STATES OF MATTER. Notes from a nuclear family

“I don’t care to belong to any club that would have me as a member”, said Groucho Marx. Not given to great self-regard, he was an extreme sceptic about the value of associating with people like himself. The economist Kaushik Basu has used this manner of self-aversion as one among many models of how individuals value associations, such as clubs. A spectrum of possibilities exists. Individuals could seek membership of a club not for tangible benefits — such as a gym or a swimming pool — but for reasons of prestige. Symmetric reasons could operate with club managements: they could offer membership to individuals who would enhance the prestige of the institution, or for more mundane considerations such as rendering a favour or increasing revenue.

Basu modelled best possible outcomes for both sides in an economic equilibrium framework. A club looking to maximise revenue could charge an extortionate membership fee from knowing how keen an aspirant member is to gain entry. Its short-term gain though could be neutralised over time. Once entry credentials are waived for a fee, perceptions about the value of membership would diminish. The next entrant could possibly slip through under a lower threshold, without paying the premium the club earlier imposed. If continued over a length of time, the process would render the membership itself worthless.

India registered a marginal uptick towards achieving a long-held ambition when Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on his recent visit to Washington DC, extracted a commitment that the US would shed all equivocation about India’s membership of the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG). The NSG was set up to deter the manner of breakout — within the discriminatory non-proliferation order — that India carried out with its first nuclear test in 1974. India’s keenness to gain entry into a club that would not have it as a member, stands Groucho Marx on his head.

What is the special benediction that India seeks from membership? The NSG is a coalition of the willing, without the force of law. Membership of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has been an explicit requirement for membership. And the NSG’s central pledge is to ensure that all supplies of material and technology are safeguarded from diversion to weapon purposes.

In terms of the overall balance, India is more buyer than seller in the global marketplace. It has a limited capability in the installation of heavy water reactor systems, which is not a greatly favoured technology standard in a stagnant or even contracting global market for nuclear energy. Domestic manufacturing in this family of reactors moreover, is barely able to keep pace with the scale of nuclear capacity expansion India has planned.

Neither does NSG membership hold out great benefits for India as a buyer. The NSG exemption India was granted in 2008 — with the active patronage of the US — has already done all the hard work to clear the way for India’s purchases of nuclear material and technology.

India’s intense diplomatic push for entry into the NSG qualifies as a case study of club membership sought for reasons of vanity. And if the US, as the chief patron of India’s case, has shown a willingness to lower the threshold for membership, it is likely to impose extortionate costs elsewhere.

Despite intense efforts to spin a web of mystification around the matter, NPT membership has been a key requirement for NSG membership, strongly underlined in the most recent reformulation of the rules, in the Aspen Plenary of 2001. If India secures a lowering of this threshold requirement, it would be a favour to be requited elsewhere. Sharing of military logistics, on which an agreement has reportedly been drafted during Modi’s most recent visit to the US, is one reciprocal favour India would have to grant. Another may be the assumption of a role within the US pivot to Asia, which involves an active policy of military containment as far as China is concerned.

The US practice of balance-of-power diplomacy involves a constant shifting and shuffling of alliances. From a lifetime spent on the inside track, often directing the most devious shifts in strategy, Henry Kissinger has recalled in a recent book that China in 1979 opened a warfront against Vietnam “with the moral support, diplomatic backing, and intelligence cooperation of the United States”. China had been angered by Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia to topple the execrable Pol Pot regime, and the US was desperate to prevent the emergence of an Indochinese federation under Hanoi’s control.

Priorities have now been reversed. In late-May, US President Barack Obama visited Vietnam in what was billed a historic effort at reconciliation. With one eye firmly fixed on China’s growing clout and neighbourhood threat perceptions over unresolved maritime security issues, he announced the lifting of the arms embargo on Vietnam.

Eagerly wading into the melee, India offered soon afterwards to supply Vietnam with the Brahmos cruise missile it has developed with Russian collaboration. It did not seem particularly concerned that Russia may be committed to neutrality in matters involving China and Vietnam.

Similar balance-of-power calculations in India’s near neighbourhood saw the US embrace Pakistan and its Taliban clients in Afghanistan, before the violent recoil of 2001. There again, India has tagged along, often buffeted by unforeseen complications. That will likely remain the case as long as India remains in the slipstream of another country’s balance-of-power calculations.

Creating a balance uniquely to its advantage seems a challenge too great for those in power today.

Sukumar Muralidharan is an independent writer and researcher based in Gurgaon

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