear programme from the crippling purview of inspections. But the entire effort will come to naught if the country is forced to negotiate a rigid safeguards agreement and additional protocol with intrusive complementary access as the U.S. would like. In the home stretch, India must insist on its sovereign prerogative to negotiate a sui generis safeguards agreement that will not hamper civilian research.
And it must ensure its Additional Protocol mirrors that of the U.S., including a national security exclusion and all the reservations outlined in the "Brill letter" attached by the U.S. to its own protocol.
7 July 2006
The Hindu
Assessing the nuclear balance sheet
Siddharth Varadarajan
WHEN INDIA signed a landmark agreement in July 2005 for "full civil nuclear cooperation" with the United States in exchange for a specific set of commitments, there were three sets of concerns that analysts on the Indian side raised. The first related to technology. Would the deal hamper India's indigenous three-stage plans in the civil nuclear field by increasing our import dependence and subjecting our reactors and research facilities to intrusive international inspections? The second set of concerns was linked to `national security.' To the extent to which nuclear weapons — rightly or wrongly — have come to occupy a central position in the country's security calculus, would the deal weaken or cap the Indian nuclear weapons capability? Finally, there were political and strategic concerns. What hidden costs did the U.S. offer of nuclear cooperation bring with it? Was India running the risk of getting drawn into a web of alliances the U.S. is building in Asia, thereby compromising its own strategic autonomy?
These questions — especially on the fast-breeder — were intensively debated in the past year and were perhaps a useful input into the difficult negotiations India and the U.S. had on the question of implementation. But with the deal now entering its final phases, it is useful to assess whether the three sets of concerns raised last year retain any validity.
Last week, a draft law allowing the U.S. President to authorise nuclear sales to India sailed comfortably through key Congressional committees in both the House and Senate. Its passage by a full sitting of the two Houses of Congress is now more or less assured. Simply put, the draft law envisages the President waiving existing restrictions on nuclear trade once he makes a "determination" that India has fulfilled a number of conditions. These conditions — which differ slightly and crucially in the Senate and House versions of the Bill — ostensibly spring from the July 2005 agreement but contain some additionalities that the Indian side might find problematic. Moreover, the grant of presidential waiver authority comes interwoven with other legislative directives to the President, some of which are harmless as far as India is concerned but some of which are definitely cause for concern.
To get a better sense of the additionalities, it is instructive to compare the operational section of the original draft of the proposed law — shared with India as part of the agreement on its separation plan, and tabled in both Houses in March as S2429 and HR 4974 — with the versions currently marked up. These spell out the conditions India must fulfil for the President to authorise nuclear commerce.
Problematic changes
On at least four counts, the changes made are problematic. Whereas the first draft spoke of India filing a declaration with the IAEA regarding its civil nuclear facilities, the Senate Bill says the declaration must be "complete" and include nuclear "materials" as well. The insistence on "complete" is odd since the word has been used internationally only in respect of the IAEA declarations filed by Iraq and Iran — countries accused of having a clandestine nuclear programme. Since the basis of the India-U.S. agreement is the de facto acceptance of India's military nuclear programme, it is meaningless to speak of a "complete" declaration. Perhaps the intention is to bring nuclear "materials" produced in the past by facilities going on the civilian list under the purview of safeguards. Either way, the wording of this clause is troubling.
Secondly, on safeguards, the original draft spoke of India accepting "IAEA practices." The Senate has amended this to add acceptance by India of IAEA "standards and principles" as well. Until now, the assumption was that the country would sign an "India-specific" safeguards agreement which would reflect the fact that India is not a non-nuclear weapons state (NNWS) under the NPT. Thus, not all nuclear facilities would be safeguarded and those that were offered would be on the basis of IAEA "practices" whose precise contours would be the subject of negotiation with the agency. The new insistence on adherence to IAEA "standards and principles," however, is intended to push India towards a tighter inspections regime for the facilities to be safeguarded, presumably in line with the intensity reserved for NNWS.
