Former US deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott has said that on the nuclear question and issues relating to India's security, Congress president Sonia Gandhi was "almost Indira-like."
When Talbott called on her as the leader of the opposition in January 1999, "Sonia Gandhi made clear that the Congress Party was not going to allow the appearance of any daylight between itself and the BJP on the nuclear issue," the ex-diplomat writes in his book Emerging India.
"Previously, she had been merely diffident and evasive on the subject; this time she was steely-- or, 'almost
Indira-like," he wrote.
Talbott had failed to make then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and external affairs minister Jaswant Singh agree to the concessions the Clinton Administration demanded, including signing the CTBT and placing all nuclear installations under international control.
On the nuclear issue, Talbott suggested that India and Pakistan should be offered a 5+2status - they will not be recognised as nuclear weapons powers under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty but would be associated with the five, and would accept certain conditions which would not apply to the US, Britain, France, Russia and China.
India could be offered permanent membership of the Security Council if such an arrangement was accepted.
In return, India and Pakistan would accept a deal offered by the US to India joining the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, make progress on a fissile material cut-off treaty, exercise strategic restraint and meet the highest standards of export controls, Talbott wrote.
Talbott says in his book that democracy was a complicating matter in persuading India to accept the American proposals.
"For 17 months, the United States had worked, primarily through Jaswant Singh, to mitigate the damage that the BJP leaders had done to the global non-proliferation regime [by carrying out nuclear tests] and to bring India into the fold of the CTBT.
"But the Indian leaders feared that signing the treaty would cost the BJP crucial support in Parliament and with the
electorate. Thus, in this respect too, Indian democracy, for all its virtues in American eyes, was a complicating factor in
accomplishing an important US goal," he writes.
Talbott also provides a rare insight on Clinton's negotiating tactics with India. Talbott says that after a one-on-one meeting with then prime minister Narasimha Rao's visit to the White House for an hour, Clinton took Talbott aside and said: "I think I may have softened him up. Now you go give him the hard message."
Talbott accordingly met Rao and told him that he was under the president's instructions to "fill in the blanks of what Rao had heard in the Oval Office."
"I said," Talbott narrates, "I realised there were pressures on him and alluded to reports that some in the Indian strategic community might be preparing for a change of policy and a round of highly provocative tests of missiles and
perhaps of nuclear devices as well. President Clinton, I said, hoped Rao would resist what we recognised was a powerful temptation."
Rao replied that he had been heartened by what he had heard from Clinton about the possibilities for the US-Indian
relationship and understood the connection between that prospect and what Talbott was saying. "But," Talbott says, "Rao gave no concrete assurances."
Clinton also met with then prime minister I K Gujral at the Waldorf Astoria on September 22, 1997. It was not particularly substantive, says Talbott, "... he (Gujral) had come to the meeting expecting tough questions and harsh demands on Kashmir and nuclear weapons. To Gujral's immense relief, Clinton was not interested in dealing with sensitive and weighty matters so much as setting the right tone for the relationship."
He raved about Shashi Tharoor's book India from Midnight to the Millennium and sought Gujral's advice on a
reading list to help him further prepare for a trip he hoped to make to the subcontinent the following year.
