Japan’s leading foreign affairs journal interviews Brahma Chellaney

Posted on November 10, 2007 by Chellaney

Japan-India Links Critical for Asia-Pacific Peace and Stability

Brahma Chellaney and Horimoto Takenori

A top Indian strategic thinker sees the Japan-India relationship as one of the key factors that will determine Asia’s future dynamics, even as China continues its rise to international prominence. With an eye on how the United States, Russia, and other countries fit into the picture, we asked him about India’s view on Japan and Asia in terms of its thinking on establishing long-term mechanisms for strategic cooperation.

Horimoto Takenori: First of all, could you tell us what kind of policies India is developing in the areas of foreign affairs and security, particularly in regard to the situation in the region at this time?

Brahma Chellaney: The situation around India at the moment is posing increasing challenges to its security. The area to the west, between India and Israel, is volatile and constitutes a contiguous arc of extremism and fundamentalism. Then to India’s east we have Bangladesh and Myanmar, both undergoing domestic tumult, and to the north the Central Asian states like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are internally troubled. Also to the north we have Tibet, where resistance to Chinese rule has continued and where China is actually doing a lot of development that is strategic in orientation and therefore affects India’s security. So in general, India’s neighborhood has become far more difficult and threatening to Indian security than in the past.

In response, India has to have, first of all, a clear strategy to deal with this deteriorating external environment. Second, it needs to have more vigorous engagement with various actors in its neighborhood. India’s foreign policy has to be dynamic and focused on engagement not just with the governments in power in those countries but also with various important elements of civil society in those states, so that India can work with as many key actors as possible. And the third element in this approach is that India has to exercise its “soft power.” These three points are crucial to developing a long-term response.

Horimoto: How would you evaluate Indian foreign policy so far in terms of those three points?

Chellaney: Indian foreign policy has been good on points two and three — engagement with civil society in the neighborhood and projecting soft power. India is currently providing $700 million to Afghanistan for reconstruction, and it provides a lot of other development aid to countries like Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and now even Myanmar. But foreign policy in terms of the first point I mentioned—devising a long-term strategy—is wanting. India still tends to be quite reactive and ad hoc in its responses.

Equal Footing with the United States

Horimoto: I see. Next, I’d like to ask you about the issue of nuclear power, which ties in with the large strides India is taking toward closer relations with the United States. We see that the efforts to finalize and put into force the U.S.-India deal on civil nuclear cooperation have gotten bogged down.

Chellaney: No strategic issue has proven more divisive in India in modern times than this nuclear deal with the United States. The problem is that the two countries entered into this agreement with different expectations of what it will deliver. India hopes the deal will bring about the removal of all sanctions it faces on the import of advanced technologies. Since 1974, when India conducted its first nuclear test, the United States has strictly regulated the flow of advanced technology to India through export controls. The irony is that communist China now has greater access to U.S. high technology than democratic India. So India’s aim is the removal of not only civil nuclear sanctions but also other technology sanctions, including export controls on space technology and on high technology in general. India would like the deal to open the way to such export controls being gradually relaxed and eventually lifted altogether.

America’s aim, on the other hand, is to rope in India as its new strategy ally in Asia. After having penalized New Delhi for its 1974 nuclear test through stringent technology controls, Washington is now ready to promote India’s “normalization” as a nuclear power through this deal, but at a price: India is to bind its interests to America’s. The future of the Indo-U.S. relationship hinges on the resolution of a key issue: will India be a Japan to the U.S. (in other words, an ally), or will it be a strategic partner? An ally has to follow the alliance leader, while in a partnership there is at least the semblance of equality. India would prefer to stay a strategic partner of the U.S. and not get into a Japan-style security dependency on Washington.

Horimoto: Specifically, there are three points on which the nuclear deal has proven controversial in India: no nuclear testing, the issue of reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, and permanent international inspections (safeguards). Regarding the first of these, you said in a recent article in the American press, in the Wall Street Journal, that this amounts to an attempt to bring India into the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) via the back door.

Chellaney: Well, the United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in December 2006, already has an explicit ban on India testing, and says that if India were to conduct a nuclear test, then all cooperation would cease. But to incorporate that into the bilateral agreement would have been from India’s standpoint, almost a de jure acceptance of the CTBT. In the agreed text of the bilateral agreement, while there is no explicit reference to nuclear testing, a test prohibition against India has been unequivocally built into its provisions through the incorporation of the U.S. right to demand the return of all supplied materials and items if Washington held New Delhi to be in violation of the accord’s terms.

Of India’s 22 commercial nuclear power reactors, 14 are going to be made subject to permanent international inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in return for which they are supposed to get permanent fuel supply from overseas. In reality, however, there is no enforceable link between perpetual international inspections and perpetual fuel supply, because the U.S. has an open-ended right in the bilateral agreement to suspend supplies forthwith while issuing a one-year termination notice by citing any reason it wishes.

The next issue is reprocessing. As a country poor in uranium but rich in thorium deposits, India is working to eventually establish a thorium-based fuel cycle as the mainstay of its nuclear power policy, and the second and third phases of its development program depend on reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. This reprocessing will take place under IAEA safeguards, so India is not seeking exemption from international monitoring, but it does want the operational right upfront to carry out reprocessing. In part, India does not want to repeat its past mistake. In the 1960s, when America built India’s first nuclear power plant at Tarapur under the peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement of 1963, America said that India can reprocess after joint determination with America that the reprocessing facility is adequately safeguarded, but to date no such joint determination has been carried out. Yet, in the latest agreement, the U.S. has granted India only a theoretical to reprocess, with the actual right to be negotiated later.

