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The agreement between the US and India paving the way for ‘full (?) civilian nuclear co-operation’ is now a reality. After Independence, no other matter of public policy bearing on relations between two countries, especially one as esoteric and arcane as the nuclear deal, had been subjected to such microscopic scrutiny.

It is doubtful, however, whether the masses, eking out their hard-pressed existence amidst a sea of hardships, were able to make head or tail of the complex debate which kept the country agog for more than three years. The cogitation was largely confined to the intelligentsia, but still, it brought home to the Government the important lesson that it could not get away with doing whatever it pleased simply because it suited its purposes.

The regrettable part, though, is the great lengths to which the Government went to concoct all manner of spurious arguments to explain away whatever was manifestly hurtful to India’s interest, and, in the bargain, create a distorted picture in the public mind of the working of the American political process.

For instance, all its contentions — that the Hyde Act did not apply since it was a domestic legislation; that the 123 Agreement superseded it as well as the final Bill before the US Congress; that it guaranteed uninterrupted fuel supply; that the interpretation or complexion the US Administration put on the contents of the Agreement in its letter to the Chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee (which was deliberately withheld from the Indian people and Parliament) should be ignored as an “internal matter” — were flatly contradicted every time by the US President, Mr George Bush; Secretary of State, Ms Condoleezza Rice and their senior functionaries in their public pronouncements and Congressional testimonies.

The latest clarification provided by Ms Rice to the US Senate, that India faced “the most serious consequences” such as “automatic cut-off of co-operation” if it were to carry out a test, means that India has permanently signed away the one paramount strategic option it had. Sensitive, dual use of technologies is also out of bounds, and the President has made it clear that uninterrupted fuel supply is only a political understanding and not a legal commitment.

Even after all this, the Government is making a last ditch effort to spread m(d)isinformation by asserting that the impact of any adverse features of the Act coming out of the US Congress can be nullified by the President by affixing suitably worded remarks while signing it. Whatever reservations the US President, as the head of the executive branch under the US Constitution, may express on an enactment, they have no force of law and will have no effect on the enforcement of the explicit and mandatory provisions of the law as passed by the legislative branch.

It will be wrong for the Government to imagine that with the signing of the Agreement, its troubles are at an end. Already, the Government has succumbed to the US fiat regarding Iran. In fact, the devil resides in the implementation. Unlike India, the US is a hard state which is accustomed to extracting its pound of flesh. It takes the enforcement laws and conditions of any agreement it enters into particularly seriously.

Soon, therefore, the US will begin sending streams of officials swarming over safeguarded and unsafeguarded facilities and seeking information on the entire range of the activities of the Atomic Energy Department for submission of reports to the Congress as prescribed by the Hyde Act. The Government will come under severe pressure of various interests in the matter of screening of tenders and awarding of contracts. This is the time for the people and Parliament to intensify their watchfulness to the utmost.

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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