Growing partisan rancor over the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal

Posted on June 27, 2008 by Chellaney

Nuclear Deal: Questions That Baffle

Why is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in a hurry to approach the IAEA Board when he knows the deal cannot be sealed during the Bush presidency? The best way to proceed is to do what he had promised — build a broad political consensus in favour.

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, June 27, 2008

The civil nuclear deal with America, although steeped in growing partisan rancour, is hardly the weighty issue that should determine any government’s future. Indeed, it is an issue of little long-term import to India’s great-power ambitions or energy needs. For the U.S., the deal offers substantive benefits. But for India the benefits are largely symbolic.

Yet the costs the still-uncertain deal is exacting on India can be gauged from the self-induced federal paralysis, with a sulking prime minister withdrawing into a shell and senior ministers deferring important work. The defence minister, for instance, called off a trip to Japan intended to add strategic content to a bilateral relationship pivotal to power equilibrium in Asia. Such government disruption from the top has no parallel in the annals of independent India.

The ungainly political stagecraft on display raises several unanswered questions. The first relates to Dr. Manmohan Singh’s obsession with a deal that has begun to warp his priorities. Many are asking the same question: Why is he willing to stake his government’s future on a single issue of questionable long-term strategic weight? Can he fashion a legacy by choosing deal-making over deterrent-building?

What is mystifying is that Dr. Singh has landed the country in a political logjam over a deal he knows cannot be completed during the remainder term of U.S. President George W. Bush. Time has simply run out. Even in an overly optimistic scenario, the deal cannot be ratified by the present U.S. Congress.

In addition to New Delhi’s insistence on taking its safeguards accord with the International Atomic Energy Agency to the latter’s governing board at this stage — an action that will gratuitously tie the country’s hands even before the final deal is clear — an extraordinary plenary meeting of the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group will need to be held to consider a rule-change by consensus. An NSG waiver will neither be easy nor swift, with the U.S. itself seeking to attach conditions that mesh with its Hyde Act. In the last stage, the deal will come up for congressional ratification, but only after three documents — the so-called 123 agreement, a presidential determination that India has met all the stipulated preconditions, and a “Nuclear Proliferation Assessment Statement” — have been placed before the U.S. Congress “for a period of 60 days of continuous session”.

Given the limited number of days left in the present U.S. legislative calendar to let a ratification process run its full course, why this tearing hurry on the part of India to take the safeguards accord to the IAEA Board? Washington — whose almost-daily statements have sought to egg on New Delhi to play that very card, even if it led to the collapse of Dr. Singh’s government — acknowledged this week that, “obviously, the next U.S. government will have to look at this [deal] and make their own decisions on it”. In fact, as early as last month, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden had said the deal is unlikely to be approved in Bush’s term.

Before knowing how the NSG will condition cooperation with India or the attitude of the next U.S. administration, why is New Delhi willing to part with its last remaining card by taking the safeguards accord to the IAEA Board? That accord, at any rate, ought to be taken to the Board only after the contours of the Additional Protocol with the IAEA have been firmed up. Otherwise, a leverage-stripped India could face more-stringent and wider inspections when it returns for Additional Protocol negotiations.

Like the 123 agreement, India has already finalized and “frozen” the safeguards accord. But unlike the former, which was made public days after it was initialled, the latter text has not been shown even to coalition allies, underscoring the creeping official opacity.

There are other mysteries, too. One centres on Dr. Singh’s metamorphosis from being anti-nuclear to becoming a fervent votary of commercial nuclear power. As finance minister in the first half of the 1990s, Dr. Singh starved the nuclear programme of funds, disabling new projects and halting uranium exploration.

The uranium crunch India confronts today is rooted in the fact that the actions Dr. Singh set in motion then were not reversed until several years after he left office. That Dr. Singh’s newfound interest in nuclear power relates merely to reactor imports has been underscored by his recent action in cutting the Department of Atomic Energy’s 2008-09 budget by more than half a billion dollars.

Another unexplained action — one that demolishes the official contention that the deal has no bearing on the strategic programme — is the U.S.-dictated decision to permanently shut down Cirus, one of India’s two bomb-grade plutonium-production reactors. As Paul Nelson, T. V. K. Woddi and William S. Charlton of the Texas A&M University point out in a U.S. government-funded study, much of India’s cumulative historic production of weapons-grade plutonium has come from Cirus, operating since 1960.

As a completely refurbished reactor, Cirus is as Indian a facility as any. The prime minister’s baffling decision to shut down Cirus two years from now, without approving a replacement reactor, will leave a major production shortfall in military-grade plutonium.

No less troubling is the fact that solemn promises made in Parliament were not kept. After the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate Foreign Relations Committee had approved separate versions of an India-specific bill, the prime minister declared on August 17, 2006: “I had taken up with President Bush our concerns regarding provisions in the two bills. It is clear if the final product is in its current form, India will have grave difficulties in accepting the bills. The U.S. has been left in no doubt as to our position”. When Congress disregarded Dr. Singh’s red lines and passed the Hyde Act by amalgamating the toughest elements from the Senate and House bills, the prime minister admitted on December 18, 2006, that “there are areas which continue to be a cause for concern”.

Yet India negotiated a 123 agreement that complies with the Hyde Act, with the U.S. stating publicly, “We have the Hyde Act, and we kept reminding the Indian side, and they were good enough to negotiate on this basis…” 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.

The prime minister’s assurances on ““removal of restrictions on all aspects of cooperation”, lifetime fuel stockpiles, linking perpetual international inspections with perpetual fuel supply through “India’s right to take corrective measures”, securing an operational consent to reprocess spent fuel, etc. today lie in tatters.

The government’s secrecy on the safeguards accord springs from the fact that its text release will expose the manner it has yielded further ground. For example, the 123 agreement, instead of granting the right to take corrective measures, just records that India will seek such a right in the IAEA accord. But the IAEA accord, in its preamble, merely cites the 123 agreement’s reference to corrective measures!

It is manifest from this record that if the deal attracts more onerous conditions during the NSG and congressional approvals, the prime minister will go along, as he has in the past, after making some perfunctory noises. Indeed, it is this record that is likely to embolden NSG members and U.S. lawmakers to tag on more conditions in the next stages to constrain India’s nuclear leeway.

As it nears its third anniversary, the deal has become an emblem of how not to conduct Indian diplomacy. The deal also symbolizes the manner it has been sought to be thrust on the nation through media management, instead of by political co-option.

Public relations alone cannot sell an initiative. Can it be forgotten that the deal’s current cheerleaders were the drumbeaters to get India to send an army division into Iraq in 2003? How more vulnerable would India have been today had that campaign succeeded?

Just as in 2003, today’s campaign is centred on overstatement — that the concerned issue holds the key to a strategic partnership with America. There is also gross exaggeration about the utility of high-priced, foreign fuel-dependent reactors from overseas.

The deal’s collapse will neither alter the direction of the U.S.-Indian relationship, which is set toward closer strategic cooperation, nor affect the modest role nuclear power will play in India’s energy mix, with or without reactor imports. The deal, contrary to the propaganda, does not offer India unfettered access to uranium imports. India’s uranium crunch, in any event, is set to ease in two years’ time as new mines and mills open, according to nuclear chief Anil Kakodkar.