The nuclear deal the U.S. signed with China is so liberal that the agreement states in one of its provisions that “bilateral safeguards are not required.” To placate Congress over the absence of IAEA or U.S. inspections, the Clinton administration worked out a loose arrangement with Beijing for nominal on-site safeguards. In India’s case, the U.S. is to have its own end-use inspections, in addition to IAEA inspections.

Horimoto: So why did the Indian government accept such terms?

Chellaney: It shows how naive Indian negotiators have been. This deal has been a real foreign policy success for the Bush administration’s second term, but in India it has become the cause of a lot of misgivings, triggering a political crisis.

Horimoto: Under the agreement, India’s uranium imports will increase. Some experts are saying that if India uses that imported uranium for electric power stations, this would enable it to divert its own uranium resources to nuclear weapons.

Chellaney: India will still have eight existing nuclear power plants that will not be subject to IAEA inspections, plus new ones that are still under construction. India’s natural uranium will have to be used for these other reactors, not for nuclear weapons. For weapons, furthermore, India uses plutonium, not uranium. There are only two facilities in India for plutonium production, the Dhruva reactor and the CIRUS reactor, and CIRUS is going to be closed down by 2010 as part of this U.S.-India accord. So, in three years’ time India will lose one-third of its plutonium production capability, and therefore one-third of its ability to make more nuclear weapons.

Horimoto: Japan is being asked by both the United States and India to accept and accommodate this 123 Agreement, but so far it has avoided giving a definite answer. This is basically because, although the Japanese government wants to be accommodating for the sake of good relations with both countries, as the only nation to have suffered atomic attack it must also heed the predominantly anti-nuclear sentiment of the Japanese people.

Chellaney: This nuclear deal still has several stages to cross. After the bilateral agreement between India and the United States, New Delhi has to negotiate a safeguards agreement with the IAEA, after which will come the deliberations by the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG) for granting India an exemption from its export controls. If the deal does get that far, Japan will have to make up its mind because it won’t be able to still sit on the fence and hedge its bets.

Horimoto: At the moment the Scandinavian countries, especially Sweden, are expressing concerns about the plan.

Chellaney: Also resisting it are Ireland, Italy . . .

Horimoto: And China also. But what do you think China’s true attitude toward this Indian nuclear deal is?

Chellaney: I think China will come on board, eventually. The United States has been keeping China in the loop on this nuclear deal with India, and U.S. Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns has said that in the final decision China will come on board. China has no reason to oppose an agreement that puts some fetters on India’s nuclear weapons program. China, however, may prefer that instead of an India-specific exemption, the NSG makes a criteria-based exemption that Beijing can use to work out similar cooperation with Pakistan.

Balancing vis-à-vis China

Horimoto: Former Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times James Mann has published a new book titled The China Fantasy (Viking, 2007), in which he says that China’s economic development will not necessarily bring democratization, that China might retain its communist regime for long, and that this could become a major problem for the United States.

Chellaney: China is a real wild card in Asia. I think it’s very important to ensure that China rises in a way that is not destabilizing for Asia or the wider world. If China becomes more high-handed or assertive, then obviously this would create disequilibrium throughout the world. China is politically autocratic but economically open, and even though that is a contradiction, China has been able to manage the contradiction rather well. If it continues to do that, then it will reap the benefits from both ends, which means that by the middle of this century, China will emerge as a truly great power. Under the Hu Jintao government, we see that growing economic prosperity has not created more political openness. On the contrary, the state has become more sophisticated in repressing dissent, as seen from the new curbs on media and scholars, Internet censorship, and so on. So I am concerned about what kind of China we will see 25 years from now. If it continues on the present path, then I think in Asia we will have a power imbalance, and globally we will have an international system in which China will try to change the rules to its advantage, creating a lot of fluidity.

Horimoto: How should India try to cope with that situation?

Chellaney: India needs to bear in mind that China is using classical balance-of-power strategies against it, and India, too, has to take strategic steps to balance China’s rise so that its power does not become high-handed. The only way that balance can be maintained is if India cooperates in building a constellation of democracies in the Asia-Pacific region—a group that would include countries like Japan, India, Australia, the United States, Russia . . .

Horimoto: Russia also?

Chellaney: I think so, because if you leave out Russia you will not get a true counterbalance to China. The most effective approach on China would be a three-way partnership among India, Russia and Japan, although for that there needs to be an improvement in the Japan-Russia relationship. Russia has the same kinds of concerns about China that India and Japan have. And if you look at it geographically, with Japan to the east, Russia to the north, and India in the south, a Japan-Russia-India three-way partnership would effectively contain China from all sides. So, in addition to the quadrilateral partnership involving Australia, Japan, the United States, and India, we need to work on this very innovative and strategic triangle involving Russia, Japan and India. And we need to strengthen the Japan-India bilateral relationship as an important pillar of power equilibrium in Asia. Japan-India strategic collaboration is pivotal to the future makeup of Asia.

Horimoto: A kind of composite approach. But doesn’t that contradict what you said in your book Asian Juggernaut (HarperCollins, 2006), where you stressed the need mainly for cooperation between Japan, India, and China? And also, how do you think China will react to such a multipronged approach?

