The house they all built

There is no doubt that Jaswant Singh and Brajesh Mishra would have been more than happy to sign the nuclear deal with the US that was negotiated by Manmohan Singh. History, however, does not stop when individuals, even exceptional ones like Jaswant Singh and Brajesh Mishra, move out of government. It marches on, even if it means disappointment for some.

The July 18, 2005 deal between India and the United States is a logical conclusion of the nuclear negotiations conducted by Jaswant Singh and Brajesh Mishra during 1998-2004.

The BJP8217;s latest line of attack is not merely about the natural opportunism of a party in opposition. Nor is it about picking nuclear nits. The NDA8217;s negotiating record will show that Jaswant Singh was proposing that India sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. And Brajesh Mishra was willing to put a large number of nuclear reactors under safeguards in return for only uranium supplies from the US. Today both of them are making outlandish charges against the government, which has got a far better deal than Jaswant Singh or Brajesh Mishra did.

What we see today is an egregious attempt by the BJP to project the Congress as being weak on national security. To suggest that Narasimha Rao pulled back from ordering nuclear tests in 1995 because of a mole in his office. And to imply that anything that the Congress Party negotiates with other nations, including the nuclear deal with the US, must be suspect.

India8217;s nuclear history, however, is a little more complicated than it appears to be in the BJP script.

India8217;s nuclear programme was founded by the nation8217;s first PM, Jawaharlal Nehru. India8217;s first nuclear test was conducted by Indira Gandhi in 1974.

The BJP8217;s record is mixed. As the first evidence on Pakistan8217;s nuclear weapons came through in the late 1970s, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then external affairs minister, was not among those in the Janata government demanding a credible response. For all the tall nuclear talk of the Jan Sangh, Vajpayee was seen by many to be soft on nuclear issues in the late 1970s. He, along with the then prime minister, Morarji Desai, must also take some of the blame for slowing down India8217;s nuclear weapons programme in the late 1970s.

Vajpayee also accepted the establishment of a joint safeguards panel with the US, which would have severely undercut India8217;s nuclear weapons programme. That decision was only undercut by bureaucratic and political backlash.

The real credit for ending India8217;s political vacillation on nuclear weapons goes to Rajiv Gandhi, who ordered the Department of Atomic Energy to build nuclear weapons in early 1989. If Rajiv made India a nuclear weapons power, Rao8217;s challenge was to preserve India8217;s nuclear deterrent from hostile international pressures which dramatically escalated after the Cold War.

The early 1990s were among independent India8217;s weakest moments. Rao deserves full credit for fobbing off relentless American pressures on the nuclear and Kashmir issues and readying the nation for nuclear tests. Pulling back from the planned December 1995 tests by no means takes away from Rao8217;s extraordinary contribution for the consolidation of India8217;s nuclear programme. That Vajpayee could test within seven weeks of coming to power in 1998 was in itself a testimony to what Rao had achieved.

Vajpayee, Jaswant Singh and Brajesh Mishra successfully managed the consequences of the nuclear tests and opened the door for a long overdue nuclear reconciliation with the international community. It is a profound tragedy that the three men are today at the forefront of wrecking what they sought to achieve for the nation, just because it is someone else who has clinched the final deal.

A little bit of effort by the NDA in 1998 and the UPA in recent years could have helped spread the substantive credit that India has accumulated in its defiance of the world order in May 1998 and its successful negotiation of an exceptional nuclear status for itself in July 2005.

The BJP8217;s wanton destruction of the national consensus on foreign policy could have even bigger consequences for India8217;s relations with China and Pakistan. Vajpayee boldly altered the framework of negotiations on two of India8217;s most sensitive issues 8212; the boundary dispute with China and the Kashmir question with Pakistan. Jaswant Singh and Brajesh Mishra discarded old impractical propositions on both these issues.

On the China boundary, Vajpayee was prepared to give up the nation8217;s claims on Aksai Chin in the negotiations with China and look beyond the Shimla Agreement in India8217;s engagement with Pakistan.

Manmohan Singh has stayed the course set by Vajpayee on these two important issues. If the BJP is now prepared to spit on a nuclear deal with the US, which it had worked tirelessly for, it would have no compunctions in attacking the government for compromising on national security vis-a-vis China and Pakistan. The Left today is eager to embarrass its own government on the nuclear deal with the US, one of the most open and transparent negotiations India has ever conducted.

For all its complexity the Indo-US nuclear deal is a bargain with negotiating chips the two sides have accumulated over the years. The talks with China and Pakistan are about compromises on territory and a redrawing of the national map.

The Left should know what it is asking for when it joins the BJP in whipping up parliamentary emotions on the nuclear deal with the US. Similar rhetoric on national security would be employed with greater force by the BJP to destroy the normalisation of relations with China and the difficult peace process with Pakistan.