Former external affairs minister in the previous Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition government Jaswant Singh has asserted that he and his party's opposition to the US-India civilian nuclear agreement is not a case of 'sour grapes', because they did not make this deal happen even though it was then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee who first initiated the strategic partnership with the United States.
Buttonholed by rediff.com, after he appeared with the other protagonist of the US-India strategic dialogue that followed India's Pokhran nuclear tests in May 1998 -- former deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration Strobe Talbott -- Jaswant Singh said that although many experts and analysts who are in favor of the nuclear deal attribute his and the BJP's opposition to the accord to 'sour grapes', it was an inherent provision in the deal that made it unpalatable to the opposition.
He also took a crack at those who dismiss him and Talbott's opposition as 'sour grapes', by quipping, "We are not given to eating sour grapes."
Jaswant Singh said he had no problem in being denied the glory of negotiating and signing this agreement as had the Manmohan Singh government and the Bush administration after they (the Vajpayee government and the Clinton administration) did the hard work, as long as the direction is correct.
"That's alright. I've no difficulty as long as the direction is correct. But because we did the hard work, I also know the pitfalls in the path," Jaswant Singh said.
Jaswant Singh strongly defended Vajpayee's attack on the agreement and the BJP's argument that Dr Singh had been suckered into this deal, saying, "He (Vajpayee) is the tallest figure in the country's polity and he is the architect of this entire strategic partnership and as the architect, is pointing out that the direction may be correct, but the detail is filled with difficulty."
Jaswant Singh acknowledged that people like Talbott were opposed to the deal because they "are obviously committed to non-proliferation, (but) that's a different matter."
But he predicted that the current "see-saw will continue to take place, because we are addressing it in two different directions. The United States of America says it's about non-proliferation, the prime minister of India says it's about energy. So which of the two are we pursuing."
"These are elementary questions," he said, and when asked why it can't be about both, replied, "then the prime minister must say so to Parliament."
Jaswant Singh said that among the difficulties in the deal -- besides China's likely opposition to it in the Nuclear Suppliers Group -- other problems with it were the Additional Protocol that India has to sign in order to consummate the deal.
"Thirdly, there is a real difficulty about restraint on further testing. Therefore, on the questions of technological development, there are difficulties on the restraint of fissile material. Fissile material restraint has to be global and it has to be verified. These are some of the difficulties," he added.
Earlier, in his usual rambling, laboured and soporific monotone, Jaswant Singh traced the genesis of the US-India strategic partnership and implied that the Dr Singh government was really reaping the benefits of a inevitable evolution of nuclear cooperation arrangement negotiated by the Vajpayee government with the Republican administration in January 2004 with the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership.
Talbott, who is also against the deal for different reasons, argued that even though the agreement "has created the appearance of putting the nuclear disagreement behind us, in fact, I fear that it's not entirely that this disagreement is behind us and the US-India relationship may continue to be conducted on a narrower band than the commonality of interests between us requires."
"I still remain very confident that this deal is going to be the law of the land, very likely at some point during the lame-duck session of the Congress. But that isn't going to end the debate, not the least because there are certainly going to be aspects to it in terms of the Congressional action that are going to remain controversial in India," Talbott said.
Talbott, currently president of The Brookings Institution -- a leading Washington think tank-- predicted that "Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is going to succeed but with some effort in pushing back against those who feel that there are unacceptable provisions in what would eventually emerge from the Congress."
"I regret that because it's going to keep us excessively focused on what is an extremely important area, not just for the United States and India to deal with, but for the whole world to deal with and that's going to be to the exclusion or at least to the diminishment of the United States' and India's ability to broaden in substance as well as in discussing collaboration on issues like the greater Middle East or the management of China's emergence as a major power and so forth and so on."
Talbott argued that "by granting India the exception that it has under the NPT, the Bush administration has moved us --and by us I mean the entire planet earth -- away from a rule-based system for controlling proliferation of dangerous technology, in particular nuclear technology, toward an approach to the preservation of world peace that is norm-based or value judgment-based where good countries about which we do not need to have concern deserve leniency --countries that are friends of the United States deserve leniency -- or indeed exceptions under the NPT. Bad countries --countries that are legitimately of concern, deserve extra stringency."
But he asserted, "It's going to be very difficult to get countries that we see as bad or the ambiguous category to agree that they are a bad category to behave accordingly. In fact, au contraire, that's part of what we are seeing in North Korea and elsewhere."
The joint appearance by Jaswant Singh and Talbott titled 'A Consequential India-US Engagement' was hosted by the South Asia Studies Program of the South Asia Studies Program of the Johns Hopkins University, and moderated by the acting director of the Program Walter Andersen.