Chellaney: As my book points out, China is already developing various levers to contain India and Japan. India hasn’t done anything in relation to China, but China is already building the Irrawaddy Corridor down to the Bay of Bengal through Myanmar; they’re building the Trans-Karakoram Corridor down to Gwadar in Pakistan; they’re building an east-west corridor in Tibet, right along India’s northern borders; and then they’re also trying to enter the Indian Ocean region. So, basically, they’re trying to squeeze India from all sides.

To deal with China’s rise, we also need a system of institutionalized cooperation among Japan, India, and China. On issues of trade, international finance, monetary policy, and so on, Japan, China, and India are virtually on the same side and can cooperate productively. Without good relations between Japan and China and also between India and China, we will not be able to understand what China is up to.

India’s Focus on the Seas

Horimoto: You mentioned the Indian Ocean. Sea-lane security is becoming an important issue in Asia, not only for defense but for economic development as well.

Chellaney: In Asia today, the issues of energy and security are inseparable. In fact, Asia faces the specter of a twenty-first-century, energy-focused version of the Great Game, the nineteenth-century rivalry between the British Indian Empire and the Russian Empire for supremacy in Central Asia. Mercantilist efforts to assert control over oil and natural gas supplies and transport routes certainly risk fueling tension and discord. That is why sea-lane security has become more important than ever.

With Japan, China, and India dependent on energy imports by sea, multinational cooperation on the security of sea-lanes has become essential to avert strategic friction in Asia. Asia needs to build a shared interest in viable energy policies, secure sea-lanes, and a stable energy environment. However, such a shared interest can be developed only on the basis of expanded political and security cooperation, as well as increased transparency in military expenditures.

Furthermore, to forestall the passions aroused by maritime boundary disputes, Asia needs an agreed code of conduct on naval and energy exploration activities. For example, the answer to the long-running battle between Japan and China over disputed oil and gas fields in the East China Sea cannot be unilateral drilling or production by either side.

Horimoto: India has been strengthening its navy and expanding the navy’s field of activity beyond the Indian Ocean to the Strait of Malacca, and recently even to the Pacific, through its joint naval exercises with the United States, Japan, and Russia.

Chellaney: It should not be forgotten that India is a peninsular country with a long coastline and a vast exclusive economic zone (EEZ) that measures more than 2 million square kilometers. The fact that 95 percent of India’s external trade moves by sea makes India especially vulnerable to maritime contingencies. Particularly important is the Persian Gulf region, the source of 85 percent of India’s oil and gas imports.

Strategically, this makes the security of sea-lanes vital to India’s economic and security interests, and India’s published maritime doctrine emphasizes the centrality of the Indian Ocean to national security. The Indian Navy, furthermore, has to protect not only sea-lanes but also the country’s large energy infrastructure of onshore and offshore oil and gas wells, liquefied natural gas terminals, refineries, pipeline grids, and oil exploration work within its EEZ. India neglected to modernize its navy for more than 15 years, but in the last few years it has been sharply increasing its naval spending.

The greater Indian emphasis on the seas also springs from China’s incremental efforts to create a network of forward listening posts, naval access agreements, and Chinese-built harbors along the Indian Ocean rim—a network stretching from Pakistan and Sri Lanka to Bangladesh and Myanmar. The Chinese interest in the Indian Ocean rim now extends even as far as the Seychelles.

As I mentioned before, Beijing has been fashioning two vertical strategic corridors, one to the west and another to east of India. The former is the Trans-Karakoram Corridor stretching from western China all the way down to Gwadar at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz, through which 40 percent of the world’s oil passes. The newly opened, Chinese-built deepwater port at Gwadar represents China’s first strategic foothold in the Arabian Sea.

The latter is the Irrawaddy Corridor from Yunnan province to the Bay of Bengal, which involves road, river, and rail links through Myanmar, including to the Chinese-built harbors at Kyaukypu and Thilawa. Then there is China’s agreement with Sri Lanka to build a port in the Hambantota District, China’s provision of aid to the Bangladeshi port of Chittagong, and its interest in a strategic anchor in the Maldives. All this underscores an emerging Chinese challenge to India’s traditional dominance in the Indian Ocean region.

One component of China’s plan is to make the Gwadar port-cum-naval base a major hub for transporting Persian Gulf and African oil by pipeline to the Chinese heartland via the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. This plan to pipe the oil in would not only cut freight costs and supply time but also lower China’s reliance on U.S.-policed shipping lanes through the Malacca and Taiwan Straits.

Besides augmenting its naval capabilities, India is building up its strategic partnerships—in the form of trade accords, military exercises, energy cooperation, and strategic dialogue—with key littoral states in the Indian Ocean region as well as with outside players like the United States, Japan, and Australia. Such cooperation is principally aimed at safeguarding the various “gates” to the Indian Ocean, and so its primary focus is on states adjacent to such chokepoints as the Strait of Hormuz (Iran), the Strait of Malacca (Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia), the Bab el Mandeb (Djibouti and Eritrea), the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa) and the Mozambique Channel (Mozambique). India’s defense ties with Iran, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Singapore, and Thailand—all countries lying along those key sea lanes—reflect India’s new emphasis on strengthening its position in the Indian Ocean.

India’s efforts to play an expanded naval role in its extended neighborhood have been illustrated in recent years by two events. The first was India’s provision of naval escorts to commercial ships passing through the vulnerable, piracy-wracked Strait of Malacca in 2003. The second was the dispatch of the Indian Navy for relief efforts and aid diplomacy after the tsunami that struck southern Asia on 26 December 2004. This was the largest humanitarian relief operation the Indian Navy has ever conducted outside India’s territorial waters.

