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“Deal will alter balance to India’s advantage”

Ashwani Kumar

CHENNAI: The India-U.S. civilian nuclear deal will alter the geo-strategic balance in Asia to the advantage of India, Union Minister of State for Industries Ashwani Kumar said on Wednesday.

The ‘123 Agreement’, in fact, is better than the one that China has had with the U.S., and, it is a triumph of sorts for India that Pakistan was denied a similar deal, Mr. Kumar said during an interaction with journalists at The Hindu.

Dismissing arguments that the deal would compromise the country’s independence or sovereign standing as ‘bunkum,’ the Minister said a country that had just pumped in a trillion $ into its economy was by no stretch a banana republic. If one examined the United Nation’s history, India had exceeded even the erstwhile Soviet Union in the number of times it voted against the U.S., he said.

While no international treaty was absolute, the ‘123 agreement’ was a “historic development” and would serve the imperative of India’s future energy security, “not just in terms of economic development but in the context of the overall strategic security of the country in a globalised world,” the Minister said. On the concerns over the implications of the Hyde Act, Mr. Kumar’s contention was that the Act was binding only on the U.S. establishment and India was privy only to the ‘123 agreement’ transacted much later.

Stating that the 123 deal was “frozen” and precluded any further fine-tuning, he said the next sequential steps involved operationalising the deal, involving the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the IAEA before ratification by the U.S. Congress in 2008. In this context, acceding to the Left’s demand of no further action on operationalising the agreement would effectively result in the deal not seeing the light of day.

The Minister claimed that all UPA allies and the Left parties had been taken into confidence at various stages of the deal and that the emphasis had always been on getting the widest possible support. As an example of this, he pointed out that it was without precedent for a Prime Minister to suo motu issue four statements in Parliament on the deal.

This was the first time that a set of circumstances had brought India and the U.S. to common positions over a number of international issues, whether it was terrorism, fundamentalism or economic reforms. Further, it was a major accomplishment that the deal was clinched at a time when more and more countries were “willing to let India in” even without being a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

On the Ramar Sethu controversy, Mr. Kumar said it was no longer a “live issue” as the UPA had already resolved it by submitting a fresh affidavit in the apex court.

The Minister, while giving an optimistic outlook on industrial growth and employment generation, outlined an exercise to make policy formulation “pointed and purposive.”

His Ministry has asked the Industries Department to ‘re-analyse’ as many as 16 studies undertaken by the Planning Commission to help calibrate policy interventions to suit industry needs on a district-wise basis.

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