Indians have mixed feelings about ties: Bush visit
By Matthew Rosenberg
NEW DELHI: With India and the United States struggling to work out a nuclear pact before US President George Bush’s arrival, India’s prime minister pledged on Monday not to compromise the country’s security to seal the deal.
During his visit beginning on Wednesday, Mr Bush is likely to find excitement over Indian-US ties mixed with ambivalence about sidling up to a nation many see as the world’s bully.
The landmark nuclear pact has, for many here, come to illustrate what India stands to gain from America _ and what it has to lose.
Talks on the nuclear deal ‘are currently at a delicate stage’, held up by disagreements over which of India’s nuclear facilities are to be designated as civilian and which are to be considered military, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told lawmakers.
Separating India’s tightly entwined civilian and military nuclear programs is key to the deal because the United States has only agreed to recognise India as having a civilian nuclear program _ not as a legitimate nuclear weapons state.
“We have judged every proposal” from the US, Mr Singh said. “The decision of what facilities may be identified as civilian will be made by India alone and not by anyone else.”
The pact would allow the United States to provide nuclear technology and fuel desperately needed by India to fuel its booming but energy-starved economy. In return, India has pledged to separate its programs and open the civilian ones to international inspection.
The deal has faced opposition from some members of US Congress, which must approve the pact. They argue it could undermine the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT0. India has refused to sign the treaty and defied the world by openly conducting nuclear weapons tests in 1998.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the president’s approach with the pact will not only address energy needs for India, but will also address important proliferation issues.
“We’ve made some progress. The negotiations are ongoing,” he said. “Whether it gets done during the trip or not, we will see. But we believe it will get done.”
Indian opponents worry the United States is pushing to classify far too many of India’s facilities as civilian, and thus subject to international safeguards. Some see it as an attempt to undermine the country’s nuclear weapons program.
Among Indians, there is also ‘a sense of America being arrogant in its dealings surrounding the nuclear pact’, said Nandan Unnikrishnan of New Delhi’s Observer Research Foundation.
“India does not like to be perceived as someone who is doing something according to an external diktat,” he said. “And the US has been a little ham-handed in terms of trying to get India to see the world its way.”
He cited US Ambassador David C. Mulford’s remark last month that if India did not support referring Iran to the U.N. Security Council over its nuclear program, the India-US nuclear pact could ‘die’ in Congress.
Parties crucial to the survival of Mr Singh’s government seethed at the comment, claiming it as evidence that New Delhi was selling out to Washington for the sake of the nuclear deal.
The deal is also seen by some as Washington’s attempt to counter China’s growing economic and political clout _ something New Delhi wants no part of.
India and China ‘will cooperate, they will compete, they will try to balance each other’, said analyst C. Raja Mohan. “But we certainly don’t want to be seen as acting as a task horse for the Americans.”—AP
