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India, US promise to take ties to a new high

Tara Shankar Sahay in New Delhi

The nuclear question need not be a hurdle in consolidating the positive outcome of the eighth round of talks between India and the United States, an external affairs ministry spokesman said.

The talks ended yesterday on an optimistic note, with both sides saying they had laid the foundation for a "new, broad-based relationship" that would go "beyond the level of normalcy".

According to senior officials of the external affairs ministry, both sides were happy with the dialogue that lasted three days (January 29-31) and helped them reduce the number of contentious issues from 13 to just four.

But they maintained that while the scope of the dialogue has been enlarged, the nuclear issue remains central to it. Besides, a whole range of related issues has emerged, forcing the two sides to continue the talks in a ninth round, to be held sometime in the middle of 1999.

Speaking to reporters, External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott said they had not finished all their work and would remain in constant touch.

The two sides will also prepare a work plan for the next steps in the dialogue before the ministers meet for the ninth round.

Expert teams will meet in March for follow-up talks on export controls while the delegations of the two countries at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva will consult each other frequently on the status of negotiations on the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty and the possibility of other multilateral initiatives.

"There has been a certain amount of reappraisal of the security perspectives of the two sides, which had become inevitable," the officials said.

They said the understanding reached on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the FMCT indicate that both sides recognise the other's strategic compulsions. But what is important is the extent to which they will go to accommodate each other on crucial security matters.

Thus, in the existing regional security scenario, India's minimum strategic deterrence appears to be the bottom line and "any rollback or capping is not possible", the officials contended.

The spokesman scotched speculation that easing of lending by multilateral development banks would automatically lead to India signing the CTBT. "[That] is only a small step towards promoting a positive environment," he said.

Referring to the other significant factor to emerge from the talks, the external affairs officials said India's compulsions to go nuclear have been understood by France, Russia, Britain and now the US. As a result, the resolution moved by the P-5 in the United Nations Security Council in May 1998 has become infructuous, much to the annoyance of China, which had proposed the resolution.

It will therefore be interesting to note how these four P-5 countries co-opt India into the system. The references made by Talbott and Assistant Secretary of State Karl Inderfurth to Indian democracy has underscored that India's isolation after Pokhran II has ended.

How Beijing reacts to this development, where four of the five existing nuclear powers negotiate with India on non-proliferation, leaving China in the lurch, is to be seen.

Additional reporting by UNI

The Pokhran tests and after

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