In that light, how justifiable is Dr. Singh’s action in turning the conditions-laden deal into a make-or-break issue of personal prestige and upping the ante to the extent that the nation has been plunged into a political crisis? Instead of wanting to precipitously approach the IAEA Board and step into a firestorm of national furore, shouldn’t the prime minister seek to achieve what he pledged in Parliament — “the broadest possible consensus within the country to enable the next steps to be taken”?

Once the IAEA Board seals the safeguards accord, India will have little role to play in the next stages, other than as a bystander anxiously monitoring from afar what additional conditions the deal attracts in the NSG and congressional-ratification processes. So why throw nuclear caution to the winds and buoy up non-proliferation literalists in the NSG and Congress in their resolve to sculpt the final deal?

The Hype on the Rise of China and India

Posted on June 22, 2008 by Chellaney

Is the India and China hype true?

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Japan Times

Today it has become commonplace to speak of India and China in the same breadth as two emerging great powers challenging the two-century-old Western domination of the world.

How justifiable is the hype on their rise? The future will not belong to China and India merely because they have a huge landmass and together make up more than a third of humanity. Being large in size and population is not necessarily an asset.

In history, small, strategically geared states have wielded global power. The colonial powers that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries were led by small Britain and included tiny Portugal and the Netherlands.

For analysts, it is tempting to make long-term linear forecasts on the basis of current trends. But such projections in the past have rarely come right. Remember the popular concerns in the United States in the 1980s that a fast-rising Japan threatened America’s industrial might?

The reason why such predictions have come wrong is that statistical probability — the sole tool in forecasting — has little application in strategic analyses.

The straight-line projections on the economic growth of China and India may be too one-dimensional.

Goldman Sachs, for instance, forecasts that China’s economy will surpass the U.S. economy around 2035 and that India will do so a decade later.

This could happen but it is hardly certain. To be sure, economic growth is essential to underpin political and social stability. It is doubtful the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly on power will survive without it continuing to deliver high economic growth. But such growth in any country hinges on several factors, endogenous and exogenous. One factor beyond the control of policymakers in India and China that could slow economic growth and create major policy challenges for them in the years ahead, for example, is climate change.

China and India, of course, have history on their side. These two were the world’s largest economies for centuries up to 1820, after which they went into sharp decline due to their failure to catch up with the industrial revolution and by making themselves easy prey for European colonial interventions.

But world history is replete with instances of small states made powerful by farsighted policies and big states unraveled by weak, unimaginative leaders.

China certainly has a more forward-looking leadership than India, even though Chinese leaders, lacking popular legitimacy, tend to be more insecure. India has to pay a "democracy tax" that weighs down its decision-making and slows its economic development.

When one examines natural endowments — such as arable land, water resources, mineral deposits, hydrocarbons and wetlands — the picture that emerges is not exactly gratifying for India and China in order for them to achieve enduring great-power capacity. Bounteous natural capital is critical for a country to sustain national strength over the long run.

India and China together have more than 35 percent of the global population — or eight times the number of inhabitants in the U.S. — but just 60 percent more usable arable land than America.

The two giants would have had a better balance between land size, population and natural resources had their populations been much smaller. But even as India still adds nearly a million people a month despite a slowing fertility rate, some Indians cheer the "demographic dividend" that awaits their youthful country while the developed world ages. Failure has come to be identified as a success.

At a time when the world is confronting an energy crisis — symbolized both by the spiraling price of crude oil and gas, and the buildup of planet-warming greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — India and China stick out for their fast-rising dependency on energy imports and growing contribution to carbon-dioxide emissions. Their energy dilemma causes a growing burden and threatens to slow down their economic rise.

Constraints on resources are likely to become pronounced as more and more Indians and Chinese gain income to embrace modern comforts in everyday life — from gasoline-fueled transport to water-guzzling gadgets like washing machines and dishwashers.

The global demand for resources is set to soar, along with their prices. But unlike the choices that the old economic giants had in their path of development — such as the one exemplified by the shift from scarce timber to abundant coal in 18th-century Britain — the emerging economic giants can avail themselves of no substitutes for some of the resources whose present demand is beginning to lag availability.

Of all the resources, the one with the greatest strategic bearing on the future prospects of India and China is fresh water.

Climate change will have a significant impact on the availability and flow of river waters from the Himalayas and Tibetan highlands, making water a key element in the national-security calculus of China and India. The Himalayan snow melt that feeds Asia’s great rivers is likely to be accelerated by global warming.

China and India already are water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated farming and water-intensive industries and a rising middle class are drawing attention to their serious struggle over water resources.

Having entered an era of perennial water shortages that are likely to parallel, in terms of per capita water availability, the scarcity in the Middle East, India and China face the prospect that their rapid economic modernization could stall due to inadequate water resources. This prospect will become a reality if their industrial, agricultural and household demand for water continues to grow at the present frenetic pace.

Even though India’s usable arable land is larger than China’s — 160.5 million hectares compared to 137.1 million hectares — the source of all the major Indian rivers except one is the Chinese-held Tibetan plateau. While the Ganges originates on the Indian side of the Himalayas, its two main tributaries flow in from Tibet.

China’s ambitious interbasin and inter-river water transfer projects in the vast Tibetan plateau, and its upstream damming of the Brahmaputra, Sutlej and other rivers, threaten India’s well-being. If President Hu Jintao — a hydrologist by training who has served as party secretary in Tibet — begins China’s long-pending project to divert the waters of the Brahmaputra northward to the parched Yellow River, it would constitute the declaration of a water war on lower-riparian India and Bangladesh.

Water is likely to become a cause of Sino-Indian tensions, reopening old wounds and bringing Tibet to center stage.

Asia’s economic rise and the ensuing shifts in international power equations foreshadow a world characterized by a greater distribution of power. But the hype on China and India needs to be tempered by geopolitical realism centered on a careful assessment of their long-term potential to build and sustain comprehensive power.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of the best-selling "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."

The Japan Times: Wednesday, June 18, 2008

India’s U.S.-Influenced Decision to Shut Down Cirus Research Reactor

Posted on June 22, 2008 by Chellaney

Cirus: A Testament to the Prime Minister’s Double Talk

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, July 1-15, 2008

One of the great mysteries still begging for illumination is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s embrace of nuclear energy. No week or month passes without Singh alluding to the benefits of nuclear power for India. But as finance minister during the 1991-95 period, Singh starved the nuclear programme of funds, disabling new projects and halting uranium exploration.

The uranium crunch India confronts today is rooted in the fact that the actions Singh set in motion were not reversed until several years after he left office. The nation today has a right to know whether Singh’s new-found interest in nuclear power is centred on imports — a concern reinforced by his government’s 2008-09 budget, which slashes the Department of Atomic Energy’s funding by $529 million.

Another baffling mystery is Singh’s decision, as part of the controversial nuclear deal with the United States, to permanently shut down by 2010 one of the country’s two bomb-grade plutonium-production reactors. The prime minister has offered no explanation to the nation for overruling the nuclear establishment and agreeing to shut down the Cirus research reactor, located at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre.

Much of India’s cumulative historic production of weapons-grade plutonium has come from Cirus, operating since 1960. In fact, Cirus had been refurbished at a cost of millions of dollars and reopened for barely two years when Singh made the surprise announcement to close down the reactor. Speaking in the Lok Sabha on March 10, 2006, the prime minister claimed that, “while the Cirus reactor was refurbished recently, the associated cost will be more than recovered by the isotope [production] and the research we will be conducting before it is closed”.

