Nine scenarios for the nuclear endgame

Whether the nuclear deal progresses beyond the current impasse or not, India needs to choreograph a proper diplomatic strategy to address all possible contingencies.



23 May 2008
The Hindu

Nine scenarios for the nuclear endgame

Siddharth Varadarajan

After eight rounds of shadow-boxing in the coordination committee on the Indo-United States nuclear deal, it has become obvious that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh does not have a credible strategy to deal with either the concerns of the Left parties or his own government.

The committee was first mooted last September to review the Left's objections to the Hyde Act. But when the Left agreed to allow the Government to negotiate a safeguards agreement with the IAEA, the understanding was that the committee would specifically parse and then approve or reject the draft agreement. Though the draft has been ready for some time now, however, the government has chosen not to share the text. While confidentiality is an issue, the government knows it cannot proceed without taking the Left into confidence. One reason for its reluctance to share the text, then, could be that the draft falls short of the Prime Minister’s promises to Parliament. Given the quality of the negotiating team India deployed in Vienna, however, this is unlikely.
The real reason is probably that differences with the Left on the basic principles underlying the deal run so deep that there is little sense in the two sides jointly poring over the safeguards text.

At the heart of these differences is a curious paradox: the fate of the nuclear deal is actually of secondary importance for the Left parties. Their main concern is the growing strategic and military alliance with the U.S. Coming at the issue from the opposite side, the U.S. shares this ordering of priorities. But where the Left sees danger, the Pentagon sees opportunity: If it can get India to swallow the bitter pill of a military partnership without the sugar-coating the nuclear deal provides, Washington isn’t going to complain. The nuclear deal can sink as far as the U.S. is concerned so long as military ties forge ahead. During Secretary of Defence Robert Gates’ visit to India in March, for example, the deal was of peripheral concern. What he wanted was progress on military acquisition, access and interoperability.

While the Left and the U.S. seem clear about what is at stake, the Prime Minister faces a dilemma. If he could find a way of reassuring the Left that India has no intention of pursuing a closer military and strategic partnership with the U.S., he could probably salvage the core of the nuclear deal. But the more India tries to rid the nuclear deal of the military-strategic baggage the U.S. has loaded on board, the less will be Washington’s enthusiasm to deliver its side of the nuclear bargain. The negotiating history of the past two years provides ample evidence of this inverse relationship. For example, instructions to vote against Iran at the IAEA were issued right after President George Bush told Prime Minister Singh during their meeting at the Waldorf Astoria in New York on September 13, 2005 that the fate of the nuclear deal was linked to Indian support on the Iran issue. This threat was repeated again in January 2006, on the eve of the IAEA’s second vote.

With the nuclear deal on temporary hold, India’s position on the Iran nuclear issue has reverted to what it was prior to September 2005 — that it should be resolved through diplomacy rather than sanctions and force. However, the Prime Minister is still pursuing a “make haste slowly” policy over the Iran pipeline for fear of irritating the Americans. In July 2005, the Left parties had said the pipeline was the “touchstone of an independent foreign policy.” By pressing ahead on that front, Dr. Singh could address the Left’s apprehensions about the deal affecting foreign policy. But the Prime Minister fears the U.S. will lose interest in pushing the nuclear deal the day a formal agreement for the Iran pipeline is signed.

There are ways of calibrating this balance and breaking the stalemate over the deal but the government’s political managers seem to be doing little other than hoping for a miracle.

The India-U.S. civil nuclear energy agreement requires four steps for completion. First, the IAEA Board must approve India’s safeguards agreement. Second, the NSG must amend its export guidelines to give a clean exemption to India. Third, the U.S. Congress must approve the bilateral ‘123’ nuclear cooperation agreement. This is the least important step from India’s viewpoint for if the first and second steps are clinched, failure to approve the 123 will only disadvantage U.S. suppliers. The fourth and final step is India signing its IAEA safeguards agreement.

Time is a factor but it is not as much of a binding constraint as the nature of the NSG exemption. Of course, the longer the India file takes to get to the NSG, the greater the danger that opposition to the deal within the 45-nation cartel will strengthen. However, as early as last fall, barely weeks after the 123 agreement was finalised, it was clear that the U.S. itself was redrafting its NSG proposals to the detriment of India.