For India, the maritime arc stretching from the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Malacca to the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan constitutes the “new Silk Road.” Building maritime security in this arc demands cooperation and strategic partnership among countries sharing common interests and values. One of several such initiatives currently being developed is the India-Japan-U.S.-Australia quadrilateral initiative. It is significant that Tokyo pushed for India’s inclusion into this group, turning the existing Japan-U.S.-Australia trilateral security arrangements into a quadrilateral tie-up. Even before becoming Japan’s prime minister, Abe Shinzo wrote in his book Utsukushii kuni e [Towards a Beautiful Country] (Bungei Shunju, 2006)* that it was of “crucial importance to Japan’s national interest that it further strengthen ties with India, and that it would not be a surprise if in another 10 years Japan-India relations overtook Japan-U.S. and Japan-China relations.”

Next Three Years Crucial for Japan-India Relations

Horimoto: To what extent can Japan and India cooperate in the area of sea-lane security?

Chellaney: Given the fact that, of all the major powers in the world, India and Japan are the most vulnerable to any disruption of oil supplies from the Persian Gulf region, they need to build close strategic cooperation centered on maritime security. India and Japan are already developing joint exercises between the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force and the Indian Navy, as well as military exchanges and high-level defense dialogue, and it is no surprise that they are exploring various kinds of cooperation in this area. India-Japan strategic cooperation can only contribute to strategic stability in Asia.

At the same time, India and Japan have to build adequate military capabilities to help maintain a stable power equilibrium in Asia. This is why, among other things, India has purchased the 40,000-ton Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov. If India does not guard the various gates to the Indian Ocean by strengthening both its own naval power and its strategic partnerships with key players like Japan, it could find itself facing the Chinese navy in its backyard before long.

Such cooperation doesn’t mean that India and Japan intend to jointly counter China. A stable, mutually beneficial relationship with China remains critical to the national interests of both our countries. But China’s growing power puts Delhi and Tokyo at a disadvantage when they deal with Beijing strictly at the bilateral level. So, broader security arrangements or initiatives are attractive for India and Japan to ensure that the rising Chinese power will not slide into arrogance.

Horimoto: The United States is also keen to remain an active player in Asia.

Chellaney: Trying to exclude the United States would only raise other problems, so we need to have initiatives that involve it as well. But we must remember that the United States is pursuing its own interests in Asia, which are to retain its geopolitical preeminence in the Asia-Pacific region, to ensure that no Asian power overtly challenges its interests in the region, and to maintain a balance of power in light of the fact that Asia is becoming increasingly important to the American economy and security. But I think that the U.S. role in Asia is going to decline over the next 50 years because of the rise of China and India and also because of the political rise of Japan, which in my view is the most under-noticed development in the world.

Horimoto: Finally, I’d like to ask you about Japan-India relations. Their economic relationship will no doubt continue to expand, but what kind of developments might they aim for in their political relations?

Chellaney: India and Japan are Asia’s largest and most-developed democracies, and the ties between them constitute the most important relationship in Asia today because it will shape the future strategic landscape of the region. Normally, the best diplomatic relationships are built on the bedrock of security ties. Japan and India have recently been stepping up their military exchanges and visits, and I don’t think there’s been any time since after World War II when the Japanese prime minister and foreign minister have publicly placed India on as high a priority as we see now. I think the next three years are going to be an important opportunity for the two countries to lay the foundation for long-term strategic cooperation. In an Asia characterized by a qualitative reordering of power, the direction of the India-Japan relationship is set towards closer engagement.

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*Forthcoming in October in English under the title Towards a Beautiful Country: My Vision for Japan (Vision, 2007)

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プロフィール [bio]

Brahma Chellaney

Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, a private think tank based in New Delhi. A specialist in international security and arms control issues, Chellaney has been an adviser to the Indian government for many years, and is currently a member of the Policy Advisory Group headed by the Indian foreign minister. He is active as a columnist for leading Indian and overseas newspapers and as a television commentator. His recent works include Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan (HarperCollins, 2006).

Horimoto Takenori

Professor, Shobi University. A graduate of the Chuo University faculty of law, Horimoto received his master’s degree in political science from the University of Delhi. He took up his current position after serving as director general of the Research and Legislative Reference Bureau, National Diet Library. A specialist in international relations in South Asia and U.S. policy on Asia, he is the author of Indo gendai seijishi [A Political History of Modern India], Tosui Shobo, 1997, and Indo: Gurobaruka suru kyozo [India: The Elephant Globalizes], Iwanami Shoten, 2007, among other works. He also translated Stephen P. Cohen’s India: Emerging Power (Brookings Institution Press, 2001) for its Japanese-language publication as Amerika wa naze Indo ni chumoku suru no ka? [Why the United States is Watching India], Akashi Shoten, 2003.

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Translated by Dean Robson from “Indo kara mita Nihon, Ajia,” originally published in the Japanese edition of Gaiko Forum September 2007 issue on the theme “ASEAN Turns Forty.” Some parts have been updated with the interviewee’s consent.

Why is the U.S. so anxious to save the nuclear deal with India?

Posted on November 3, 2007 by Chellaney

An Air of Desperation

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, November 3, 2007

In its frantic efforts to salvage the nuclear deal, the United States is sending out a politically incorrect message — that the deal matters more to it than the very survival of the Manmohan Singh government. The deal has not only divided India like no other strategic issue since independence, but also plunged the world’s largest democracy into a political crisis, with the threat of a mid-term election looming large. Yet the unrelenting U.S. pressure on India to proceed with the deal has only intensified.