But Singh still hasn’t answered the key question: Why did he succumb to U.S. pressure over a reactor that remains crucial to India’s strategic programme? Not only does the country still lack a credible minimal nuclear deterrent against its main challenge, China, but also current international estimates of India’s weapons-grade fissile material stockpile put its quantity just marginally higher than Pakistan’s. Given that Singh is now committed to “work with the U.S.” for the early conclusion of a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT), India needs to sharply accelerate its rate of weapons-grade plutonium production as it doesn’t have time on its side. Singh’s action, however, throws a larger spanner in the works.

The shutdown of Cirus two years from now, if the nuclear deal goes through, will deprive the nuclear military programme of almost one-third of its current supply of weapons-grade plutonium. Of course, India could build a replacement reactor. But the long lead time needed to build a research reactor, and the government failure thus far to sanction such a facility, will leave a major production shortfall.

The fuel burn-up in large, electricity-generating reactors produces plutonium of a quality far less desirable for weapons. Therefore, for military-grade plutonium, India has relied on its research reactors, Cirus and Dhruva. But Dhruva — commissioned in 1985 — faced major start-up problems that took several years to rectify. That is why the 40-MWth Cirus has contributed the larger share of India’s cumulative historic production of weapons-grade plutonium — a point noted by Paul Nelson et al in a 2006 paper funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. In having insisted that New Delhi dismantle Cirus, America’s aim, needless to say, was to crimp India’s nuclear-deterrent plans — an objective the deal seeks to serve also by enforcing a permanent test ban.

Cirus — the source of plutonium for the 1974 nuclear test — was built with Canadian technical assistance and received US heavy water under two separate 1956 contracts that predated the 1957 establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the 1968 finalization of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) text. Because the concept of international “safeguards” (inspections) had not yet been devised, India gave no explicit undertaking to abjure nuclear-explosive uses.

Indeed, just after Cirus came on line, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru openly declared: “We are approaching a stage when it is possible for us … to make atomic weapons”. Decades later, the shutdown decision has given the non-proliferation lobby in the U.S. and Canada much to celebrate: India is tacitly conceding its 1974 test was born in sin and, to atone for it, it will shut down Cirus. Singh’s action, besides compromising the strategic programme, mocks various international (and even official American) legal opinions clearing India of any Cirus-related wrongdoing.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

China-India-Japan Power Struggle in Asia

Posted on June 22, 2008 by Chellaney

Dragon, Tiger and Samurai

Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade

by Bill Emmott

Allen Lane

Price: Rs. 795

Book review by Brahma Chellaney

Pioneer, June 22, 2008

A fundamental reordering of power in Asia is challenging the equations between the continent’s three major powers that hold the key to Asian stability. As they maneuver for strategic advantage, China, India and Japan are transforming relations between themselves in a way that portends closer strategic engagement between New Delhi and Tokyo to help parry Beijing’s moves to dominate Asia. The present actions of the three players offer a peep into the future power relations in Asia.

A year-and-a-half after this reviewer published Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan, a HarperCollins publication that was a runaway bestseller, Bill Emmott has done a book on the same Sino-Indian-Japanese theme. Emmott, a former editor of The Economist, is a specialist on Japan, having served as a correspondent there and published six books on that country. Not surprisingly, the sections on Japan in his latest book are the most interesting. Emmott doesn’t display the same depth of understanding when analyzing India and China.

He is, however, right about the emergence of the new Asia that is today the world’s main creditor and economic locomotive. “Today’s Asia has been shaped by economics, and it is an Asia of increasing prosperity, of interdependence and of global financial influence,” he writes. “This is the first time since the Mongol empire established by Genghis Khan in the 13^th century that Asia has become truly connected together across 6,000 kilometers that separate Japan in the east from India in the west, or even as far as Iran”.

Asia does not end at Iran’s western borders but extends all the way to Turkey, 97 per cent of which is in the Asian hemisphere. The largest and most populous continent by far, Asia also includes 72 per cent of the Russian Federation. It encompasses very different and distinct areas — from the sub-arctic, mineral-rich Siberian plains to the subtropical Indonesian archipelago; and from oil-rich desert lands to fertile river valleys.

Asia is a highly diverse continent. It has countries with the highest and lowest population densities in the world — Singapore and Mongolia, respectively. It has some of the wealthiest states in the world, like Japan and Singapore, and also some of the poorest, such as North Korea, Burma and Afghanistan. It has tiny Brunei, Bhutan and the Maldives and demographic titans like China, India and Indonesia.

Asia is bouncing back after a relatively short period of decline in history that had been partly precipitated by European colonial interventions over two centuries. Asia’s share of the world’s economy totalled 60 per cent in 1820, at the advent of the industrial revolution, according to an Asian Development Bank study. It then went into sharp decline over the next 125 years.

Today, it already accounts for 40 per cent of global production — a figure that could, according to some projections, rise to 60 per cent by 2050, when three of the world’s four largest economies (China, India, the U.S. and Japan) would be Asian.

This suggests that Asia is merely seeking to regain the preeminence it had for most of 2,000 years before the industrial revolution allowed the West to vault ahead. As British historian Angus Madison has brought out, China and India were the world’s largest economies for centuries up to 1820. According to Kishore Mahbubani’s new book, The New Asian Hemisphere, “The past two centuries of Western domination of world history are the exception, not the rule, during 2,000 years of global history”.

It is against this background that one should view the power struggle between China and Japan, and China and India. Modern Japan, as Emmott notes, is the product of the 1868 Meiji Restoration, which set in motion its rapid rise. Japan first defeated China in 1895 and then Russia in 1905, “the first time an Asian country had defeated one of the Western imperialist powers”, in Emmott’s words. Japan was also Asia’s first economic success story.

Such is the international hype about China’s rise that it is often forgotten that Japan remains the world’s second largest economic powerhouse, with an economy that is still larger than China’s, with only a tenth of the population. Tokyo may not share Beijing’s obsession with measures of national power, but Japan’s military, except in the nuclear sphere, is the most sophisticated in Asia.

A strong Japan, a strong China and a strong India need to find ways to reconcile their interests in Asia so that they can peacefully coexist and prosper. Never before in history have all three of these powers been strong at the same time. China’s emergence as a global player, however, is dividing, not uniting, Asia.

More anecdotal than forward-looking, Emmott, unfortunately, shies away from the power issues. In fact, the question the book carries in its subtitle, How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade, is left largely unanswered.

When Emmott does dare to make a prediction, such as the Dalai Lama’s death prompting China to “use brutal methods to suppress an uprising by Buddhist monks in Tibet”, recent events prove him wrong. It did not need the Dalai Lama’s demise for a Tibetan uprising to break out or for China to employ naked repression against monk-led protestors. The Dalai Lama indeed has emerged as China’s enemy No. 1, reflected in the epithets Beijing has hurled at him in recent weeks, including “a wolf with a human face and heart of a beast” and “a serial liar”.

Emmott has little to say about how China is driving Japan and India closer. Tokyo, as if to make up for decades of neglect, is beginning to enthusiastically discover India as an investment destination and a potential strategic partner. Reversing a long-standing pattern, it now provides more development loans to India than to China.

Every action has a reaction. China’s officially scripted anti-Japanese mob protests of 2005 — a testament to the manner nationalism has begun to shape an increasingly assertive Chinese foreign policy — set in motion a Japanese reaction that will take long to concretize. But its signs so far suggest that Japan will not allow China to call the shots in East Asia. China, for its part, is fiercely opposing its two Asian peers, Japan and India, from joining it in the United Nations Security Council as permanent members. In the emerging Asia, the two major non-Western democracies, Japan and India, are set to become close partners.

