After five rounds of intense, often contentious, negotiations, India and the US have finally agreed on the contours of the 123 pact, which has been described as “a touchstone of a transformed bilateral relationship between India and the US”. Ever since the Bush administration declared in 2005 its ambition to achieve full civil nuclear energy cooperation with India, there has been such euphoria surrounding the deal that it was not often realised that whole process would be a long and tortuous one. Today, when both Right and Left are hard pressed to find faults with the deal and when even Anil Kakodkar has expressed his satisfaction with it, it is clear the Indian government has, for a change, conducted its diplomacy far more effectively than many had assumed would be the case. The US has committed itself to uninterrupted fuel supplies and will help India in developing strategic fuel reserve. India is allowed to reprocess spent fuel from its civilian reactors in a new facility, which will be subject to the IAEA safeguards. While there does not seem to be any explicit reference to India’s tests in the future, the US president remains bound by the Atomic Energy Act to ask for the return of nuclear fuel and technology if India does test.After the Hyde Act was passed last year, there was a lot of concern in India about some of its “extraneous and prescriptive” provisions. When confronted by the Opposition, the government had to specifically assert that the 123 Agreement would not mention India’s voluntary moratorium on testing; a moratorium on fissile material production would not be a condition for the deal; the issue of reprocessing will be dealt with seriously; and that the US government has assured that fuel supply will not be affected under the present laws.While the Bush administration needed a 123 agreement that was consistent with the Hyde Act, the Indian government wanted to ensure that the terms of the agreement do not constrain India’s long-term options and the differences seemed very hard to reconcile. But it is precisely this balance that the present pact seems to have got right. It would not be inaccurate to say that the US seems to have made far greater concessions than India as the sound and fury in the US makes clear. US critics are calling it everything from “a complete capitulation on US laws” to “a deal that makes it easier for India to resume nuclear testing”. They, however, are missing the big picture. The fact is that this deal is not and has never been an end in itself for either India or the US. The pact is about the need to evolve a strong strategic partnership between the world’s biggest and most powerful democracies after years of distrust.The fact that there is little criticism of the deal in India is a tribute to the deft handling of these negotiations by the government. International negotiations conducted by liberal democracies are a tricky business. As Robert Putnam, a professor of political science at Harvard University, puts it, international negotiations are a “two-level game”. At the national level, domestic groups pursue their interests by pressuring the government to adopt favourable policies while, at the international level, national governments seek to maximise their own ability to satisfy domestic pressures while minimising the adverse consequences of foreign developments. Both these levels have to be taken seriously by the governments if they want to achieve successful outcomes from negotiations. So the best strategy for the executive is to absorb the concerns of societal actors and build coalitions with them at the domestic level while, at the international level, it should try to implement these concerns without committing to anything that will have deleterious effects at home. This was exactly what the Indian government did with great skill. Much remains to be done as India starts negotiating an India-specific safeguards agreement with the IAEA and getting the NSG approval. The current malcontents in the US Congress will find it very difficult to object to the present pact if India is able to conduct these two negotiations successfully, because this will show that global consensus is behind the deal. The NSG approval is a tricky one, and India could face some diplomatic conundrums, especially if China decides to align with some European states such as Sweden, Ireland, Austria, which have taken a hardline position on granting non-proliferation concessions to India. It is to be hoped that India will be as far-sighted in its diplomatic strategy as it moves to the next stage in crafting a landmark deal.The writer teaches at King’s College London
