Old Order, New Deal

Then as now, the challenge is how to advance Indo-US relations by finding a sensible compromise to a difficult nuclear question. Much like the nuclear separation plan that has animated the nation now, India was exercised then over the American refusal to honour its obligations to supply enriched uranium fuel for the Tarapur reactors. When she came back to power in 1980, Indira Gandhi was determined to find a way out of the Tarapur mess. So was President Ronald Reagan.

The two of them hit it off very well when they met at Cancun, Mexico in 1981. Despite the raging Cold War at the global level and the renewed American supply of arms to Pakistan, Indira Gandhi recognised the importance of building better ties with Washington and Reagan was ready to oblige. Eric Gonsalves, then Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs, who was in charge of the US policy said, ‘‘Indira Gandhi understood that the global balance of power had changed in the early 1980s and was determined to improve ties with the US’’.

IN the early 1980s the final round of confrontation between America and Soviet Russia had begun. After a decade of Maoist excesses during the Cultural Revolution, China was back on the world stage, this time in the American camp. After years of telling New Delhi not to mend ties with Beijing, Moscow itself was reaching out to China. If India did not make a move towards the US it would be thoroughly isolated. Indira Gandhi had not visited Washington for more than a decade and was keen to restore political interaction at the highest level. A visit to Washington, which would take place in 1982, would be unsuccessful without resolving the Tarapur imbroglio.

For four years, Reagan’s predecessor, Jimmy Carter was reluctant to supply fuel for Tarapur unless India accepted onerous non-proliferation obligations. President Reagan, a pragmatist like President George W. Bush, told India that the US was ready to find ‘‘an orderly disengagement’’ from the Tarapur controversy and suggested that an alternative supplier for Tarapur could be found. This simple diplomatic compromise would end years of Indo-US dispute over Tarapur.

But the Department of Atomic Energy was adamant. Just as it argues now that it doesn’t need outside assistance for the nuclear programme, the DAE then insisted that it had an ‘‘indigenous’’ solution to the problem called mixed oxide fuel. As many rounds of difficult negotiations with the US unfolded, the DAE argued that if the US cannot honour its obligations on fuel supply, India should also get out of its commitment to keep the Tarapur reactor under international safeguards.

AS the talks teetered on the brink of failure, Indira Gandhi stepped in to mandate a pragmatic approach to the negotia- tions with the United States. She refused to buy the ‘‘self-reliance’’ argument of the DAE scientists. She recognised that if simple alternative fuel supplies could be arranged for Tarapur, it was unwise to experiment with unproven technologies to run the Tarapur plant. She also rejected advice from the pro-Soviet lobby that India could get fuel for Tarapur from Moscow. Indira Gandhi understood that replacing America with Soviet Russia would be a needless provocation at a time when the national interest lay in expanding ties with the former. She was quite happy to settle for France, part of the Western camp, as a source of fuel for Tarapur. By the time she reached the United States in July 1982, the Tarapur deal was all sealed and ready to be announced.

Looking beyond Tarapur, Indira Gandhi got President Reagan to initiate a new programme for bilateral collaboration in science and technology. Like Indira Gandhi, Manmohan Singh recognises that amidst a changing global balance of power, India needs a solid partnership with the United States. As in the early 1980s, the progress in Indo-US relations has been willy nilly tied to resolving bilateral nuclear differences in a practical way.

THE DAE, then and now, has voiced a range of fears on safeguards, breeder reactors and self-reliance. It has pitted minor technical concerns against the larger potential gains for India from the nuclear deal with the United States. Indira Gandhi’s handling of the Tarapur episode suggests technical concerns must ultimately yield place to larger political judgments on national interest.

Over-ruling the DAE’s scientist-bureaucracy, Indira Gandhi settled for a practical compromise on Tarapur and rejuvenated Indo-US relations. For all its arguments against the Tarapur deal with the US, the DAE was quite happy to live with it. The essence of the Tarapur compromise survived despite the fact that India moved later from France to China to Russia for fuel supplies over the last two decades. ‘‘We have to follow our own objectives and when these coincide with those of other powers not to take advantage of the situation would amount to acting against national interest,’’ Ambassador Gonsalves says.

The nuclear stakes today are much larger. They are about India ending its nuclear isolation and finding strategic parity with China. India is also much stronger than in the early 1980s. Bush is far more supportive of India’s aspirations than any other American president in the last sixty years.

The decisions that Manmohan Singh have to make are much easier than those made by Indira Gandhi, provided he lets his own judgment of national interest prevail. On the eve of President Bush’s visit, the nation expects nothing less from Manmohan Singh.