The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (36 page)

What exactly had Dr Singh achieved? In the joint statement, the US had recognized that ‘as a responsible state with advanced nuclear technology’, a phrase devised to recognize India’s nuclear capability without declaring it a nuclear weapons power, India ‘should acquire the same benefits and advantages as other such states’.

The US had agreed to help develop India’s nuclear power industry and, to this end, would seek Congressional approval of the required changes to US laws that would enable US companies to export nuclear fuel and technology to India. Apart from easing restrictions on the sale of fuel for the Tarapur atomic power station, the US also agreed to work with other countries to help India get access to uranium. This meant changing the existing restrictions imposed by the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).

In return for this, India agreed to ‘assume the same responsibilities and practices and acquire the same benefits and advantages as other leading countries with advanced nuclear technology, such as the United States’. An important Indian commitment was to separate civilian and military nuclear facilities and programmes, and place civilian facilities under the IAEA safeguards regime. India also renewed its commitment, made unilaterally by the Vajpayee government in May 1998, that it would not conduct any more nuclear tests.

The subsidiary commitments included working towards a multilateral Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty and refraining from transfer of enrichment and reprocessing technologies to countries that do not have them. India also agreed to sign up to the Missile Technology Control Regime and NSG guidelines. All this was nothing more than an assurance that India would adhere to its already existing stellar record as a non-proliferator of nuclear technology.

The critical next step was for the US to secure Congressional approval of changes to its laws that would enable the US President to offer India access to high- and dual-use technologies. Once India signed what was called the 123 Agreement, the US Congress would be able to change the relevant laws.

The 18 July joint statement opened the door for these negotiations. Dr Singh had made history. In the midst of our euphoria, however, we little imagined that the process would finally end only thirty-nine months later, after hundreds of heated hours of debate in Parliament, many days of excruciating negotiations around the world, and the reconstitution of the UPA alliance.

 

 

The summit meeting at the White House was followed the next day by the PM’s address to the joint session of the US Congress. It was a speech written with care and deliberation by Montek and myself, with important inputs from Jaishankar. Dr Singh rehearsed his delivery diligently. Since US audiences like to applaud well-crafted sentences, the punchlines were underlined so that he knew which sentences to emphasize and when to pause, in case there was applause.

Dr Singh entered the hall to a standing ovation and, as he made his way down the aisle, he was repeatedly stopped for handshakes, the longest stop being with Senator Hillary Clinton. Usually, Dr Singh was a weak orator. The only occasion on which he made an effort to speak clearly and loudly, emphasizing key phrases, was when he delivered the Independence Day address. However, he knew the US Congress speech was a historic foreign policy statement to an important audience. His listeners were the very Congressmen and women who would have to give their vote of approval to the nuclear deal that he was seeking to strike with President Bush. The purpose of this speech was to win over their hearts and minds. He rose to the occasion.

As Jaishankar and I sat with copies of the speech, pen in hand to mark statements that were applauded, we found him being applauded for every minute of speaking time. The prime minister, we later noted, had been interrupted no less than thirty-three times. It was a 3000-word speech. In his early days in office, Dr Singh would read 100 words in a minute. As he aged, his pace slowed down to seventy-five to eighty words per minute. At this rate, the address should normally have taken him a little over thirty minutes. It, in fact, took close to forty-five minutes, because of the frequent ovations—some brief, about five to ten seconds, some long and some standing.

Sure, there were many India sceptics in that audience and some would later actively try to block the nuclear deal. But that morning, the halls of the US Congress reverberated to unending applause for a man who spoke candidly and honestly, and presented India in a new light to a new world.

‘Partnerships can be of two kinds,’ he said as he ended his address. ‘There are partnerships based on principle and there are partnerships based on pragmatism. I believe we are at a juncture where we can embark on a partnership that can draw both on principle as well as pragmatism.’

With each round of applause, we could see Dr Singh’s confidence grow, his voice rise and his articulation become clearer. It was very moving to see and feel the palpable admiration for this shy, diminutive turbaned man trying to alter the destiny of the world’s biggest democracy.

