Nuclear or unclear?

There are two fundamental oddities in the entire debate. Whatever one’s views on the deal itself, the Indian state has left fundamental questions unanswered. While selling the deal to the Indian public, we were told that India would have the right to designate the lines of civil military separation. But this raises the obvious question: what are the negotiations with the US about? Why can’t we simply make this separation according to whatever considerations we deem appropriate and then simply inform the US? If any plan has to meet US approval, then we are not free to draw the line as we wish. If we are free to draw the line, then what’s the ardent negotiating about? It is not so much that the goal-post is moving; it is that it is not clear which direction we are supposed to kick.

One reply is that the Bush administration has to convince Congress about this deal. But that is simply a euphemism for saying we are not free to designate the military-civilian separation as we wish. It is a bit absurd to say that there is one agreement we negotiated with the Bush administration, but now we have to do something different to allow it to negotiate with Congress. Proponents of the deal are constantly fudging this point.

Further, what it India’s bottomline position on which reactors it is willing to put under civilian safeguards? This is ultimately a political decision that our political leadership needs to explain to the Indian public and our negotiators clearly. The DAE secretary may have been out of line in going public with his views, but he has been emboldened in this by the PMO not taking full charge of proceedings. The DAE is not in charge of India’s strategic interests. The prime minister will have to define India’s strategic bottomline and defend it.

If the makers of this deal are silent on key questions and don’t take the lead in answering them, of course every engineer and bureaucrat will rush in to fill the vacuum. It is often said that these are not questions on which the government can reveal its cards upfront, for that that might compromise our security and negotiating power. But there is a supreme irony in the fact that the government of the US and the US Congress will have semi-public hearings on Indias separation plans before the Indian government engages with the Indian public. The Kakodkar episode is a product of too much circumlocution in our debate over nuclear policy.

Of course it has to be said that the DAE is also a prisoner of its own false self-image. The one good thing the Indo-US nuclear deal has done it to throw some spotlight on our actual achievements in the nuclear field.

The lesson is that we should not become victims our own distorted self-image, secrecy and a discourse that believes in euphemism instead of straight talk. This will be a world in which it will be easier to hold our strategic priorities hostage to a politics of innuendo and half measures, where every opinion will seem as good as any other. Defenders and critics of the deal trade on secrecy. Realist critics draw on arguments about India’s uranium position and technological strengths that may or may not be true; defenders oversell the importance of nuclear energy, and fudge on exactly what the deal is about. Great-power politics requires not only clear vision, but leaders who take responsibility for implementing that vision, at each step.

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