In that light, a key challenge for Tokyo and New Delhi is to manage their increasingly intricate relationship with an ascendant China determined to emerge as Asia’s dominant power. Yet it makes sense for Japan and India to play down the competitive dynamics of their relationship with Beijing and put the accent on cooperation. An emphasis on cooperation also suits China because it is in accord with its larger strategy to advertise its “peaceful rise”.

Emmott believes, in his optimistic scenario, “China, India and Japan, encouraged by the Americans and Europeans, would work together to build pan-Asian institutions within which to manage their disputes and differences”. But his nine recommendations — half of them addressed to what he calls “the poor old United States of America, the world’s chief bearer of burdens and payer of prices” — provide little clue to how this scenario will be realized.

U.S.-India Nuclear Deal: Correct the Sequence

Posted on June 22, 2008 by Chellaney

Put The Ball In Their Court

To help build bipartisan Indian support, let the US present a final deal

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India, June 19, 2008

The blame game on the nuclear deal has begun in earnest. “It is now an Indian problem”, says Henry Kissinger. “India needs to make some tough choices”, chips in US Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez. Instead of putting the onus on India, why doesn’t the US do its part and present New Delhi a final deal it cannot rebuff? After all, the deal has yet to be ratified by the US Congress or considered by the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group, a cartel the US helped establish in response to India’s 1974 test.

Before India plays its last card, shouldn’t America secure an NSG rule-change and congressional ratification? That card involves taking the safeguards accord to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s governing board for approval. That is a small step, given that the text of the accord has already been finalized and “frozen”. The Americans can now easily take this text to the NSG and their Congress for the necessary approvals so that New Delhi knows the final terms of the deal before it forfeits that last card. Given the distinct possibility of the deal attracting more grating conditions as it traverses the next stages, shouldn’t India know the deal’s closing terms before it approaches the IAEA board? Can India tie its hands before the final deal is clear?

Even a quick look at the original July 18, 2005, agreement-in-principle will show that India’s obligations were merely reciprocal to America’s actions. That accord first lays out America’s obligations, with the President committed to seek “agreement from Congress to adjust U.S. laws and policies, and … work with friends and allies to adjust international regimes to enable full civil nuclear energy cooperation and trade with India”. It then defines India’s part as occurring in return: “The Prime Minister conveyed that for his part, India would reciprocally agree that it would be ready to assume the same responsibilities and practices and acquire the same benefits and advantages as other leading countries with advanced nuclear technology, such as the US”.

Along the way, however, the sequence was reversed, to India’s disadvantage. The original terms also got changed. Today, there is not even the pretence that the deal offers “full civil nuclear energy cooperation”, or that India is set to “acquire the same benefits and advantages” as the US. What is on offer is restricted cooperation tied to conditions that require India, among others, to brook a permanent test ban; to grant an open-ended right to the US to suspend fuel supplies forthwith simply by issuing a one-year termination notice; to forego reprocessing of spent fuel until it has, in the indeterminate future, won a separate, congressionally vetted agreement; and to agree to route not just spent fuel of US-origin but all “foreign nuclear material” through a costly new dedicated reprocessing facility, for which no components are to be allowed to be imported because of a wider continual ban.

The Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP) initiative was designed to help ease US technology controls against India in three separate areas — high technology, civilian space and commercial nuclear power. These three areas became known as the “trinity”. Yet, instead of a broad deal covering all the “trinity” issues, the US offered a deal in just one area where its commercial interests were dominant — the revival of its moribund nuclear-power industry. An enduring strategic partnership with the US will clearly aid Indian interests. But can such a partnership emerge without the US delivering on the other “trinity” areas — high-technology and civilian space cooperation?

While the nuclear deal has required complex actions — a change in US law, a so-called 123 agreement and a proposed NSG waiver — the opening of civilian space and high-technology cooperation with India merely demanded US executive action. By elastically interpreting existing US law and applying to India the same standards it does to another non-NPT state, Israel, Washington could have opened the doors to civilian space and high-technology cooperation. Instead, the US Congress has audaciously cross-linked civil nuclear cooperation to the continuance of US export controls against New Delhi in another “trinity” area, with the Hyde Act stipulating that US missile sanctions law (which prohibits dual-use space exports) will still apply to India even after it “unilaterally adheres” to the US-led Missile Technology Control Regime as part of the current deal.

That the deal could be subject to even more conditions is a real concern. First, the US has declined to share with India its revised “pre-decisional” proposal to the NSG. Its first proposal, submitted before the Hyde Act’s passage, sought to make the test ban on India a multilateral reality. Its latest proposal is said to add new conditions that mesh with the Hyde Act’s constraints. Second, congressional ratification could follow the 1985 example, when the attachment of three extraneous conditions held up the US-China nuclear deal for 13 years. The Hyde Act indeed states that it will be open to Congress to “pass a joint resolution of approval with conditions” by giving up “the expedited procedures” that permit a simple up-or-down vote.

Before seeking to force India’s hand, the US ought to present a final deal. A deal that comes with “clean” NSG and congressional approvals and with transparent, just terms will win bipartisan Indian support. The ball should now be in America’s court because India has already delivered on issues ranging from a civil-military separation plan to a safeguards accord.

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research.

Barack Obama’s legacy weighs down U.S.-India nuclear deal

Posted on June 17, 2008 by Chellaney

Obama’s India-Nuclear Legacy

Whether Obama becomes U.S. president or not, his two 2006 congressional amendments have helped constrain India’s fuel access and room for manoeuvre under the nuclear deal, now in abeyance.

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, June 18, 2008

Barack Obama’s epochal political breakthrough in becoming the first black presidential candidate in history of either of the two main U.S. political parties is a tribute to his stump skills and the popular hopes he inspires. In contrast to his aging opponent John McCain, whose conservatism is anchored in the past, the 46-year-old Obama is the candidate for change, offering a distinctly different vision centred on charting a better future.

That is Obama’s real strength. In the Democratic Party primary contest against Hillary Clinton, Obama’s victory underscored a couple of political axioms: Sunny beats sullen, and buoyancy defeats whining.

A first-term U.S. Senator, Obama has come up rapidly. But even as a rookie Senator, Obama left a distinct imprint in congressional deliberations. Take the vaunted U.S.-Indian nuclear deal. The deal, yet to pass several major steps, is currently in limbo. But if it ever takes effect, Obama’s contribution would have been no small in the constraints the U.S. Congress has imposed on civil nuclear cooperation with India.

When the full Senate considered the deal, Obama criticized what he called the “blank cheque” offered to India through the official waiver legislation introduced by the Bush administration in March 2006. Obama’s intervention is recorded in Congressional Record of November 16, 2006:

“Mr. President, I rise today to express my support for the U.S.-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act. As I have said before, I believe strengthening the relationship between our two nations is an important strategic goal and this legislation helps us take a dramatic step in this direction.

“However, like many of my colleagues, I have concerns with potential non-proliferation consequences of this agreement. Much to my disappointment, the administration has done very little to address these concerns, instead, sending draft legislation to the Congress that was essentially a blank cheque.

“The managers of the bill, Senators Lugar and Biden, have done a tremendous job taking the administration’s proposal and shaping it into meaningful, bipartisan legislation. The bill now before the Senate helps move us closer to India while addressing some key non-proliferation issues.