Part of the problem is that the UPA has wasted enormous effort making spurious arguments in favour of the deal’s less defensible elements like the Hyde Act. The Hyde Act is not binding on India and may not even be binding on the Bush administration but a future administration can always use it, should it so desire. By the same token, the deal’s critics should also not be overly preoccupied with Hyde. For even if the Act had been perfect from the Indian perspective, a future administration could always amend it or tear it up. The issue, therefore, is not textual protection but practical insurance against American double-dealing, and the latter can only be achieved by minimising nuclear imports from the U.S.

When the UPA and the Left meet on May 28 to decide the fate of the deal, they should evaluate the likely consequences of either going forward or standing still. Broadly speaking, there are nine scenarios, each of which has different probabilities of occurrence and different levels of associated strategic risk.

Scenario 1: The Left allows the safeguards agreement to be sent to the IAEA if the government agrees not to sign it until all restrictions on India have been lifted and to not operationalise the 123 agreement without the coordination committee’s approval. After the IAEA Board’s approval, the U.S. asks the NSG to change its guidelines. Given the Left’s qualified backing, India stresses that anything other than a clean exemption is unacceptable. If the exemption is clean, India immediately operationalises its bilateral agreements with Russia and France. At this point, the U.S. Congress may insist on amending or vetoing the 123 agreement. Alternatively, the Left may threaten to topple the government if the 123 is operationalised. Either way, the Hyde Act would remain a dead letter. The U.S. will have gained no additional levers of influence over the conduct of Indian foreign and strategic policy. Risks: Very low. Probability: Low to medium.

Scenario 2: Same as 1, except that the 123 agreement is approved. Here, India buys lots of U.S. nuclear material and fuel and finds itself under pressure to support U.S. policies on fronts such as Iran and the pipeline. Risks: Very high. Probability: Low to medium.

Scenario 3: Same as 2, except that India buys only limited amounts of U.S. nuclear equipment and fuel. Though pressure to follow U.S. policies is great, Washington does not have much leverage because of India’s limited exposure. Risks: Very low. Probability: Medium.

Scenario 4: The Left allows the safeguards agreement to be submitted but the IAEA Board shoots it down. This would be a diplomatic setback since it would puncture the notion that India’s status as a de facto nuclear weapon state enjoys wide international support. Risks: High. Probability: Very low.

Scenario 5: The Left allows the safeguards agreement to be submitted, the IAEA Board approves it but the NSG sets impossible conditions. At this point, India walks away with dignity. The U.S. is shown up as a country that could not live up to its word. Risks: Low to medium. Probability: Low to medium.

Scenario 6: Same as 5 but the NSG imposes “borderline” conditions on the implementation of its waiver. The government consults the Left and all political parties on what the best course of action is. Risks: Low to medium. Probability: Medium to high.

Scenario 7: The Left parties block the deal at the present stage. The nuclear agreements with Russia and France remain a dead letter. Meanwhile, the underlying military partnership between the U.S. and India continues to grow. Risks: Medium to high. Probability: Medium to high.

Scenario 8: The same as 7 except that the Left also manages to reverse the underlying military partnership with the U.S. Risks: Low to medium. Probability: Low.

Scenario 9: Same as 7 except that Russia and France break ranks after a while and agree to start nuclear cooperation with India and eventually the U.S. itself comes around to offering better terms. Risks: Very low. Probability: Very low.

A prudential strategy would minimise the risks — that is, buy as little nuclear material as possible from the U.S. or other countries imposing unwelcome conditions — while simultaneously expanding the energy options available for the country such as gas by pipeline. A country of India’s size can have its cake and eat it too. The U.S. wouldn’t mind a situation where India rejects the lifting of nuclear sanctions the deal envisages but not the strategic partnership which lies behind it. The challenge for the Left and the UPA is to craft a strategy where that equation is reversed.

Diplomatic Notebook: India, the NSG and cluster bombs

The U.S. probably has a pretty good idea of what India and the IAEA secretariat have negotiated. But India is still in the dark about what Washington plans to do at the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

22 May 2008
The Hindu

DIPLOMATIC NOTEBOOK
India, the NSG and cluster bombs

Siddharth Varadarajan

The Indo-U.S. nuclear deal is not part of the principal agenda of the Nuclear Suppliers Group which is meeting this week in Berlin for its annual plenary. Though Indian negotiators have finalised the draft of an India-specific safeguards agreement, the lack of domestic political consensus means the government is not yet in a position to submit the agreement to the International Atomic Energy Agency Board for formal approval. Vienna being a porous place, one can safely assu me the United States has a pretty good idea of what India and the IAEA secretariat have negotiated. New Delhi, on the other hand, is completely in the dark about what kind of exemption the Bush administration is prepared to seek from the nuclear cartel’s export guidelines for India.

