Author: Yashwant Sinha
Publication: The Asian Age
Date: August 20, 2006
For some of us who have been striving to ensure
that the one-sided India-US nuclear deal does not pass muster in Indian Parliament,
August 17, 2006 when the Rajya Sabha debated the issue, was a day of partial
satisfaction, of partial victory. I have no doubt in my mind that if we, in
the various political parties, other writers, commentators and editors, and
the nuclear scientists had not expressed our reservations against the deal,
the Prime Minister would not have been compelled to offer the clarifications
he offered in Rajya Sabha on that day. Let us not forget that when the House
of Representatives of the US Congress passed the Bill, there was no official
response from the government of India. In fact, through background briefings
of a section of the media which is blindly supporting the deal, the government
sent out a message that it was happy at the outcome.
August 17 is a victory of sorts because the
Prime Minister has been forced to dismount from his high horse. But a large
number of questions remain, which the Prime Minister deliberately ducked that
day. Even when I put some of these questions to him directly and pointedly
at the end of the debate, he decided to remain glued to his seat and chose
not to respond to them. If we want an equal and mutually beneficial deal with
the US, these questions must be answered satisfactorily. And until that happens,
we must not give up.
The Prime Minister reiterated once again that
there will be no shifting of the goalposts from the July 18, 2005 statement.
I had, in my intervention in Rajya Sabha, made the point that some of the
goalposts had already been shifted from July 18. I even listed them point-wise.
But the Prime Minister chose to ignore these questions. The following is the
list of questions asked to the Prime Minister and which he deliberately chose
to ignore in his reply:
1. I challenged the basis of the deal, namely
energy security. I quoted facts and figures to prove how the approach was
fundamentally flawed. I asked the Prime Minister to share with the House his
understanding of the economics of nuclear energy compared to other sources
of energy. He did not reply to this point. I also asked him to state the kind
of investment which was needed even to have a meagre 20,000 MW of nuclear
energy by 2020. He again did not reply.
2. I asked him to share with the House the
financial cost of the separation of our nuclear facilities between civilian
and military. I reminded him that at no stage has the government taken Parliament
into confidence with regard to this cost which some have estimated at US $40
billion. He once again chose not to share this information with Parliament.
3. He did not explain why his interpretation
of the deal and the US interpretation of the deal have remained so diametrically
opposed to each other all these 13 months.
4. I asked him why we have accepted a water-tight
separation plan which does not apply to nuclear weapon states. As is well
known, nuclear weapon states accept only voluntary, revocable safeguards while
perpetual inspections by the IAEA apply solely to non-nuclear weapon states.
He kept quiet.
5. I asked him why the fast breeder programme,
which is based entirely on our own technology, has been offered for safeguards
in future in the separation plan when he had assured the nation that it will
not be brought within the safeguards. He kept quiet.
6. I asked him why the Cirus experimental
reactor, which as Arun Shourie said, produced a third of our weapons grade
plutonium, had been included in the list of civilian facilities and the fuel
core of Apsara was being sought to be shifted from its present location. He
ducked this question.
7. I quoted the US secretary of state Condoleezza
Rice's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 5,
2006 where she said, "We have been very clear with the Indians that the
permanence of the safeguards is permanence of the safeguards, without condition.
In fact, we reserve the right, should India test, as it has agreed not to,
or should India violate in any way IAEA safeguard agreement to which it would
be adhering, that the deal from our point of view would at that point be off."
The Prime Minister told the House that India would not accept any obligation
in the bilateral agreement not to test. Secretary Rice has said the opposite
and has asserted as highlighted earlier that we have already agreed not to
test. Who should we believe?
8. I asked the Prime Minister specifically
whether the US actually opposed the supply of fuel for Tarapur by the Russians
recently despite their commitment in the July 18 agreement to facilitate such
supply. He did not reply.
9. My colleague Arun Shourie asked him pointedly
about the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty. In the July 18, 2005 statement,
we have agreed to "work with" the US for the conclusion of this
treaty. The question is has the US agreed to work with us or does it expect
us to toe whatever line it enunciates? This is exactly what has happened.
Reliable verification is a key issue of this treaty.
Our consistent position has been that observance
of obligations under the treaty must be verifiable. Yet, the draft which the
US has presented to the Committee on Disarmament does not contain any such
provision. Arun Shourie wanted to know what government of India's position
on this issue was. It was met with resounding silence.
The principles of reciprocity, parity and
sequencing of the various steps as enunciated in the July 18, 2005 statement
have already been violated by the US with impunity. Thus, based on what has
already happened, not on what is likely to happen, the July 18 statement is
in tatters. What is going to happen to it when the final Bill is adopted by
the US Congress is horrendous from our point of view. And yet, we choose to
bury our head in the sand in the face of the gathering storm and pretend that
all is well.
I was disappointed when Sitaram Yechury rose
in Rajya Sabha at the end of the Prime Minister's speech, even after I had
expressed my reservations about it, and suggested that the Prime Minister's
reply should be taken as the Sense of the House. I immediately disagreed with
his suggestion. But I must note here that there is a fundamental difference
between our position and the position of the CPI(M). The CPI(M) had criticised
the 1998 nuclear tests. They are against India becoming a nuclear weapon state.
So, their concerns did not include concerns relating to the weapons programme,
which incidentally is our basic concern. The CPI(M) also accepts the July
18, 2005 statement about which we have reservations. They are also reconciled
to the deviations and departures which have already taken place from the July
18 statement.
I began my speech in Rajya Sabha with these
words, "I propose to approach this task not in a partisan manner, but
in as objective a manner, as fair a manner as possible, and I expect that
those who will respond from the government's side will also keep this in mind
and respond to our concerns taking this as an issue of supreme national importance."
I was disappointed, therefore, when the three speakers from the Congress Party
including the minister of state for external affairs, Anand Sharma, indulged
in "tu tu main main."
But the Prime Minister was even more disappointing.
He gave the House an overdose of his biography which was entirely unnecessary
because nobody had attacked him personally. Was he responding to his friends
in his own party? His remark that he inherited a bankrupt economy from me
in 1991 was in poor taste. Dr Manmohan Singh was the economic adviser to the
then Prime Minister, Mr Chandrashekhar. In that capacity he used to not only
attend all Cabinet meetings but was also fully involved in economic management.
Nobody, therefore, should know better than him what we had inherited when
we came into office in November 1990.
His mentor and the famous economist I.G. Patel
in a lecture delivered at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore on
October 28, 1991 had this to say: "If the present crisis is the greatest
that we have faced since independence … it is because successive governments
in the Eighties chose to abdicate their responsibilities to the nation for
the sake of short-term partisan political gains and indeed out of sheer political
cynicism." He went on to blame the Rajiv Gandhi regime directly for this
crisis. He called the Chandrashekhar government feckless but added that, "The
Chandrashekhar government began to behave more responsibly than most people
had expected." It would have been better, therefore, if the Prime Minister
had shown greater intellectual honesty than he did while making this entirely
uncalled for remark.
We have only partially succeeded in dissuading
the Prime Minister from treading the dangerous path of the India-US nuclear
deal. The struggle is far from over. I hope Lok Sabha will keep up the pressure
when it debates the nuclear deal. I hope the scientists who issued the statement
will keep up the pressure when they meet the Prime Minister on August 26,
2006. I have already said in Rajya Sabha that if the deal goes through in
the shape that the Americans have given it and even if this government accepts
such a deal, it cannot bind India in future.
Yashwant Sinha is a former Union minister
for finance and for external affairs
