NEW DELHI: President George Bush will face a far harder sell than India’s prime minister to win the support of US lawmakers for their historic nuclear deal, analysts said on Friday.
Indian analysts and media celebrated the breakthrough made by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, which is intended to lift a three-decade-old ban on civilian nuclear technology trade with India.
The pact still needs approval from the US Congress and the 45-member cartel of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).
Experts warn that Mr Bush may struggle to convince a suspicious Congress that he has not bowed to the Indian nuclear bomb lobby’s desire to reserve a significant number of reactors for making atomic weapons.
Henry Hyde, Republican chairman of the powerful House of Representatives international relations committee, said that the panel would scrutinise the deal with a fine-tooth comb.
It ‘would thoroughly examine’ the specific provisions of the agreement and potential consequences for US interests and those of the international community, he noted in a statement in Washington.
“The president may have made a fatal error in putting nuclear weapons at the heart of improved US-India relations. Lawmakers want the latter, but not at the price of the former,” said Joseph Cirincione, an American nuclear weapons expert.
“Worse, Indian officials have made clear that India alone will decide which future reactors will be kept in the military category and exempt from any safeguards,” he said.
The nuclear fuel supply from the United States is key for the civilian reactors that India would build in the future to produce energy to power its rapidly growing economy.
The agreement effectively ends India’s status as a nuclear pariah, even though it has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
New Delhi’s flexibility to be able to declare future breeder reactors as untouchable by international inspection belies Bush administration claims that the pact is a boon to non-proliferation, said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the independent US Arms Control Association.
“In the rush to meet an artificial summit deadline, the White House sold out core American non-proliferation values and positions.”
TOO MANY CONCESSIONS: Although many US lawmakers favour closer ties with India, non-proliferation advocates said details that had so far emerged suggest Mr Bush gave away too much in the nuclear agreement in an effort to ensure a successful summit with Manmohan Singh.
Democratic Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts said the accord ‘undermines the security not only of the United States, but of the rest of the world’.
“With one simple move the president has blown a hole in the nuclear rules that the entire world has been playing by and broken his own word to assure that we will not ship nuclear technology to India without the proper safeguards,” said Mr Markey, co-chair of the bipartisan task force on non-proliferation.
SCEPTICAL INDIANS: Some Indian experts were equally sceptical of approval from either the Congress or the NSG despite what officials presented as tough last-minute negotiations in a race to seal the pact for Mr Bush’s maiden visit to India.
“The real problems are going to come now. The real test is whether the deal can pass muster with the NSG and the US Congress,” said Bharat Karnad of a New Delhi-based think tank, Centre for Policy Research.
“Bush is a lame duck president. A lot of questions are going to be raised by US analysts, as soon as they start digesting the deal from the non-proliferation point of view.”
On the other hand, Prime Minister Singh battled tough opposition from his party’s important leftwing allies, who held massive protests against both the Bush visit and the deal.
The communists, who have 63 members in the 545-member parliament, say India has invited interference in its foreign policy through the deal with the ‘imperialist’ United States.
They also say the deal caps India’s nuclear weapons programme by putting most of its nuclear reactors under inspection.
Other analysts, however, said such opposition posed no real threat to Mr Singh’s Congress-led government. “They will make some noise, but once it (the deal) is explained to the parliament, they will come around,” C. Raja Mohan, a security analyst said.“After all it is such a good deal for India,” he said. —AFP/Reuters
