CHAPTER 5 INDIA AND THE USA

‘The world’s most powerful and the world’s most populous democracies should work together.’

Spokesman for the US Administration 2006

PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH’S visit to India in March 2006 was a turning point in India’s relationship with the USA. For the first time, it seemed as if India was being welcomed to the big table, for whatever reason, and India’s Congress-led administration seemed keen to foster better ties with the USA.

At the heart of this surprising new rapport lies India’s nuclear technology. India insists that it needs nuclear power because its fast-growing economy urgently needs an energy source, and India has very few energy sources of its own. The problem is that it also has nuclear arms. After the 1998 nuclear tests, the US was highly critical of both India and Pakistan, and imposed both diplomatic and technological sanctions on both countries. The 9/11 attack, the Iraq war and the need for help in the war on terror eased Pakistan’s path back into the fold. India’s economic success – and maybe a growing concern about China’s expansion – helped India.

Working together

Bush’s visit was just the culmination of a process of moving together that had begun with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Washington. According to the US administration, ‘the world’s most powerful and the world’s most populous democracies should work together’. It was a neat summary of high-sounding common purpose, but it was never specified exactly on what they should be working together. It seemed clear to most that the aim was to help stabilise relationships with the USA’s needed ally Pakistan and also to provide a counterweight to the growing power of China in Asia.

While Bush was in India, he and Manmohan Singh started the path to an agreement on nuclear technology, which was signed by both parties in December 2006. It was only a first step and a wary first step at that, but it was a genuine agreement. The idea was that the USA, which dominates the world’s nuclear supplies, would help India with its nuclear power programme. In return, India would accept regular inspections of its nuclear plants.

The amazing thing is that India, having never been part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and having actually tested both nuclear bombs and nuclear missiles, is accepted into the nuclear family. Iran, meanwhile, which has signed the treaty, is hounded for, as it claims, simply wanting to develop nuclear power. The power of realpolitik is all too starkly revealed.

Anti-American voices

There are plenty of people in India, both on the left and the right, who criticise the Congress administration’s pro-US position. On the one side are India’s liberals who are angry at the US occupation of Iraq, the US’s human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo in Cuba and the way the US seems to throw its weight around. On the other are the BJP, who attack the friendship on Hindu nationalist grounds, arguing that India should be more independent. The more hawkish in the Indian government argue that this agreement gives the USA a stranglehold on Indian foreign policy – and that a little bit of pressure from Washington will cause India to sway like a reed in the wind. They argue that this has already happened with a proposed natural gas pipeline between Iran and India via Pakistan, which some believe was scuppered by the Americans because of the policy of isolating Iran.

Yet if that is the case, Manmohan Singh has been a little tougher in his dealings with Washington than might have been expected. In a speech to the Indian parliament when signing the agreement, Singh said India would not accept any ‘extraneous conditions’ added to the agreement by the USA. ‘India will find it difficult to and cannot accept any such conditions beyond those already agreed to in the understandings with the United States.’ He warned that the negotiations ahead would be tricky. The kind of ‘extraneous’ conditions he was talking about was the US administration’s requirement to report annually to Congress about India’s ties with Iran’s nuclear programme. The US administration has tried to play down these fears, but the final agreement is still being wrangled over.

Tiffs or crises?

Meanwhile, the USA and India have come into confrontation over other issues. The USA did not back India’s move to become a permanent member of the Security Council, which would finally give it the world power status it feels it deserves. The USA is also believed to have blocked India’s candidate for the post of secretary general of the United Nations. Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, on the other hand, backed India’s promotion to a permanent position on the Security Council, and in return India backed Venezuela’s application to become a non-permanent member. George Bush was so upset by this championing of the renegade Chavez that he apparently spent ten minutes directly on the phone to Manmohan Singh in an effort to dissuade him. Singh was unmoved.

At the same time, there was another source of tension between the USA and India. In the run-up to the 2007 G8 conference of the world’s leading industrialised nations, Bush, under fire for resisting tough action on global warming, called for India and China to join him in a long-term plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The implication was that India would have to cut emissions as much as the USA. Although energy consumption is rocketing in India, it still contributes less than 3 per cent of global emissions of carbon and under the Kyoto protocol, India, as a developing nation, is not required to cut emissions. Although they said nothing in public, in private they were incensed by Bush’s proposal that they should join the USA in making cutbacks. ‘We are not responsible for global warming, so they cannot hold us up to it now,’ one official is reported as saying. ‘What is our per capita greenhouse gas emission? It is nothing.’

India’s environment secretary Vishwanath Anand argued that the country was already spending 2.17 per cent of its budget on climate-change issues and its existing energy policies would cut emissions by 25 per cent by 2025. Anand also made the pointed remark that India was trying to pursue clean energy alternatives with a nuclear energy deal with the USA, except that the deal had got delayed by differences between the two sides. The Reuters news service reported an unnamed foreign ministry official as saying, ‘Let them give us clean energy first. Then we can think of emission cuts.’