The US-India deal billed as a landmark strategic deal of the twentieth century was never going to have an easy sail. The lack of open support for the deal has however been surprising.
In Washington the administration has been the lone-ranger rallying support for this controversial deal. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is leading the administration's effort. Rice has written in the newspapers, appeared on television networks and given numerous interviews. Finally she went before the Congress in a marathon session to defend the deal. In her testimony the only new argument that Rice put before the two Houses was to "have faith" in India.
While Rice clearly stated that India would not cap weapons production unilaterally she insisted that others must have faith in India's intentions; that India would not go for an arms race. It maybe too early to determine the extent to which Rice's testimony may have swung votes in favor of the deal. It remains a dynamic situation. Meanwhile, lobbying by the administration, the Indian government and the Indian-Americans is in full swing. This includes lobbying visits by senior Indian officials and ministers to Washington and organizing India trips for high-profile Congressmen like Edward Kennedy and Dennis Hastert, speaker of the House. The Indian-Americans are raising money for the election campaigns of US congressman and senators in the hope that their voting patterns can be influenced.
The congressional voting on the bill proposing India-specific changes in the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 is unlikely before August. The bill first must clear the House and the Senate Foreign Relations Committees. The administration is keen that the voting takes place before the November elections of the House of Representatives and of one-third of the Senate. Republicans may lose the present majority in the House.
The overall resistance to the deal however has revolved around five somewhat overlapping issues. First, domestically the Bush administration has adopted a personalized track as opposed to a process track on the deal. The troika of Condoleezza Rice, Blackwell and Ashley Tellis essentially put the deal together, blessed by Bush. While the congressmen were essentially presented a done deal, even the reservations of the bureaucracy were made a short shrift of. For example, the Washington Post reported that the evening before the deal was signed in New Delhi the US Undersecretary had told the Post in a telephone conversation that since there were outstanding issues, the signing of the deal was not imminent. The deal was signed the next morning as the president chose to overrule all reservations. Second, the non-proliferation lobby has effectively spread its message. The message is that with all its holes a non-proliferation regime does exist. That with the stroke of a pen the US-India deal threatens to overturn this regime that was so painstakingly put together. Also as the big five powers take the Iranian case to the UN, the Indo-US deal is seen as potentially undermining such unified anti-proliferation action. Many argue that the credibility of any future international action against proliferators could be undermined after the US-India deal goes through in its current form. This deal is also likely to create deep divisions in the hitherto unified group of countries working against non-proliferation.
Third, the Bush administration chose to not seek international support for the deal. The deal, as it stands now, would violate Article 1 of the NPT that makes it incumbent on the NPT signatories to conduct nuclear transactions only with NPT signatory countries. Yet none of the members of the key members of Nuclear Suppliers Group were consulted. The IAEA was seen to be the only international body that has been supportive of the deal.
Fourth, significantly the US business community has not been able to transfer its strong advocacy of the deal to the US legislature. The US Chamber has been seeking support for the deal since passage of the deal would open business prospects worth over $100 billion for the US. Yet, as of now, not many within the Congress appear to have "bitten into" the economic argument.
Finally, power seems to have trumped the "dollar power" and the Democratic Party's generally pro-India ethos. As of now the Democrats have not "come through" for India. Its historic fascination with the richness of the Indian culture and the Indian democracy has produced many high-profile India supporters within the Democratic Party. Significantly, the former first families, the Clintons and the Kennedys have led the India-doters in the Democratic Party. In fact it was the Democrats under Bill Clinton, who in 1999 began to lay the foundations of what is now being seen as a landmark US-India strategic alliance.
Against this backdrop, the noncommittal attitude of the Democrats is surprising. Clintons, Edward Kennedy and Joe Biden have opted for silence at this point. Perhaps a key factor in keeping the Democrats from supporting the deal could be the 2008 elections. The party that desperately wants to return to power may have concluded that the path to the White House may have to be paved with an aborted US-Indo nuclear deal. Will the aborted deal be the stick with which the Democrats would like to beat the Republicans at the polls?
After all if the deal were being billed as the most significant strategic deal of the 21st century, the Bush administration's failure to pull it through would equally be seen as a monumental failure. It would be considerably more damaging to the Bush administration than the Dubai Port deal. A more recent issue has been India's Iranian connection. The docking of an Iranian naval vessel in the last week of February at an Indian port has raised questions about Indian-Iranian military ties. Sen. Babara Boxer raised it vehemently demanding that a precondition to the deal must be that India forswears all military ties with Iran. At the Congress Condoleezza Rice's defense of the deal was rooted in the paradox of a visionary realism. She wanted the US Congress to buy into the Bush vision of a US-India relationship that would define the 21st century's global scene. Invoking realism she rejected the call for asking India to cap nuclear weapons production. That, she argued, was not possible without bringing China and Pakistan into the equation. She argued that the deal would put an end to India's "nuclear isolation" by bringing 16 of its 22 nuclear reactors' under IAEA safeguards. India, the secretary of state maintained, would never sign the NPT.
Significantly this American understanding of the nuclear question vs. a vs. India approximates with Islamabad's thinking about its own situation. Meanwhile for Condoleezza Rice it's a hard sell in the Congress. But with some amendments and IAEA-India safeguard arrangements in place, a sell is possible nevertheless.