“However, I remain concerned about the issue of nuclear testing. A decision by the Indian government to conduct such a test could trigger an arms race in South Asia that would be extremely dangerous and destabilizing.

“The good news is that the joint statement between President Bush and Prime Minister Singh of July 18, 2005, declared that India’s unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing will continue. I take Prime Minister Singh at his word, but also believe in following President Reagan’s mantra of ‘trust but verify’.”

Obama was not content that the official bill actually attached a legally binding rider to the deal tantamount to dragging India through the backdoor into the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) — a pact the Senate had itself rejected in 1999. While the CTBT grants its parties the right to withdraw by invoking supreme national interest, the official bill put India under a permanent test ban by mandating re-imposition of civil nuclear sanctions in the event of a test — an American action that would leave India’s safeguarded power reactors high and dry in a deal-driven paradigm.

To help further toughen the legislation, Obama introduced two amendments that profoundly reshaped the terms on which India is now being offered the deal.

1. The first amendment was an innovative insertion that imposed fetters on uranium-poor India’s access to fuel, restricting such imports to “reasonable reactor operating requirements.” Obama’s amendment not only undercut the stated raison d’être of the original deal — “full civil nuclear energy cooperation and trade with India” — but also busted Dr. Manmohan Singh’s March 7, 2006, assurance to Parliament that New Delhi would secure the right to build lifetime fuel stocks to guard against supply disruption. Furthermore, it shattered the claim in India’s Separation Plan that, “The U.S. will support an Indian effort to develop a strategic reserve of nuclear fuel to guard against any disruption of supply over the lifetime of India’s reactors.”

Obama’s Senate Amendment 5169, passed by a voice vote, stated: “It is the policy of the United States that any nuclear power reactor fuel reserve provided to the Government of India for use in safeguarded civilian nuclear facilities should be commensurate with reasonable reactor operating requirements.” The House of Representatives had proposed no such restriction. Obama’s amendment, which became Section 114 of the Senate bill, found its way into the final legislation as Section 103 (b) (10) of the Hyde Act.

The amendment’s avowed purpose was to “clarify U.S. policy in order to deter nuclear testing.” That meshed with what Obama stated on the Senate floor. Consider the following exchange in the Senate:

Obama: On a related note, is it the chairman’s interpretation of the legislation that, in the event of a future nuclear test by the Government of India, nuclear power reactor fuel and equipment sales, and nuclear technology cooperation would terminate; other elements of the U.S. -India nuclear agreement would likely terminate; and the U.S. would have the right to demand the return of nuclear supplies?

Lugar: Yes, under our bill, the only requirement which is waived is that in Section 123.a(2) of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 — for full-scope safeguards. India’s 123 Agreement would still have to meet the requirement of Section 123.a(4), which requires that in the event of a test by India of a nuclear-explosive device, the U.S. shall have the right to request the return of supplies as you have stipulated.

Obama: I offered an amendment that the managers have already accepted pertaining to the supply of nuclear power reactor fuel in safeguarded civilian nuclear facilities. To further clarify this issue, is it the managers’ understanding that provision of fuel to the Government of India should be sized in a way to maintain a deterrent to Indian nuclear testing, while also providing protections against short-term fluctuations in the supply of nuclear fuel? In other words, is it your understanding that providing a fuel reserve to India is not intended to facilitate resumption in nuclear testing?

Lugar: Yes, that is our understanding.

Obama: Does the chairman believe that, as this agreement moves forward to the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG), the U.S. should work to ensure that other nations provide nuclear power reactor fuel in a similar fashion?

Lugar: Yes, I hope that would be the case.

The “deterrent against Indian testing” Obama sought by keeping India on a tight fuel-access leash is a goal enthusiastically embraced by the full Congress in passing the Hyde Act. According to the Act’s accompanying explanatory statement, the fuel reserve provided to New Delhi should not be “of a size that would enable India to break its commitments, or end its moratorium on nuclear testing, and [still] maintain its civil nuclear energy production despite unilateral or international sanctions.” It also records that U.S. officials, contradicting Dr. Singh’s lifetime-fuel claim in Parliament, had testified that America “does not intend to help India build a stockpile of nuclear fuel for the purpose of riding out any sanctions that might be imposed in response to Indian actions such as conducting another nuclear test.”

Without defining what constitutes a “reasonable” fuel requirement, the Act circumscribes India’s fuel access to “some fresh fuel stored, so as to minimize down time when reactor cores are removed.” In other words, the stockpiling of fuel may be permitted to cover only the next refuelling — a far cry from the lifetime stocks Dr. Singh had pledged.

To further crimp India’s fuel access, the Obama-authored stipulation allowing imports for only reasonable operating needs is coupled with the requirements of Hyde Act’s Section 104 (g) (2) (H) and Section 104 (g) (2) (J) that the President annually estimate the amount of uranium mined in India during the previous year and let Congress know whether the imported uranium had affected India’s rate of production of unsafeguarded fissile material.

Obama’s desire that any exemption for India from the rules of the 45-nation NSG similarly restrict Indian access to foreign fuel will be easy to realize, given that Washington has considerable leverage over the handful of international firms that monopolize the global reactor fuel business. To help maintain a tab on India’s nuclear activities, the Senate bill’s Section 108 (a) stipulated that Congress be kept fully informed on India’s: (i) material non-compliance with any obligation; (ii) new nuclear facility construction; (iii) fissile-material production; and (iv) changes in the operational status of nuclear installations. That provision became the Hyde Act’s Section 104 (g) (1)).

2. Obama helped insert another amendment to ensure that America did not facilitate civil nuclear exports to India by other states, if U.S. exports to New Delhi were terminated under American law. This effectively nullified Dr. Singh’s commitment to Parliament that if fuel shipments were suspended, “the U.S. and India would jointly convene a group of friendly supplier countries … to pursue such measures as would restore fuel supply to India.”

Obama’s amendment became Section 102 (6) in the Senate bill and was incorporated in the Hyde Act as Section 102 (13). Ominously, mirroring Obama’s criterion on “short-term fluctuations”, Congress has recorded that any “assurance of supply arrangements that the U.S. is party to will be concerned only with disruption of supply of fuel due to market failures or similar reasons, and not due to Indian actions that are inconsistent with the July 18, 2005, commitments, such as a nuclear-explosive test.”

To ensure that no firm in another NSG country exported to India on less-stringent terms, the Hyde Act’s Section 104 (g) (2) (C) is identical to the Senate bill’s Section 108 (b) (3) in mandating that the President’s cyclic “Implementation and Compliance Report” to Congress provide a description of any significant commerce between India and other countries that either was inconsistent with NSG guidelines or would not meet standards applicable to U.S.-origin material. The intent behind this provision is to use the threat of sanctions to block a proposed export by, say, a French or Russian firm on less-rigorous terms.

The point here is that Obama’s call for an effective “deterrent” against Indian testing is fully reflected in the final legislation, which aims to ensure that India would have little room for manoeuvre if the U.S. suspended or terminated cooperation. Also, as he desired, the legislation covers U.S. policy and actions in the NSG. It is thus no surprise that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice assured Congress barely four months ago that any NSG exemption for India will be “completely consistent with the obligations of the Hyde Act.”

Yet, despite this background and his broken promises to Parliament, Dr. Singh, with remarkable insouciance, still pitches for the deal, only to be held back by wiser counsel from Sonia Gandhi. And although a permanent test ban is built into the deal, a despairing Dr. Singh last week chose an unusual setting — a lengthy, prepared speech to less than a dozen service probationers — to make a curious policy pronouncement: “if the CTBT came into being, we will not sign it.” That inexplicably reversed India’s stance that it won’t come in the way of the CTBT’s entry into force.