Thirdly, the original draft spoke of India making "satisfactory progress toward implementing an Additional Protocol that would apply to India's civil nuclear program." In the new Senate version, the reference to "India's civil nuclear program" has been deleted and "satisfactory progress" has been changed to "substantial progress." In the Senate Bill, the term "Additional Protocol" has been defined as a "protocol ... based on a Model Additional Protocol as set forth in IAEA information circular (INFCIRC) 540." Until now, the Manmohan Singh Government has insisted it would sign only "an" additional protocol rather than "the" additional protocol. But the Senate committee, by deleting the reference to India's civil nuclear programme, has raised a question mark over Washington's willingness to allow India to invoke — as the U.S. itself has done — national security exclusions to override the intrusiveness of INFCIRC 540.
Fourthly, in the original draft, India was expected, in line with the July 2005 agreement, to support "international efforts" to limit the spread of enrichment technology. The House version has changed this to "supporting United States and international efforts." One of "efforts" the U.S. is considering to limit the spread of enrichment technology, for example, is to sanction or bomb Iran. Another is the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), in which President Bush told the Asia Society in February that India would be treated not as a "fuel cycle state" but as a "recipient." Is India expected to support such efforts?
In any event, the reference to enrichment technology is especially problematic because of the Senate's insistence on explicitly ruling out the sale of enrichment-related technologies to India. The July 2005 agreement had spoken of the U.S. adjusting its laws to enable "full civil nuclear energy cooperation and trade with India" but what is being proposed is something less than "full." Indeed, in its `Declaration of Policy,' the Senate Bill decrees that it shall be U.S. policy "to work with members of the NSG, individually and collectively, to further restrict the transfers of such equipment and technologies, including to India." Elsewhere, the Bill explicitly prohibits the sale to India "of any equipment, materials or technology related to the enrichment of uranium, the reprocessing of spent fuel, or the production of heavy water" except if India joins the GNEP or a similar IAEA-sponsored programme.
Taken together, what does the addition and subtraction of a few words in the operational section of the Bill mean? It represents an attempt by the U.S. to dictate the parameters of the safeguards agreement and additional protocol India is to sign with the IAEA. Indeed, to underscore the point and ensure real-time monitoring of the evolving safeguards agreement, the House Bill explicitly tasks the President with not just submitting the final agreement to Congress for approval but also giving monthly reports to it on the "status of the negotiations ... between the IAEA and India."
Apart from safeguards, the Senate version of the Bill has grafted on a separate layer of supervision under the rubric of end-use monitoring. Any nuclear material, equipment and technology exported to India by the U.S. would be subject to not just IAEA safeguards but an end-use monitoring programme to be run by the U.S. The Senate is also insisting that this end-use monitoring should involve U.S. inspectors acquiring the same degree of access as IAEA inspectors "in the event [that] the IAEA is unable to implement safeguards."
The IAEA has a limited budget and would normally prefer to deploy its surveillance resources not in a country like India — which is known to possess nuclear weapons — but in NNWS suspected of having a clandestine nuclear programme. Thus, over a period of time, the periodicity and intensity of active safeguards implementation by the IAEA in India will likely come down. For example, hundreds of facilities in the five NPT-defined nuclear weapons states are safeguarded but the IAEA actively inspects no more than a dozen. It is precisely to guard against such an eventuality that the U.S. is insisting on a parallel unilateral inspections mechanism for any nuclear material it exports to India. And by insisting that the President prepare an annual report on third country nuclear exports to India which do "not meet the standards applied to [U.S.] exports," the attempt will be to force other suppliers and perhaps the NSG as a whole to insist on similar conditions just in case India decides not to purchase equipment from American vendors.
So far, the separation plan prepared by India has managed to exclude civilian experimental and research work vital for the success of the three-stage nuclear programme from the crippling purview of inspections. But the entire effort will come to naught if the country is forced to negotiate a rigid safeguards agreement and additional protocol with intrusive complementary access as the U.S. would like. In the home stretch, India must insist on its sovereign prerogative to negotiate a sui generis safeguards agreement that will not hamper civilian research.
And it must ensure its Additional Protocol mirrors that of the U.S., including a national security exclusion and all the reservations outlined in the "Brill letter" attached by the U.S. to its own protocol.
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