Washington circulated a short “pre-decisional” draft in March 2006 but that text has since undergone substantial revision. According to the February 2008 report of the Congressional Research Service, U.S. Nuclear Cooperation with India: Issues for Congress, the United States has now developed a second draft incorporating the suggestions of other NSG members. “However, Washington has not yet circulated the proposal to the NSG Consultative Group out of concern that it would leak, thereby enabling the Indian leftist parties to use the draft to raise additional objections to the deal and stop discussions between New Delhi and the IAEA,” the CRS report states. The source it quotes is a “personal communication” by an unidentified State Department official.

Indian officials have no idea what changes the U.S. has incorporated in its first draft, which envisaged a fairly clean exemption for India without any of restrictions or conditions on the sale of components for safeguarded enrichment and reprocessing plants, reprocessing spent fuel and the like envisaged by the Henry Hyde Act of December 2006 and the U.S.-India bilateral nuclear cooperation agreement (i.e. the 123 agreement) finalised last July. The CRS report notes that the U.S. intends to unveil its new draft at an NSG Consultative Group meeting only after the IAEA Board of Governors has approved India’s safeguards agreement.

*** *** ***

This secrecy is of a piece with the gag order the State Department has imposed on members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs to ensure its answers to a number of detailed clarifications sought by Congressmen on the nuclear deal do not leak out. The questions were framed by the Committee after House Resolution 711 “expressing the sense of the House of Representatives concerning the U.S.-India nuclear cooperation agreement” was referred to it last October. The resolution states that it is in the U.S. interest to ensure the NSG does not approve an exemption for India “that allows other countries to engage in civil nuclear commerce with India that is prohibited under U.S. law, thus putting U.S. firms at a competitive disadvantage.” The operative part of H.R.711 is that the administration should not move for any revision of the NSG’s guidelines until it has (1) answered “all outstanding questions raised by Congress” on “apparent inconsistencies” between the Hyde Act and the 123 agreement, and (2) resolved “all differences of interpretation” of the 123 agreement’s provisions with India.

What does this mean for India, assuming the nuclear deal is able to pass the gauntlet of Left opposition and move on to the next stage? For one, that the U.S. will likely attempt to claw back the concessions it made in the 123 agreement and close the window on India getting at the international level what U.S. vendors are unable to provide under domestic law. India, for example, does not need enrichment and reprocessing technology from others but would like to import components for safeguarded fuel cycle facilities. The 123 agreement excludes this but the NSG at present has no separate bar on the sale of such components. Second, the Indian interpretation of many of the 123 agreement’s provisions — especially on the right of return — differ significantly from the American one. Since it is this deliberate ambiguity of language which allowed the 123 text to be sold by the two governments to their respective publics, any attempt to resolve these “differences of interpretation” could well lead to the agreement itself unravelling.

Until now, India was willing to swallow some of the unpleasant provisions of the 123 agreement because it knew that what mattered in the final analysis were the NSG guidelines. After all, the 123 agreement gets “operationalised” only when India buys nuclear equipment and fuel from the U.S. And so long as the NSG guidelines allow India to buy what it wants from other countries, a prudential strategy would be one which postpones this operationalisation for a few years. It is precisely this sequencing loophole in the nuclear deal that the U.S. is now trying to plug by denying India the "clean exemption" it wants from the NSG. All indications are that the NSG hurdle will be the hardest of all. But India will always have the option of walking away from the table if the nuclear cartel seeks to impose unreasonable restrictions on the country.

*** *** ***

One of the issues being discussed in the Berlin NSG plenary is a U.S.-initiated proposal to adopt new rules governing the export of enrichment and reprocessing (ENR) technology and equipment. Altering the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and NSG rules governing ENR has been an American priority for several years now. At present, neither the NPT nor the NSG envisage separate restrictions. The NSG guidelines only prescribe full-scope safeguards as a condition for the sale of nuclear material and equipment and do not impose additional conditions on ENR equipment. Until now, the U.S. has advocated a complete international ban on the sale of ENR technology to countries which did not already posses it, something NSG members have always resisted.

Last month, the U.S. changed tack to propose that the NSG adopt separate rules for such exports. Among the restrictions the U.S. envisages are (1) NPT membership (thereby ruling out India), (2) adherence to the Additional Protocol providing for snap inspections (something India will not allow since it possesses nuclear weapons), and (3) “black box” technology, whereby importing countries would not be able to replicate the safeguarded equipment they buy for use in some hidden facility.