Whether Obama becomes President or not, his legacy helps constrict India’s access and options under the deal. Indeed, that legacy exposes the myths still driving residual Indian interest in the deal, which Dr. Singh grudgingly acknowledged for the first time “has run into some difficulties.” These myths include the following:

■ the deal offers a magic-carpet ride to resolve India’s self-made uranium crunch by opening the path to unfettered access to foreign fuel;

■ unlike the conditions-laden U.S. waiver, the NSG will grant India a relatively “clean” exemption;

■ once the deal with the U.S. takes effect, New Delhi would gain access to civil nuclear items and materials from France and Russia on more-favourable political terms.

■ soaring oil prices justify greater emphasis on nuclear power.

There is little link between oil and nuclear energy, because oil is primarily used for transportation and the nuclear choice is for electricity generation.

Indeed, such myths show that if the now-stuck deal traverses to the next stages, India will be in for more nasty surprises.

But it is already clear that this deal cannot become a reality while George W. Bush is still President. Time has run out.

For example, to win congressional ratification, the cooperation agreement has to be submitted to Congress — along with a detailed presidential determination on India’s compliance with various preconditions — “for a period of 60 days of continuous session” before a joint resolution for approval can be taken up for consideration by the two legislative chambers. And despite the provision for a simple up-or-down vote — a practice that does not permit any amendment — the Hyde Act states that it will open to Congress to “pass a joint resolution of approval with conditions” by giving up the available “expedited procedures.”

The blunt fact is that it will be an Obama or McCain administration — and a new government in New Delhi — that will have the final say on the deal. The cheerleaders of the deal who have been shouting themselves hoarse thus need to hold their fire.

An Obama triumph — good for America and good for the world — will help add momentum to the U.S.-India relationship by freeing it of the albatross that the deal now represents.

Sikkim in India-China Relations

Posted on June 6, 2008 by Chellaney

Defending against martial arts

After Arunachal Pradesh, China is testing Indian defences in Sikkim

Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, June 6, 2008

After Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim has become a symbol of China’s hardening stance on territorial disputes with India. The only portion of the 4,057-kilometre Himalayan frontier with India that Beijing accepts as settled is the small 206-kilometre Sikkim-Tibet border, defined by the 1890 Anglo-Sikkim Convention. Yet, that has not prevented China from seeking to drag Sikkim into its boundary disputes with India. Consider the following developments:

One, Chinese forces last November destroyed some makeshift Indian army bunkers near Doka La, at the Sikkim-Bhutan-Tibet trijunction. Two, China now has laid claim to the “Finger Area”, a 2.1-square-kilometre tract that protrudes like a finger over the Sora Funnel valley, at Sikkim’s northernmost tip. Three, it has coupled a threat to destroy the Finger Area’s stone demarcations with a surge in cross-border forays. And four, it has objected to India’s move to beef up defences in the vulnerable Siliguri Corridor — the chicken neck that connects mainland India with the northeast.

Leverage, not soundness or legitimacy, has always defined China’s claims. Take the 1914 McMahon Line, which set the border between the then-independent Tibet and the northeastern stretch of the British Indian Empire extending into Burma. Beijing has accepted the McMahon Line with Burma but not with India, finding it more profitable to rail against that colonial-era line. While playing the Tibet card against India by laying claim to Arunachal on the basis of its putative historical ties to Tibet, China has employed its non-recognition of the McMahon Line to deter New Delhi from utilizing the Tibet card against it.

Before Sikkim merged with the Indian Union in 1975, Beijing had publicly accepted the 19th-century border line between Sikkim and Tibet. That is how Beijing got saddled with contradictory positions: rejection of the McMahon Line with India as a colonial imposition but acceptance of the Anglo-Sikkim Convention of older colonial vintage, even though the convention had been imposed on the Manchu Qing dynasty when it was unravelling. But given its revisionist craving against a status-quoist India, China is not the one to allow any contradiction to tame its primordial territorial urge.

India’s lamb-like approach has only been grist to the Chinese leverage-building mill. From Nehru’s grudging acceptance of Chinese suzerainty on Tibet to Vajpayee’s blithe recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, India has incrementally shed its main card — Tibet — and thereby allowed the aggressor state to shift the spotlight from its annexation of Tibet and Aksai Chin to its claim on Arunachal and assertiveness on Sikkim. Not surprisingly, India has failed to persuade China to agree even to a mutually defined line of control.

Take Sikkim. It is New Delhi that turned Sikkim into a bilateral issue, arming Beijing with leverage. Although Beijing had declined to accept Sikkim’s change of status from an Indian protectorate to an Indian state, no PM until Vajpayee attempted to raise that issue with China. The Sino-Indian disputes involve large chunks of territory, while Sikkim is not only a tiny state, but also Beijing has neither laid claim to it nor disputed its boundary. So China’s insistence on ploughing a lonely furrow on Sikkim was of little consequence.

If Beijing’s depiction of Sikkim as independent was germane to any issue, it was to its own oft-thrown bait of a “package settlement” with India. Sikkim, and the trans-Karakoram tract in occupied Kashmir that Pakistan ceded to China in 1963, do not fall in any of the three Chinese-identified sectors with India — eastern, middle and western. It was to probe whether the “package settlement” idea was a diversionary ruse or a plausible proposal that Indian negotiators, from the time the ongoing border talks began way back in 1981, quietly sought clarity on China’s Sikkim stance. The steadfast Chinese refusal to enter into a discussion either on the specifics of a possible package or on the gaps, as on Sikkim, showed that the ostensible offer was little more than rhetorical bait.

India’s China policy, however, was steered into uncharted waters in June 2003, when Vajpayee visited Beijing, two months after he had reversed course on Pakistan. Desperate in the twilight of his political career to fashion a legacy as a peacemaker, Vajpayee kowtowed in Beijing. He shifted India’s long-standing position on Tibet from it being an “autonomous” region within China to it being “part of the territory” of China. He linked his Tibet concession with supposed Chinese flexibility on Sikkim. Having turned Sikkim from a non-issue into a bilateral issue, he claimed credit for beginning “the process by which Sikkim will cease to be an issue in India-China relations”.

Five years later, China is seeking to ensure Sikkim will not cease to be a bilateral issue. After all, it has got what it wanted, including the Vajpayee-initiated reopening of the ancient Tibet-Sikkim trade route. It even got Vajpayee to accept a new border-talks framework focused on the illusive “package settlement”, allowing it to renege on its commitment to present maps showing its version of the frontline. That the border talks today have run aground is no accident: the new mechanism was intended to take India round and round the mulberry bush.

India’s diplomatic naïveté can be astonishing. During Premier Wen Jiabao’s 2005 visit, one of his officials handed a new Chinese map showing Sikkim in the same colour as India. Promptly, then Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran displayed that map before the media to triumphantly claim that Beijing had “recognized” Sikkim as part of India. He was followed by Manmohan Singh, who told the Lok Sabha on April 20, 2005: “During my meeting with Premier Wen, he stated that China regarded Sikkim as an ‘inalienable part of India’, and that Sikkim was no longer an issue in India-China relations”.