An obvious question begging an answer is: What are the compelling interests America aims to advance through this deal that are prompting it to give high priority to getting this arrangement through, even if it results in Singh’s political downfall? Is the venerable Singh so dispensable for the U.S.?

The Congress Party, holding only 27.5 per cent of the Lok Sabha seats, needs allies to survive in power or to return to office in a new election. With not a single party today willing to help shore up the deal, the Congress does not wish to stake its future on that dicey, divisive issue.

Yet, from the time Sonia Gandhi and the prime minister last month pulled back from the political-precipice edge, the U.S. has piled up pressure on New Delhi, leaving no stone unturned to rescue the deal. Remember how President George W. Bush anxiously sought to reach the PM by telephone while the latter was travelling in Africa? This week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee to convey the same message — in the words of her spokesperson, “to urge the Indian government to move forward with this deal.”

To personally lobby Indian leaders, the White House sent Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in recent days. And as if India were a Pakistan, where Washington brokered a Pervez Musharraf-Benazir Bhutto deal to help keep its pet dictator in power, the U.S. is trying to cut a deal between the Congress Party and Bharatiya Janata Party, so as to save another deal dear to it.

By pulling out all the stops, the signs of desperation have become unmistakeable. In fact, since that famous Bush call to Singh, no day has passed without some senior U.S. official, diplomat or congressman telling India why it should seize the deal as a golden opportunity not to be missed. The U.S. ambassador to India, for his part, has seemingly returned to his old marketing job, hawking the deal door-to-door — from South Block offices to the homes of important politicians in town.

It is as if a vibrant India is really a dumb India that doesn’t know what is in its own interest and needs counsel from the other party in the deal. Besides prolonging India’s political crisis and keeping alive the spectre of a snap poll, such meddling, along with its unremitting advice, has become increasingly clamorous.

Paulson, for example, counselled his host nation “to implement the agreement as soon as possible,” acknowledging that the U.S. has been “encouraging it to go forward as quickly as possible.” Kissinger weighed in with his ominous hints about the effect of the deal’s collapse on India’s credibility. The smooth-talking Nicholas Burns, now making almost a daily statement on the deal, declared from Washington: “We, and many other governments, believe that India should grab this opportunity and enter a new era of relations with the U.S.”

Make no mistake: It is the U.S. which sees the deal as an irresistible opportunity, which, if taken advantage of, would bring lasting strategic benefits. There is thus dismay that Indian politics has stalled what the Bush administration had been savouring as a major foreign-policy accomplishment.

The U.S. got the deal largely on its terms. In addition to the 41 pages of India-specific conditions in the Hyde Act (passed with bipartisan support after closed-door briefings), the U.S. has concluded a so-called 123 agreement without permitting India upfront to reprocess, or providing for a dispute mechanism (like the arbitral tribunal found in the 123 accord with Tokyo), or explicitly linking perpetual international inspections to perpetual fuel supply. Of all the 123 agreements the U.S. currently has with partner-states, the one with India stands out for conferring enforceable rights only on the supplier-state.

That is why, as the state department reiterated this week, the U.S. will not accept renegotiation of the deal. Washington indeed wants New Delhi to speedily conclude a safeguards pact with the International Atomic Energy Agency because from then on, India would become a mere spectator, watching what additional conditions the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group and the U.S. Congress may attach to the final deal.

America’s commercial interests in the deal are evident: The tens of billions of dollars worth of arms and reactor contracts it is likely to reap. Not so obvious is its huge strategic stake, which is two-fold.

First, the deal would open the path to rope in India more than just as a strategic partner. In a 21st-century world in which the concept of alliance is giving way to nations pursuing multiple partnerships to pursue a variety of interests with different players in diverse settings, the U.S. still fancies bringing in India as a new Japan or Britain — an ally that would faithfully follow the alliance leader.

Burns makes no bones about America’s intent. “I think Americans might be able to say 20 years from now, India is one of our two or three most important partners in the world. That will be a tremendous strategic change for us… You need friends, you need allies,” he said in an October 3 interview. At the Council on Foreign Relations on October 23, he amplified: “Twenty or 30 years from now, many Americans would say India is one of the two or three most important global partners — the way Japan and the European Union are today.”

Second, the deal is the means to achieve a central U.S. goal since the 1998 Indian tests — to prevent India’s rise as a full-fledged nuclear-weapons state and bring it into the U.S.-led non-proliferation regime (or, what Burns calls, the “non-proliferation mainstream”). Having failed to stop India from going overtly nuclear, the U.S. wants India’s capabilities to stay regionally confined (like Pakistan’s), even if that strategically disadvantages New Delhi vis-à-vis Beijing.

The first and second objectives are linked because, if this deal goes through, India would be saddled with a rudimentary and inadequate deterrent capability that would promote security dependency on the U.S., including for missile defence. Fostering security dependency is the key to winning and maintaining an ally.

In his 2004 book, Engaging India, Strobe Talbott wrote: “If there is a deal to be done with India, my guess is that it will be a version of the one offered by the Clinton administration and rejected by the BJP-led government. The four U.S.-proposed non-proliferation benchmarks put forward in 1998 — joining the CTBT, making progress on a fissile material treaty, exercising strategic restraint (by that or some other name), and meeting the highest standard of export controls… should remain the basis of the American policy into the future. That means the U.S. government should persist until the four areas of restraint become the basis of the Indian policy.”

