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A durable Indo-US partnership is highly desirable, but it can be built not on Indian strategic obsequiousness or joint opportunism in relation to a third country but on shared national interests.

Not many will question India’s efforts to build a stronger relationship with the world’s sole superpower. A durable Indo-US partnership is highly desirable, but it can be built not on Indian strategic obsequiousness or joint opportunism in relation to a third country but on shared national interests. Shared interests mean far more than shared democratic values.

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Indeed, shared democratic values represent little more than a shibboleth if one examines how they operate in actuality. Take the vaunted nuclear deal. While the deal faces rigorous scrutiny in the US, with New Delhi itself spending more than $ 2 million of Indian taxpayer money to lobby members of the US Congress, a nominated Indian PM neither needs the approval of Parliament nor is answerable to the public for a deal that strikes at the heart of India’s main asset — its nuclear deterrent.

It is a tribute to the vitality of US democracy that this deal will not pass muster until the White House has demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that it carries advantages for the US not attainable through other means. Such are the checks and balances in the US system that the deal will hang in the balance until its legislative scrutiny is completed. In contrast, it does not redound to the credit of Indian democracy that a deal-obsessed PM has ignored reservations expressed in Parliament by almost all non-Congress parties, including his government’s allies.

The PM went on to promise, “It goes without saying that we can move forward only on the basis of a broad national consensus.” Unable to forge consensus, the PM has still pushed ahead, micromanaging every aspect of the subsequent negotiations to the extent that he personally negotiated with a US undersecretary of state the final points before the Bush visit. Compare the deep-seated independent thinking in the US with the concealment of even hard facts from the Indian public so as to tightly manage the national debate. It has been five weeks since a sanitised version of the civil-military separation plan was presented to Parliament, but the vast majority of newspaper readership in India has yet to learn of some of the PM’s key decisions — to shut down the recently refurbished Cirus reactor (the source of 30 per cent of the country’s weapons-grade plutonium); dismember Apsara, Asia’s first research reactor, to relocate its fuel core; and increase to at least 31 the number of facilities coming under permanent international inspections.

Bush’s deal-related bill, which seeks to hang the Damocles’ sword of waiver termination over India’s head, has received little attention in India. Even before US Congress considers attaching its own riders, Bush has imposed eight conditions holding India to good conduct, eroding Indian strategic autonomy. A comparable US nuclear deal with China was brought into force in 1998 with no provision for recurrent review and no analogous condition, with its Article 8(2) saying even bilateral safeguards “are not required”. The deal was signed when China, still outside the NPT, was a de facto nuclear power like India today.

An informed debate is the very essence of democracy. What we have in the works is a blunder of no less an epic proportion than Nehru’s referral of the Kashmir issue to the UN, the giving back of Haji Pir to Pakistan in early 1966, and the return under the Simla Agreement of territorial gains and Pakistani prisoners without securing a Kashmir resolution. The earlier blunders occurred precisely for the same reason evident today — heavy official spin snuffing out an informed debate.

If this deal takes effect, India can forget about emerging as a full-fledged nuclear-weapons State or a strategic peer to China. At best, it will be a nuclear power whose quest for a credible minimal deterrent has been locked at the level of a retarded undersized deterrent, with functionality equivalent to a mentally challenged child.

The US aim is to deter the rise of a nuclear India that could threaten US global or regional interests. Capping India’s deterrent is the US key to containing Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions and permitting Beijing to halt its covert WMD transfers to Islamabad. Pakistan’s strong reaction to the deal springs from a foreboding that it will open the way for enlargement of the foothold the US gained in its nuclear programme following the proliferation scandal in which A.Q. Khan became the scapegoat.

India can expect more of what it has heard in recent days — Condoleezza Rice’s accent on Indo-Pak “nuclear balance”, and Richard Boucher’s cheeky demand that India “absolutely” define its deterrent in the sole context of Pakistan and enter into “mutual understandings” with that country “in both conventional and nuclear areas”. The Bush team’s stated gameplan is “to lock in this deal and then seek to achieve further results”. A key element is to enmesh India in discussions on further nuclear limits by pushing it to define its deterrent. If India baulked at engaging the US on this issue, Washington would unsheathe its new-found leverage arising from the deal.

A basic question has gone unanswered: do the PM’s pledges to the nation carry no sanctity? After failing to keep his word to proceed only on the basis of consensus, he has reneged on solemn pledges in Parliament. He vowed to “acquire the same benefits and advantages” as the other nuclear powers and “never accept discrimination”, yet he accepted international inspections of a type applicable only to non-nuclear States — permanent and legally irrevocable. Today he backs a US waiver bill that treats India not as a nuclear power or strategic partner but strategic pawn. While he promised that no one from “outside will tell us what is ‘civilian’ and what is ‘military’”, Cirus, Apsara and several other facilities are a testament to the US forcing his hand.

Against this background, with a threat looming that it might end up with an albatross round its neck, India’s hope may lie in US Congress rescuing it from a treacherous nuclear deal. If that happens, it will be the second time Congress has come to India’s rescue. By throwing out the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1999, the US Senate helped free India from Jaswant Singh’s CTBT-signature commitment in his secret talks with Strobe Talbott.

Ingeniously, the US now has used the very nuclear deal to drag India into the CTBT, with Section 1(d) of the bill seeking to turn the voluntary Indian moratorium into a legally binding obligation forever. In 1998, India was able to test and bear sanctions because the US had little leverage over it. The deal seeks to reverse that situation. It will create a wrenching Indian dependency on a US-led nuclear cartel and arm the US with long-term leverage, effectively foreclosing India’s testing option even if China or the US were to test again.

Fortunately, Bush’s credibility is so damaged at home that the deal faces tougher scrutiny in Congress. While the US-China nuclear accord took 13 years to take effect — with Beijing yet to buy a single US power reactor — the deal with India may not survive if Congress delays it beyond this year.

Congress, appreciative of the fetters the deal puts on India’s crown jewels but apprehensive about the collateral damage to the non-proliferation regime, is unlikely to pass the bill without attaching such grating riders that the result will be a pyrrhic victory for the dealmakers. It will be a situation where the deal has been passed, yet it cannot be implemented.