But has Beijing itself made any such statement to date unequivocally recognizing Sikkim as part of India? The answer is no. The clever practitioner of diplomacy that it is, Beijing has broken the Sikkim issue into umpteen parts, doling out two morsels to get New Delhi to open trade through the strategic Nathula Pass — a one and only reference to the “Sikkim state of the Republic of India”, found in a trade-related paragraph in a 2005 joint statement; and its cessation of cartographic aggression without any formal statement recognizing Sikkim’s present status, thus leaving open the option to resume the cartographic mischief at a later date if circumstances warrant. Also, the trade-related reference to the Sikkim state of India is as empty as the 1954 Panchsheel Agreement’s reference to specific mountain passes and posts, which Nehru misconstrued as Chinese recognition of the Indo-Tibetan frontier despite Beijing saying it had signed a border-trade accord and not a border accord.

Contrast this wily approach with the callow way India has forfeited its bargaining chips. The more India has stripped itself of leverage, the more emboldened and hardline China has become. The government conceded in the Lok Sabha on April 22 that Chinese forces have stepped up “regular cross-border activities” in the past “three years”. More than three dozen Chinese forays into Sikkim alone have been reported so far this year.

Today, as China aggressively probes Indian defences in Sikkim and keeps New Delhi under psychological pressure, India ought to realize its own contribution to encouraging such assertiveness. The newly opened army memorial near Nathula to the 267 martyrs who laid down their lives defending Sikkim against attacking Chinese forces in 1958, 1962 and 1967 is also a cenotaph to India’s reluctance to learn from the past.

Map courtesy The Economist, May 1999

U.S. Policy on Burma

Posted on June 6, 2008 by Chellaney

El celo de la primera dama

LA VANGUARDIA, May 31, 2008

Por Brahma Chellaney, profesor de estudios estratégicos del Centro de Investigación Política de Nueva Delhi:

Un desastre natural suele ser ocasión propicia para apartar a un lado las diferencias políticas y mostrar compasión. No obstante, la Birmania devastada por el ciclón, gobernada por elites militares ultranacionalistas y rapaces, temerosas de sanciones de parte de Occidente, se ha visto presionada para franquear sus áreas devastadas a la ayuda humanitaria o bien enfrentarse a una intervención armada de signo asimismo humanitario.

La politización de la ayuda ha oscurecido el papel de una protagonista cuyos esfuerzos han contribuido a ejercer mayores presiones sobre los generales birmanos. En cuanto el ciclón Nargis,con vientos de hasta 190 kilómetros por hora, devastó el delta del Irawadi, la esposa del presidente Bush, Laura, lanzó públicamente improperios contra los aislados gobernantes birmanos. En una comparecencia sin precedentes en la sala de prensa de la Casa Blanca – dominio tradicional del presidente y del secretario de Estado- Laura Bush peroró sobre política exterior y acusó a la junta birmana del elevado número de víctimas del ciclón. Y en diciembre, Laura Bush dijo en Nueva Delhi que “India, uno de los principales socios comerciales de Birmania, ya no vende armas a la junta”, para sorpresa de la audiencia.

A decir verdad, siendo China un suministrador de armas de confianza desde hace 20 años y pudiendo abastecerse de armas a través de Singapur y Rusia, la junta apenas precisa de armamento indio. India, en cualquier caso, tampoco llevará la contraria a la primera dama estadounidense, imbuida de furor moral y religioso.

Por otra parte, no es difícil optar por la prédica ética contra Birmania, uno de los países del mundo más endebles y en situación más crítica. Sancionar a Birmania de vez en cuando se había convertido en un pasatiempo tan dilecto al presidente Bush que sólo 24 horas antes del ciclón anunció otra tanda de sanciones. Ninguna instancia mundial, sin embargo, ha llegado a sugerir medidas penales (moderadas) contra China por su permanente represión brutal en Tíbet, pues las sanciones acarrearían pérdida de empleos y otros inconvenientes económicos a Occidente.

De hecho, incitado por su esposa, Bush ha firmado más medidas para sancionar a Birmania en los últimos cinco años que contra cualquier otro país. La cruzada de Laura Bush contra la junta militar que se considera a sí misma defensora de la unidad e identidad cultural birmana, predominantemente budista, obedece a la inspiración encarnada en algunas iglesias cristianas que cuentan con notables minorías étnicas, aparte de una reunión mantenida al parecer en aquel país con una víctima cristiana de una violación. En cambio, tanto Laura Bush como su marido encontraron la senda despejada en relación con una intervención militar en la política de países vecinos de Birmania, como Bangladesh y Tailandia.

Aunque la junta militar birmana accedió al poder en 1962, las primeras sanciones estadounidenses de importancia no llegaron hasta 1997. No obstante, el punto de mira sobre Birmania se fijó con mayor precisión y fuerza bajo el mandato de Bush.

Actualmente, Birmania se halla atrapada entre las sanciones lideradas por Estados Unidos y la creciente influencia de China. Azuzado por el diablo que le pisa los talones, el país se inclina hacia el profundo mar azul de la benevolencia china.

Al tratar a Birmania como un títere en el marco de un juego geopolítico más amplio e intentar llevar al país ante el Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas, la Casa Blanca no hace más que aumentar la necesidad de protección política de la junta procedente de una China dotada de poder de veto, con la consiguiente obligación de agradecer tal protección a Pekín. Muestra de ello ha sido la firma de un contrato gasista de 30 años de vigencia.

Las iniciativas estadounidenses no sólo han obligado a Birmania a desplazarse del no alineamiento al alineamiento, sino que han motivado una dependencia mayor de la política estadounidense respecto de Pekín en lo concerniente a Birmania.

Como en el caso de Corea del Norte, Bush externaliza alegremente en China una parte de su política con relación a Birmania. Sin embargo, la política estadounidense acusa también el peso del celo misionero de Laura Bush sobre Birmania. Lejos de mejorar la situación de los derechos humanos en el país, este miope activismo ha contribuido a reforzar a la junta. La amenaza de una invasión por causas humanitarias de Birmania hiede a recurso desesperado y apunta a un deseo de valerse de la herramienta humanitaria para provocar un cambio político.

Ahora resulta que una mujer no electa ni titular de responsabilidad alguna secuestra la política de Estados Unidos para promover paradójicamente elecciones libres y responsabilidad pública en Birmania. Y el doblemente electo y renacido cristiano Bush da fe de hallarse bajo la influencia de su esposa, como se constata mediante la expresión “Laura y yo” en su último anuncio de sanciones contra Birmania.

Pero, como dice la Biblia, “no hay peor ciego que el que no quiere ver”.

Hush! Hush! Not A Word

Posted on June 5, 2008 by Chellaney

Strategic Imperative/Brahma Chellaney

Hush-Hush is Bush Word on Nuclear Deal

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, June 1-15, 2008

The more the Indo-US deal has progressed, the more the conditions it has attracted and the greater the consequent imperative to keep key elements under wraps. Nearly three years after it was unveiled as a “historic” breakthrough in US-Indian relations, the deal’s future remains uncertain. Even if Prime Minister Manmohan Singh were to rupture his party’s relationship with the Left by taking the deal to the governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, can he ensure that the deal will take effect without attracting more odious conditions at the subsequent stages involving the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers’ Group and the US Congress? The deal has already divided India. And the possibility that the deal will get the final clearances without the attachment of further grating conditions seems remote. A showdown with the Left will break the present government without guaranteeing a final deal on largely palatable terms.