That is exactly the line U.S. policy has followed. In the Bush deal with India, the second and fourth Clinton-prescribed benchmarks (progress on fissile material treaty and “comprehensive” export controls) find explicit mention in the original July 18, 2005, deal. The other two benchmarks are reflected in the enabling legislation, the Hyde Act, which seeks both to compel India to exercise strategic restraint and to drag it through the backdoor into an international pact rejected by the Senate — the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The test ban also is built into the 123 agreement implicitly through the incorporation of the U.S. “right of return.”

The Bush team indeed managed to secure more: While the Vajpayee government was willing to open two indigenous power reactors at the most to international inspections as part of a deal, the Singh government has agreed to put 35 nuclear facilities, including eight existing indigenous power reactors, under IAEA safeguards of a kind applicable only to non-nuclear states — perpetual and legally irrevocable.

In addition, it has agreed gratuitously to shut down the Cirus research reactor by 2010, an action that would significantly affect India’s rate of production of weapons-grade plutonium. Given that fuel burn-up in power reactors produces plutonium of a quality less desirable for weapons and that the use of power stations for such purposes, in any case, makes little economic sense, India has relied on its Cirus and Dhruva research reactors to derive supergrade plutonium. And given that Dhruva, commissioned in 1985, faced major startup problems that took a long time to rectify, most of India’s cumulative historic production of weapons-grade plutonium has come from Cirus — a point noted by Paul Nelson et al in a 2006 paper funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

In asking New Delhi to dismantle Cirus, the U.S. has sought to crimp India’s nuclear-deterrent plans. As Undersecretary Robert G. Joseph had asserted, deal-related measures “must contribute to our non-proliferation goals.”

India could build a replacement reactor. But the long lead time needed to construct and commission such a reactor is bound to leave a major production shortfall. Yet, no explanation has been offered to the Indian public thus far as to why New Delhi, disregarding the advice of its Department of Atomic Energy, agreed to shut down the 40-MWth Cirus, which had been refurbished at a cost of millions of dollars and reopened only in 2004.

With all the U.S. benchmarks met, is it any surprise that Talbott now has turned from a critic to a proponent of the present deal, joining the “this-has-got-to-happen-soon” chorus and attacking the Singh government for “a very shortsighted calculation” in putting its survival ahead of the deal?

The key point is that if this U.S.-dictated deal falls apart, it will not only deny America the handle it seeks on Indian policy and deterrent posture, but also its one-sidedly magnanimous terms are unlikely to be replicated in any future agreement. That is why Washington today is feverishly delivering the same two-word message: “Hurry up.”

Let’s be clear: Time is on India’s side. The real test the deal has to pass is whether it can survive a change of government both in New Delhi and Washington. And the test for Singh, given the upcoming Parliament session, is whether the deal can withstand what he has so far sought to thwart but now ought to allow — close legislative scrutiny.

After all, India should enter into the arrangement, not as a good deed for the U.S., but for its own good. Every right-thinking Indian would want U.S.-inspired technology controls against his country to go, but that can hardly justify “a deal at any cost” approach or the use of rose-coloured vision to sell Indians a fantasy. The present deal does not cover high-technology and civilian space controls against India and indeed leaves intact even restrictions on civil enrichment and reprocessing equipment transfers.

The current hold on the deal, forced by domestic political circumstances, underscores the vitality of Indian democracy. It can only help enhance India’s international stature and safeguard national interests.

India, China and Tibet

Posted on November 1, 2007 by Chellaney

Delhi’s Tibetan glitch
India’s subdued stance on Beijing’s unjustified territorial claims has basically harmed Tibet. And to add insult to injury, then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee virtually gave up on Tibet pretending that China was willing to accept Sikkim as part of India.