At a meeting of NSG officials in Vienna in April, the U.S. clashed with Canada, Brazil and South Africa over the “black box” proposal.

With enriched uranium emerging as a fuel of the future, countries like Canada (with large uranium deposits) and South Africa (with enrichment technology) do not want the energy market to be cornered by the handful of countries which today supply nuclear fuel. However, it is more than likely that the NSG will adopt an "NPT only" rule for ENR sales. And that the exemption the U.S. seeks for India will not relax the proposed new rules on enrichment and reprocessing.

*** *** ***

A major arms control initiative gets underway this week in Ireland with the convening of the Dublin Diplomatic Conference on Cluster Munitions. A cluster munition is a bomb which contains multiple explosive submunitions that disperse deadly bomblets over a wider area after the principal detonation occurs. Such munitions violate the norms of war because they spread over a wide target area, causing civilian casualties. During Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006, for example, thousands of cluster bombs were dropped in heavily populated areas causing hundreds of civilian deaths and injuries. At the end of the war, one million unexploded bomblets lay strewn across southern Lebanon.

Prompted by the international outcry that Israel’s indiscriminate use of cluster munitions provoked — and the failure of the U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) to move towards prohibiting these deadly bombs — Norway invited concerned countries at the end of 2006 to attend a conference to work towards a ban. The Oslo process led to subsequent meetings, most recently in Wellington, where a Declaration on Cluster Munitions was adopted. The Dublin Conference, at which more than 100 countries are participating, is aimed at drafting a Convention prohibiting the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions. The U.S. is officially staying away. So is India.

Though India is a party to Protocol V of the CCW dealing with explosive remnants of war and is thereby committed to the “responsible use” of cluster munitions, it is wary of the Dublin process. First, it would rather deal with the issue through the U.N. And second, it believes cluster bombs serve a useful military purpose. So as with Ottawa process, which led to an international convention against landmines, India prefers to sit outside. This is unfortunate. Every weapon serves a “useful military purpose” but when it causes unacceptable damage to the civilian population its use should be banned.

Bhutan - A Photo Blog -1

The Bhutan army's ceremonial brass band gets ready to receive India's Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh

Last week, I visited Bhutan as part of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's media delegation. I've reported about the visit earlier but I thought I'd share some of the photographs I took of this incredibly beautiful country.

Paro airport cannot handle large aircraft so the PM's delegation travelled on two Airbus A319s. The media plane landed first.

Paro has one of the most difficult approaches of airports anywhere in the world. As the pilot descends, he or she must bank sharply to the right and then to the left to avoid two hills before aligning the aircraft with the runway. Here is the Prime Minister's plane making a sharp right barely a few hundred feet above ground.

Members of Bhutan's cabinet waiting to receive Manmohan Singh. Ministers wear orange shawls.

Bhutan's first elected Prime Minister, Jigmi Y. Thinley chats with journalists. In the background is Manmohan Singh's plane: the door is open and the airhostess is waiting for the stepladder.

Manmohan Singh speaks to reporters at Paro airport as Prime Minister Thinley looks on.

Chhattisgarh has lost the plot

One year after jailing the eminent doctor, Binayak Sen, State authorities have arrested another leading civil liberties activist, the journalist and filmmaker, Ajay T.G.

13 May 2008
The Hindu

Chhattisgarh has lost the plot

Siddharth Varadarajan

On May 5, the Chhattisgarh police announced the arrest of Ajay T.G., a Raipur-based journalist and filmmaker, under the State’s draconian Special Public Security Act (PSA). He has been charged with sedition under the Indian Penal Code and with having unlawful contact with a banned organisation, the Communist Party of India (Maoist), under Sections 3, 4 and 8 of the PSA. Like Binayak Sen, who was arrested last year on May 14, Ajay is a leading member of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties. He is also a prominent social worker whose contribution to the education of young girls from poor slum-dwelling families is well known. The circumstances leading to his arrest are so bizarre and reflect so poorly on Chhattisgarh’s approach to dealing with the naxalite problem that they bear recounting in some detail.

During the Lok Sabha elections of 2004, Ajay was part of a fact-finding team that visited a number of interior villages in the Dantewada region of the State to study the reaction of ordinary villagers to the Maoist call for a poll boycott, on the one hand, and heavy CRPF deployment, on the other.