In any event, a deal of such strategic import that will lock India in perpetual, legally irrevocable commitments with the IAEA and arm the US with leverage ought not to be turned into a partisan issue domestically. Just as the Bush administration ensured congressional passage of the Hyde Act with bipartisan support, even if it meant loading the legislation with conditions unrelated to civil nuclear cooperation, Dr. Singh needs to build what he had promised long ago — a broad national consensus in support of the deal. To press ahead without such consensus would be a betrayal of national trust. In fact, that act would be doubly ironical: not only has the Indian Parliament been shut out from closely scrutinizing the deal, the US Congress will get a second chance to examine the deal when it comes in its final form, with the approval contingent on bipartisan support.

In that light, the Bush administration’s latest gag order on its written responses to congressional questions is an attempt to keep the Indian public in the dark on the deal’s larger and long-term implications. With New Delhi revealing little from the beginning, the Indian public had depended on US disclosures to understand the meaning of the various twists and turns in a continuing saga. But in recent months, new information has been hard to come by, with US officials becoming tight-lipped and the administration asking Congress to keep under wraps information that ought to be in the public domain.

Why all this secrecy about information the executive branch has shared with the legislature? Even though the deal is between the world’s largest and most-powerful democracies, hush-hush is the word on both sides. Take New Delhi’s own posture. It has refused to explain to Parliament and the public why it has willingly accepted an array of conditions under the bilateral 123 Agreement — conditions that range from India’s grant of an open-ended right to the supplier to suspend supplies forthwith simply by issuing a one-year termination notice, to the absence of any dispute-settlement mechanism such as an international arbitral tribunal that finds mention in the Japan-US 123 Agreement.

Even the men roped in by the government have not been very forthcoming on why they now support the deal. Take A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and Brajesh Mishra. Mishra has gone from being a critic to a proponent without explaining his volte face. All he says is that he was officially briefed and now “hopes” and “believes” the deal is no longer detrimental to Indian interests. But why doesn’t he share with the public any new facts or information he has received? Kalam’s coming out in support of the deal raises even more troubling questions. In 1999, as defence adviser, he came out publicly in support of India’s signature on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Now he lends support to a deal that drags India through the backdoor into the CTBT. He has declared, “If at any time there was a fear that national security would be compromised … we can at any time withdraw (from the deal)”. That suggests he hasn’t studied the deal: the 123 Agreement, for instance, makes explicitly clear that once it enters into force, India cannot free itself of its obligation to maintain international inspections in perpetuity on its entire civil nuclear programme.

Can pompous personal opinions help sideline or suppress hard facts? Given that India still does not have minimum deterrence against China, how justifiable is New Delhi’s focus on deal-making rather than on deterrent-building? And will playing hush-hush rescue a misbegotten deal?

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Eastward movement of global power and influence

Posted on May 31, 2008 by Chellaney

The Orient Express

Brahma Chellaney
May 29, 2008 India Today

Rivals: How The Power Struggle Between China, India And Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade by Bill Emmott Allen Lane Price: Rs 795, Pages: 328 The Second World: Empires And Influence In The New Global Order by Parag Khanna Allen Lane Price: Rs 695, Pages: 496 The eastward movement of power and influence, once concentrated in the West, is now the subject of an increasing number of books that are coming out by the dozen. These two volumes belong to this genre. While Bill Emmott’s focus is on the three largest Asian powers, Parag Khanna looks at the global geopolitical marketplace and determines the likely winners and losers. Emmott’s diffidence to put forward a central thesis is more than made up for by Khanna’s boldness in sketching out the next generation of global geopolitics. They symbolise different styles and generations. The changing global equations are reflected in new realities. These include the waning relevance of the international structures the US helped establish after its World War II triumph; the rise of Asia as the world’s main creditor and economic locomotive; and greater international divisiveness, including on core global challenges. While the world is not yet multipolar, it is no longer unipolar, as it had been from the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse till the end of the 1990s—a period during which America failed to fashion a new liberal world order under its direction. What we have today is a world still in transition. The ongoing power shifts are linked to Asia’s phenomenal economic rise, the speed and scale of which has no parallel in world history. The seat of ancient civilisations and home to the majority of the world’s population, Asia is bouncing back after a relatively short period of decline in history. Its share of the world’s economy had totalled 60 per cent in 1820, at the advent of the industrial revolution, declining sharply over the next 125 years. Today, Asia already accounts for 40 per cent of global production—a figure that could rise to 60 per cent by 2050, when three of the world’s four largest economies (China, India, the US and Japan) would be Asian. Asia’s rise, while promoting greater international equity, need not necessarily mean the decline of the West. There is little evidence to suggest Asia is rising at the expense of the West. The spread of prosperity will signify more stakeholders in peace and stability. The EU’s attraction, for example, lies in its readiness to share the European pie with new member-states it admits into its fold. Shared interests entail shared responsibilities. That, in turn, promotes a greater distribution of power. But like some other authors, Khanna and Emmott have rushed to conclude that the spread of prosperity to more countries implies the diminution of the power of the US. American pre-eminence, Emmott writes, “will soon be over (if it is not already), and for reasons more fundamental and enduring than America’s post-Iraq weakness”. Khanna is more blunt: the moment of US supremacy is over, replaced by the imperative to “renew American competitiveness”. According to Khanna, “America’s imperial overstretch is occurring in lockstep with its declining economic dependence, undermining the very foundation of its global leadership”. America’s vulnerabilities can no longer be hidden. Today, the US is the world’s leading debtor and top importer of both manufactured goods and oil, and runs by far the largest current account deficit. A shift towards multipolarity is unstoppable, with the emergence of major new players. But for the next several decades, the US will easily remain the world’s most powerful state militarily and will also be the leader in scientific innovations. In 2050, the US is likely to still be influential enough to do almost anything, but not powerful enough to do everything by itself. Emmott’s China-India-Japan theme has seemingly been inspired by this reviewer’s 2006 book, Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan, the first study of that strategic triangle. But Emmott’s book, contrary to its title, focuses not on the “power struggle” between these “rivals” and how that will “shape our next decade”, but on their supposed strengths and their determination to regain their historical power. More journalistic than scholarly, the book makes desultory recommendations— half of them addressed to the US—that have little to do with its title. Khanna’s easy-to-read, insightful book offers a rich tour of the emerging geopolitical landscape stretching from Asia and the Middle East to Eastern Europe and South America. He sees the US, EU and China as the only great powers and clubs dozens of other countries, including India, Russia and Japan, as the new “Second World”, comprising swing-states that will determine which superpower gains the upper hand. The geopolitics of the 21st century, he writes, will centre on the “new Big Three”—not Russia, a petrostate facing depopulation and run by the “Kremlin-Gazprom oligarchy”; not the Islamic world; and not India, which he sees as lacking both clear, long-term goals and strategic appetite. History testifies that without establishing primacy in its own neighbourhood, no country has sustained itself as a great power. But India continues to be tormented even by smaller neighbours. So Khanna’s scepticism on India may be right. Khanna’s projected big picture appears less plausible: the Big Three will make the rules for all, and the other states will be left merely to “choose their suitors in this post-American world”. He forgets that his Big Three have interests that won’t be easy to reconcile, posing a hurdle to their rule-setting. While China wants a multipolar world and a unipolar Asia, the US wants a multipolar Asia but a unipolar world. Despite having travelled to some 40 “Second-World” countries to research the book, Khanna speciously concludes that these states are destined to play second fiddle to the “Big Three”. He couldn’t be more wrong. (c) India Today, 2007