Vol 6 Issue 5
September – October 2007

Brahma Chellaney

he Sino-Indian spat over Arunachal Pradesh triggered by Beijing ‘s new hardline stance on territorial disputes has brought home the truth that at the core of the India-China divide remains Tibet and that unless that issue is resolved, the chasm between the two demographic titans will not be bridged. After all, Beijing’s claim to Arunachal Pradesh or more specifically to a slice of it, Tawang, flows from Tibet ‘s putative historical or ecclesiastical ties with Arunachal.
Tibet thus lies at the heart of the disputes. To focus on Arunachal or even Tawang is not only to miss the wood for the trees, but also to play in to the hands of China, which has sought to practise incremental territorial annexation. Having gobbled up Tibet, the historical buffer between the Indian and Chinese civilisations, Beijing now lays claim to Indian territories on the basis of not any purported Han connection to them but supposed Tibetan Buddhist ecclesiastical influence. A good analogy to China’s expansionist territorial demands was Saddam Hussein’s claim, following his 1990 invasion of Kuwait, to areas in Saudi Arabia on the basis of alleged Kuwaiti links to them.
Another reminder that Tibet remains the central issue was the September 2006 shooting by Chinese border guards of unarmed Tibetans fleeing to India via Nepal through the 5,800-metre-high Nangpa-la Pass. There have been instances in the past of Tibetans being shot at by the paramilitary People’s Armed Police or the People’s Liberation Army at border crossings, but this was the first such incident captured on film and shown across the world on television. The 41 survivors of that event who escaped gunfire and capture by Chinese troops on ice-covered Himalayan terrain recounted in Dharamsala how the guards opened fire without warning on some 77 Tibetans, a majority of them teenage boys and girls seeking to pursue Tibetan Buddhist studies in schools run by the Dalai Lama.
Beijing, having wrung the concessions it wanted out of India on Tibet, now is calculatedly signalling that Arunachal is its next priority. By publicly presenting Arunachal as an outstanding issue that demands "give and take," it is cleverly putting the onus on India for achieving progress in the border negotiations. Lest the message be missed, New Delhi is being openly exhorted to make concessions on Arunachal, especially on strategic Tawang – a critical corridor between Lhasa and the Assam Valley of immense military import.
The choice before India now is stark: either to retreat to a defensive, unviable negotiating position where it has to fob off Chinese territorial demands centred on Arunachal or to take the Chinese bull by the horns and question the very legitimacy of Beijing’s right to make territorial jurisdiction claims ecclesiastically on behalf of Tibetan Buddhism when China has still to make peace with the Tibetans.
Either way it does not augur well for the border talks, already the longest between any two nations in modern world history. After a quarter-century of continuing negotiations, the border diplomacy has yielded no concrete progress on an overall settlement nor removed even the ambiguities plaguing the 4,057-kilometre frontline. Beijing has been so loath to clearly define the frontline with India that it broke its 2001 promise to exchange maps of the eastern and western sectors by the end of 2002.
Gently shining the diplomatic spotlight on the Tibet question will help India turn the tables on Beijing, whose aggressive territorial demands have drawn strength from New Delhi’s self-injurious and gratuitous acceptance of Tibet as part of China.
At a time when China is threatening to divert the waters of river Brahmaputra, the subtle and measured revival of Tibet as an unresolved issue will arm India with leverage and international say on any Chinese effort to dam the Brahmaputra and reroute its waters. With water likely to emerge as a major security-related issue in southern Asia in the years ahead, India can hardly ignore the fact that the Indus, Sutlej and Brahmaputra originate in occupied Tibet.
Tibet is the means by which India could coop up the bull in its own China shop. Beijing ‘s new hardline focus on Arunachal/Tawang is apparent not only from its refusal to grant visa to any official from Arunachal Pradesh, but also from its aggressive patrolling of the still-fuzzy Himalayan frontier. Through its forcefulness on Arunachal, China is signalling that the ongoing negotiations with India cannot centre merely on border demarcation, even if both sides still call them "border talks".

Beijing, having wrung the concessions it wanted out of India on Tibet, now is calculatedly signalling that Arunachal is its next priority. By publicly presenting Arunachal as an outstanding issue that demands "give and take," it is cleverly putting the onus on India for achieving progress in the border negotiations

Imperceptive or tactless actions can hardly advance any country’s interests. But China, being a closed system, does not seem to understand that. That is the reason why communist China has a tradition of acting in ways unfavourable to its own long-term interests. One recent example of that is the way it helped rekindle Japanese nationalism by scripting anti-Japan mob protests in April 2005. Tokyo is now more determined than ever not to allow Beijing to call the shots in East Asia.
What is new is not China ‘s claim to Tawang or to the whole of Arunachal Pradesh but its brassy assertiveness in laying out in public its territorial demands. What makes such forcefulness doubly astonishing is that its net effect will only be to reinforce India ‘s resolve not to cede further ground to China. Indian officials take an oath of office pledging to "uphold the sovereignty and integrity of India," and it is unthinkable any Indian government would gift Tawang to China. As Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee has already put it, "Every inch of Arunachal is part of India."
That Tawang is a Monba, not Tibetan, area is a conclusion that British surveyors Bailey and Moreshead painstakingly reached, leading Henry McMahon to draw his famous redline on the Survey of India map-sheets to Tawang’s north. Earlier at Shimla in October 1913, the British Indian government and Tibet, represented by McMahon and Lonchen Shatra respectively, reached agreement on defining the frontier at that meeting, to which the Chinese delegate at the Shimla Conference was not invited because all parties at that time, including China, recognised Tibet ‘s sovereign authority to negotiate its boundary with India. Even Ivan Chen’s map presented at the Shimla Conference clearly showed Tawang as part of India.
An ecclesiastical relationship cannot by itself signify political control of one territory over another. However, in the two regions – Amdo (the birthplace of the present Dalai Lama) and Kham – where Tibet exercised undisputed ecclesiastical jurisdiction and political control, the occupying power has forcibly incorporated those areas in the Han provinces of Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan. Before claiming Tawang to be part of Tibet, China should be told plainly to first restore Amdo and Kham to Tibet.
Yet, a disturbing pattern of Chinese statements is emerging without cause. A diplomat-cum-senior researcher at a Chinese foreign ministry-run think-tank suggested that India kick out the Dalai Lama if it wished to build ‘real and sustainable’ relations with Beijing. In an interview with an Indian newspaper, Zheng Ruixiang said: "The Tibet problem is a major obstacle in the normalisation of relations between India and China. India made a mistake in the 1950s by welcoming the Dalai Lama when he fled Tibet. It is now time for correcting the past mistake and building a real and sustainable relationship with China."
The pattern suggests that under President Hu Jintao, who made his name in the Chinese Communist Party by ruthlessly quelling the 1989 anti-China protests in Lhasa as the martial-law administrator, Beijing may be striving to adopt a more forthright stance vis-à-vis India, including on the border disputes and the presence of the Dalai Lama and his government – in – exile in Dharamsala. Having consolidated his hold on power in the past year to emerge as China’s unchallenged ruler, Hu has begun suppressing dissent at home, strengthening the military and shaping a more nationalistic foreign policy. Hu may believe his regime can exert more strategic pressure on India, now that the railway to Tibet has been built and Pakistan ‘s Chinese-funded Gwadar port-cum-naval base is likely to be opened during his stop in Islamabad next week.