The team went through several deserted villages before arriving at a village around 4 p.m. As Ajay started taking photographs of a deserted polling booth, the team was surrounded by a group of angry, young Maoist villagers. The youth accused the group of being police agents and detained them for several hours. They were eventually allowed to leave late in the evening but Ajay’s camera was confiscated.

For Ajay, the loss of his camera was a real blow. His only source of income was the freelance filming he did as a mediaperson. His family was also terrified at the thought that the Maoists believed him to be a police agent and decided not to file an official complaint with the authorities. But as word spread in Raipur about the threats to which the fact-finding team had been subjected, the Maoist leadership in the State moved to control the fallout and declared that it would compensate him if the camera was not recovered. The fact that this incident occurred and that Ajay and his colleagues were the victims of Maoist high-handedness is public knowledge because the media covered it in June 2006.

A year-and-a-half later, on January 21, 2008, the Chhattisgarh police intercepted an alleged arms drop by two Maoist women. When the house of one of the women was searched, they recovered a letter addressed to the Maoist spokesman by Ajay on the letterhead of the “The Campaign against Child Labour” (an organisation of which he is convenor). The letter, written in 2004, was about the return of the same camera. When the police arrived at his house to question him, Ajay, in the presence of lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj, readily acknowledged authorship of the letter and also explained the unfortunate circumstances in which it had been written. Nevertheless, the police seized his computer.

Since filmmakers these days rely as much on their computers as on their cameras, Ajay moved the local courts for the return of his PC. His case was posted for hearing on May 10. Five days before that, however, the police came and arrested him, invoking the Public Security Act which was not even in force in 2004 when the letter was written. Incredibly, stories are now being planted in the local press about how the police only discovered he was the author of the letter after going through his computer and conducting “handwriting analysis.”

Think about this for a second. Here is a journalist who was actually the victim of a crime committed by the Maoists. For weeks, the family fretted about what the Maoists would do to Ajay since they seemed to believe he was a police agent. And now, the same police steps in to victimise him again, this time with perhaps deadlier consequences since the grant of bail under the PSA — as Dr. Sen has learned — is well-nigh impossible. The irony is that the police are prosecuting Dr. Sen for his alleged connections with the naxalites without pausing to ask why, if he was so well connected, a fact-finding mission of which he was a member was illegally detained by the Maoists in 2004.

The fact of the matter is that both Dr. Sen and Ajay T.G. are being targeted because of their association with PUCL. And PUCL is under attack because it is one of the organisations inside Chhattisgarh — besides the Communist Party of India (CPI), the Vanvasi Chetna Ashram of Gandhian worker Himanshu Kumar, and others — that have been trying to expose the ugly reality of Salwa Judum, the State-run vigilante death squad that has led to the death of hundreds of civilians and the forced displacement of tens of thousands of adivasis. CPI leaders in the State are routinely harassed. Himanshu of the VCA, a long-time associate of the late Nirmala Deshpande, is being threatened with eviction from the land on which his ashram was legally built for documenting Salwa Judum atrocities. Courageous local journalists such as Kamlesh Paikra and Afzal Khan have also been attacked and intimidated for exposing state-sponsored violence. When CPI MP Gurudas Dasgupta tried to travel to Dantewada to support the protest of local adivasis against the expropriation of their land for a big industrial project, he was denied entry by motivated mobs with the police a silent spectator.

Despite the growing ranks of those critical of Salwa Judum, the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Chhattisgarh continues to brand its critics as “naxalites” or as persons influenced by the “psychological war machinery of Maoists” — a claim the Chhattisgarh DGP Vishwa Ranjan made about Ramachandra Guha and Nandini Sundar (who have filed a PIL in the Supreme Court against Salwa Judum) in an interview to the Pioneer on April 3. The Maoists’ psywar machinery is clearly formidable because among those it has now managed to “influence” is an expert committee of the Planning Commission, which includes former IB Director Ajit Doval as member, the Veerappa Moily Committee on Administrative Reforms and the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, all of which have documented the Salwa Judum’s excesses or called for it to be disbanded.

The Chhattisgarh government should realise that countering an armed insurgency requires tact, and intelligence. The arrest and intimidation of prominent critics such as Dr. Sen and Ajay show the utter non-application of mind on the part of its police force. The Salwa Judum is doomed; its withdrawal can be delayed a little but not prevented. The sooner it is withdrawn along with draconian laws like the PSA, the better.