NEW DELHI, April 21: The Bharatiya Janata Party on Friday slammed the government’s recent nuclear deal with the United States as untenable, saying it erodes India’s diplomatic independence and strategic space.
Former foreign minister Jaswant Singh issued a list of lacerating questions to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in which he brought out apparent contradictions between New Delhi’s claims and the American explanation of the deal agreed last month.
“What the government has offered to the US results in a significant erosion of our strategic space,” Mr Singh said. It abandons India’s autonomy of action, ‘placing 90% of our nuclear plants on surveillance by an intrusive IAEA regime, and all this for just about eight per cent of our energy requirements of around 2025’.
This agreement…is not in accord with India’s national interests, Mr Singh said. “That is the only litmus test: of national interest, against which we can assess issues of such central importance.”
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in a recent testimony to the US Senate’s Foreign relations Committee, said this ‘initiative with India does not seek to renegotiate or amend the NPT. India is not and is not going to become a member of the NPT (as) a nuclear weapons state.”
As India cannot be a NWS without subscribing to the NPT, and if it is not a NWS, then India can simply not have the ‘same benefits and advantages’ as the ‘US has’.
Mr Jaswant Singh said this must be fully clarified by the prime minister, and to the satisfaction of the country. “Otherwise a great deal of the prevailing confusion will spread further.”
Repeatedly it is asserted by senators as also by Secretary Rice ‘that the NPT is the cornerstone…… that the Nuclear Suppliers Group has … certain standards of behavior. India is agreeing to adhere to those unilaterally. Through the Missile Control Technology Regime, (sic) which India is agreeing to adhere to unilaterally…And so I have – I think we have to think about the energy and nonproliferation as two halves of this same walnut.”
Against these assertions ‘our government has to explain, firstly, whether we have agreed to unilaterally adhere to the NSG criteria and obligations’, Mr Singh asked.
