NEW DELHI, 25 July 2005 — The monsoon session of the Parliament, beginning here today, is likely to turn stormy with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh facing a grilling by the opposition.
To maintain discipline and order, speaker of the Lok Sabha Somnath Chatterjee convened an all-party meeting yesterday. Manmohan is accused of giving away too much in striking a landmark nuclear technology deal during his trip to the United States last week.
While some experts say President George Bush’s decision to allow civilian nuclear sales to India will help solve the vast energy needs of one of Asia’s fastest-growing economies, there has been mounting domestic criticism the agreement could hurt national security.
The opposition Hindu fundamentalists say the accord reached during Manmohan’s visit puts a ceiling on India’s nuclear arsenal and New Delhi would lose “flexibility” in deciding its weapons strategy. They vowed over the weekend to make it a central issue during the new parliamentary session.
Former Premier Atal Behari Vajpayee said Bush “merely made promises” — Congress can still scupper the deal pledging US aid for energy-hungry India’s fledgling civilian atomic power program — but Manmohan made “long-term and specific commitments” that have security implications for the nation.
India was denied access to large nuclear reactors and fuel as a result of sanctions imposed after it conducted nuclear tests in 1974 and later in 1998.
Manmohan agreed to separate India’s civilian and military nuclear programs, open its facilities to outside scrutiny and work to prevent nuclear proliferation.
“Though we believe in minimum credible deterrent, the size of the deterrent must be determined from time to time on the basis of our own threat perception. This is a judgement which cannot be surrendered to anyone,” said Vajpayee, who led India through nuclear weapons tests in 1998.
While New Delhi’s relations have warmed considerably with rival Pakistan, it is still deeply wary of its nuclear-armed neighbor with which it has fought three wars. India has also fought a brief border war with China in 1962.
India’s communist allies on whom Manmohan’s Congress party relies for survival in Parliament have also attacked the agreement, saying it could hamper “the pursuit of an independent nuclear technology policy.” Supporters of the deal say it will end India’s pariah status since it first tested nuclear weapons and refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and shifts it closer to international acceptance as a nuclear-armed nation.
But critics say India has lived long enough without such acceptance and does not need it now.
India’s nuclear capability “created without the permission of the West or the Soviet Union...is at the heart of India’s sense of itself as a power,” said M.J. Akbar, editor of the Asian Age.
“Any suspicion that a prime minister has taken dictation from Washington does not travel well with public opinion,” he said.
Former national security adviser Brajesh Mishra said over the weekend, “We may have gotten into an agreement that will harm us in the long term as far as national security.” The opposition has also expressed suspicion that the US is using the bait of help for India’s civilian nuclear program to get New Delhi to abandon a proposed 4.5-billion-dollar pipeline that would bring natural gas from Iran.
The US accuses Iran of trying to build a nuclear bomb and supporting terrorism.
Those suspicions were fueled when Manmohansaid in Washington that the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline project was “fraught with risks ... considering all the uncertainties of the situation there in Iran.” Petroleum Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar said the nuclear agreement was not a “quid pro quo” for abandoning the pipeline.
But opposition groups and the government’s communist allies are calling for Manmohan to explain his remarks. They accuse the Indian delegation of bowing to US pressure and secretly agreeing to ditch the pipeline.