Tibet is the means by which India could coop up the bull in its own China shop. Beijing ‘s new hardline focus on Arunachal/Tawang is apparent not only from its refusal to grant visa to any official from Arunachal Pradesh, but also from its aggressive patrolling of the still-fuzzy Himalayan frontier

Given autocratic China’s penchant to act counterproductively, India should welcome the Chinese resurrection of the past and highlighting of bilateral disputes in public. What all this brings out is that Beijing is unwilling to settle the border disputes on the basis of the status quo. Not satisfied with the Indian territories it has occupied, either by conquest or by furtive encroachment, China wishes to further redraw the frontiers with India, even as it keeps up the charade of border negotiations.
The new Chinese brashness helps create the necessary leeway for India to re-evaluate its policy and approach and add more subtlety and litheness to its stance unilaterally accommodating China on Tibet and other issues.
India needs to first grasp the damage to its China policy caused by Atal Bihari Vajpayee as prime minister. Both on Tibet and the border talks, he acquiesced to Chinese demands. He signed on to a document formally recognising Tibet to be "part of the People’s Republic of China" and, by agreeing to a new framework of border talks focused on an elusive "package" settlement, he rewarded Beijing for its breach of promise to fully define the frontline through an exchange of maps.
China may have ceased its cartographic aggression on Sikkim through its maps, but the important point, often overlooked, is that it has yet to expressly acknowledge that Sikkim is part of India. While it now makes India accept in every bilateral communiqué the Vajpayee formulation that Tibet is "part of the People’s Republic of China," Beijing till date has declined to affirm in a joint statement with New Delhi or even unilaterally that Sikkim is part of the Republic of India.
Sikkim was never an issue in Sino-Indian relations until Vajpayee made it one. He then ingeniously flaunted the Chinese "concession" on Sikkim as a cover to justify his kowtow on Tibet.
Tibet is India ‘s trump card, yet Vajpayee capriciously surrendered it to gain a dubious concession on Sikkim, over which China has never claimed sovereignty. All that China was doing was to depict Sikkim as an in dependent kingdom in its official maps. But such action made little difference to India. The world had accepted Sikkim’s 1975 merger with India, and it made little sense for New Delhi to surrender its Tibet card just to persuade Beijing to stop ploughing a lonely furrow – that too over a territory over which China had staked no claim. If an Indian concession on Tibet can ever be justified, it can only be in the context of making Beijing give up its claims on Indian territories, formalise the present borders and reach a deal with the Dalai Lama to bring him home from exile.

Tibet is India ‘s trump card, yet Vajpayee capriciously surrendered it to gain a dubious concession on Sikkim, over which China has never claimed sovereignty. All that China was doing was to depict Sikkim as an in dependent kingdom in its official maps

For India, the Dalai Lama is a powerful ally. When China annexed Tibet, India surrendered not only its extra-territorial rights over that buffer, but it also signed a pact in 1954 – the in famous ‘Panchsheel Agreement’ – accepting Chinese sovereignty over Tibet without seeking any quid pro quo, not even the Chinese recognition of the then existing Indo-Tibetan border. That monumental folly stripped India of leverage and encouraged the Chinese to lay claims to Indian territories on the basis of Tibet ‘s alleged historical links with those areas.
The Panchsheel accord recorded India’s agreement both to fully withdraw within six months its ‘military escorts now stationed at Yatung and Gyantse’ in the ‘Tibet Region of China’ as well as ‘to hand over to the Government of China at a reasonable price the postal, telegraph and public telephone services together with their equipment operated by the Government of India in Tibet Region of China.’
If India still has any card against Beijing, it is the Dalai Lama. As long as he remains based in Dharamsala, it is a great strategic asset for India. The Tibetans in Tibet will neither side with China against India nor accept Chinese rule over their homeland. If after the death of the present 71-year-old Dalai Lama, the institution of the Dalai Lama were to get captured by Beijing (like the way it has anointed its own Panchen Lama), India will be poorer by several army divisions against China.
It is not late for India to repair the damage done through blunders by Nehru and the closet-Nehruvian Vajpayee. The only way India can build counter-leverage against Beijing is to quietly reopen the issue of China ‘s annexation of Tibet and its subsequent failure to grant autonomy to the Tibetans, despite an express pledge contained in the 17-point agreement it imposed on Tibet in 1951.
This can be done by India in a way that is neither provocative nor confrontational. Building a mutually beneficial relationship with China does not demand appeasement on India ‘s part. And the alternative to appeasement is not provocation. Between appeasement and aggravation lie a hundred different options.
India can start diplomatically making the point that China ‘s own security and well-being will be enhanced if it reaches out to Tibetans and grants genuine autonomy to Tibet through a deal that brings back the Dalai Lama from his exile in Dharamsala. If the Chinese ambassador to India can publicly demand "mutual compromises" on Arunachal – a statement portrayed by the Indian press as an attempt by him to "play down" his unabashed claim on Arunachal – is it too much to expect the Indian ambassador in Beijing to genially appeal to China’s own self-interest and suggest it pursue "mutual compromises" with the Tibetans on Tibet?

The writer is Professor of strategic studies,
Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi