Proposal for pragmatic patience

It seeks to explain the delay in commercialising the fabled Indo-U.S. nuclear deal as it alludes to possible pitfalls

February 23, 2015 10:37 pm | Updated 10:40 pm IST

Last week saw the Modi government releasing a seven-page document explaining what it conceded to break the seven-year long jam in commercialising the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal. At the same time, the U.S. Ambassador to India, Richard Verma, spoke at New Delhi’s Vivekananda International Foundation underlining the need to bring all the “energy and persistence necessary to overcome the obstacles” to materialise our “shared objectives”. Ambassador Verma prefaced his comments by recalling the parting words of President Obama as he left New Delhi on 27th January: “… now the hard work will truly begin …” which seemed to give a curious twist to the just concluded ‘transformative’ summit between two iconic leaders of world’s largest and oldest democracies.

The formal heralding of this ‘transformative’ bonhomie goes back to the famous July 2005 joint statement of President George W Bush Jr. and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. They sought to evolve a civil nuclear agreement to ensure energy security for emerging India and to transform their relationship into a global strategic partnership. Both leaders planned to complete this process within one year i.e., by July 2006. Their nuclear deal instead was concluded only on October 10, 2008. What is perhaps most intriguing is that even a decade later, following their recent New Delhi summit this January, there appear no sign of nuclear technologies or material arriving from already identified US firms at already identified Indian project sites.

Dinshaw Mistry’s book is a brave attempt to explain this inordinate delay using a framework-of-analysis to examine the nitty-gritty of the Indo-U.S. nuclear negotiations spread over seven phases culminating in this ‘deal’ in 2008. But what makes it ambitious is that Mistry hopes this prism of linkage between diplomacy and domestic politics can provide lessons to have pragmatic expectations from other similar initiatives. This framework, for instance, is expected to explain why the U.S. will never strike a similar nuclear deal with Pakistan or Israel; why it is not able to allow reprocessing by South Korea or enrichment by Iran or Brazil. Simply put, U.S. domestic politics does not support such a possibility, not as yet.

Two-level game theory Classic works of experts like Robert Putnam, Peter Evans and Herold Jacobson explain how international agreements involve bargaining not just at the ‘international’ level i.e., amongst national governments but also at the ‘domestic’ level between national governments and their domestic constituencies. Using this pre-requisite of domestic support, Mistry alludes to the resultant ‘win-set’ that determines the pace of negotiations. He defines ‘win-set’ as a set of international arrangements that hold promise of winning domestic approval. These ‘win-sets’ determine the nature, as also the outcome of international negotiations. He concludes that international negotiations’ trajectories, therefore, can be best understood through these ‘win-sets’ of the two-level game theory that tell us how bureaucratic factors, legislative politics, and domestic mobilisation influence negotiating positions.

In the case of the Indo-U.S. nuclear negotiations, President Clinton was ‘deeply disturbed’ by India’s nuclear tests of 1998; yet, he was the one to initiate strategic dialogue that saw Strobe Talbott and Jaswant Singh having 14 rounds of talks at 10 destinations in seven countries. It was with the coming of George Bush Jr. as the President of the United States, followed by the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, that Indo-U.S. entente was to be formally launched. A series of talks during 2001-2003 between the then U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and India’s powerful Principal Secretary to Prime Minister and National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra opened the doors for high-technology cooperation. Domestic politics, therefore, was influencing their international behaviour.

As a result, the U.S. National Security Strategy of September 2002 was not just to describe India as ‘one of the great democratic powers of twenty-first century’ but the two sides set up a High Technology Cooperation Group in December 2002 that was hurriedly upgraded as Next Stop for Strategic Partnership (NSSP) from January 2004. Likewise, the joint statement of July 2005 between President Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was to not just recognise India as ‘a responsible state with advanced nuclear technologies’ but initiate serious negotiations for full-scale nuclear cooperation.

All this, in spite of well-known reluctance of Secretary State Colin Powell, the 2001-02 India-Pakistan border tensions leading to US travel advisories, strong scepticism amongst India’s nuclear scientists and most of all, the strong opposition from both BJP and left parties that clearly had narrowed their ‘win-sets’ during early 2000s.

Expanding & shrinking ‘win-sets’ These win-sets were often expanded by strong commitment and personal interventions by Bush and Manmohan Singh. President Bush was to face non-proliferation concerns of Congress, especially its sense of not being informed of the initial stages of July 2005 Joint Statement. While the Bush administration was to make strong strategic, economic and environmental case to allow some non-proliferation concessions for India, Manmohan Singh was to deploy expensive lobbies in the U.S. and take bold initiatives at home to overcome the combined opposition of left parties and the BJP. Domestic politics was to turn favourable with coming of Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State from 2005 and the high-growth rate in Indian economy during 2005-2008 that expanded their ‘win-sets’ thus accelerating their nuclear negotiations. But the election of a pro-non-proliferation Democratic President from 2008 and India’s policy paralysis during 2009-2014 were to slow down any progress once again.

As regards India, Mistry talks of four societal constituencies that supported the nuclear deal: business houses that hoped to gain from investment and technology; retired government officials, especially diplomats; non-governmental experts; and the pro-U.S. middle class plus segments of media. He also talks of four domestic constituencies that opposed the nuclear deal: senior scientists distrustful of the U.S.; some strategic affairs experts; segments of media and anti-nuclear activists.

In the end, book alludes to a few interesting intangibles. For instance, in spite of this frustrating pace, Mistry credits the Indo-US nuclear deal with having conferred on India the unique status of becoming the sixth country in the world to retain nuclear weapons and still participate in civilian nuclear commerce. The same matrix of tangibles-intangibles may also help explain India’s gains from the recent Modi-Obama summit last month. Though he provides no new information and his exhaustive details can occasionally become taxing, Mistry contributes a new perspective.

In any case, the author confesses that his is a heuristic framework that applies intelligent guesswork rather than present any new theoretical framework.

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