 

 

In another era, with a different prime minister, like Indira Gandhi or Rajiv Gandhi, the Congress party would have had its members lining the streets of Delhi to welcome the PM back after such a historic visit. That was not to be. Not only did the Left Front and the BJP manage to put the Congress on the defensive with their knee-jerk condemnation of the agreement even before the PM explained its details to them, there were also internal worries that the PM’s bonhomie with President Bush would alienate the party’s Muslim vote base and encourage the traditionally anti-US Left to destabilize the minority government.

Within ten days of returning home, Dr Singh made a statement in Parliament allaying fears that there was a ‘secret deal’ behind the public one, and denying that India was entering into a military alliance with the US against China. He also assured the Parliament that the negotiations with the US to work out the separation plan and other details would not hurt India’s strategic nuclear programme. The media believed the PM, but the BJP and the Left refused to do so. The Left’s opposition was ideological, given its traditional anti-US stance. The BJP’s was expedient, given that it was the Vajpayee government that had initiated a dialogue with the US to get this very result.

As the negotiations progressed, Dr Singh discovered that he had to handle far too many egos at home. The debate on the nuclear deal got enmeshed, on the one hand, with domestic political battles both within the ruling Congress party and with the Opposition, and on the other, with inter-ministerial turf battles, especially between the DAE and the ministry of external affairs.

A considerable part of Dr Singh’s time was taken up explaining the deal to his party leadership and the Opposition, and handling critics and opponents within the government, especially the DAE. The DAE had to not only overcome its trust deficit with the US, created by years of US sanctions, but also its lack of trust in the PM. He was seen as a pacifist who was opposed to nuclear weaponization and, therefore, likely to sell India cheap.

Some of Dr Singh’s critics spread the word that he had not only cut the DAE’s budget as finance minister, but had also opposed a plan to conduct nuclear tests in the winter of 1995. This was only half-true. Narasimha Rao did consider the option of testing in 1995 but chose not to do so because the ministry of finance had estimated that the economy would not be able to bear the burden of the sanctions that developed countries would impose on India. Later, in 1998, the Vajpayee government, too, calculated the economic cost of testing, and took several steps to neutralize the likely impact of sanctions, which in the end turned out to be much less than feared. This was partly because, in 1998, the economy was stronger than it had been in 1995. But India’s nuclear hawks preferred to see the issue in simplistic terms.

Dr Singh realized that he had to build a wider constituency of support for his initiative within the government and not allow the DAE to have a veto. Towards this end, he created the ECC in July 2005, including in it ministers from all energy-related ministries, which brought in Finance Minister Chidambaram and Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde, politically influential and supportive of the PM; the DAE was just one of the many departments dealing with energy policy represented here. This omnibus group was tasked to create a wider energy policy framework within which, it was hoped, negotiations with the US could be explained to the domestic political audience. It is a different matter that over time the DAE secured a veto over the deal mainly by using the political opposition to bolster its own position as a reluctant party to the deal.

After the ECC’s first meeting on 6 August 2005, a PMO press release said:

The Prime Minister said that India must invest in nuclear energy and the recent steps he has taken to end India’s global isolation in this regard should help the country increase the share of nuclear energy in the overall energy mix of the economy. Dr Anil Kakodkar, Secretary, Department of Atomic Energy, also emphasized the need for India to import uranium and invest in uranium mining to meet the requirements of nuclear power generation. He drew attention to the fact that the price of domestically mined uranium is 4 to 5 times that of imported uranium. Several participants complimented the Prime Minister for successfully concluding a deal with the United States that would enable India to import uranium for nuclear power projects.

 

The PMO spared no effort to educate public and political opinion on the agreement and Dr Singh spoke at length in both Houses of Parliament. Diplomats Jayant Prasad and S. Jaishankar, both of whom had intimate knowledge of the nuclear deal, helped me prepare a booklet, ‘Facts about India’s Initiative for Seeking International Cooperation in Civil Nuclear Energy’, that was then translated into all Indian languages and published by the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity (DAVP) of the ministry of information and broadcasting. While the essence of the deal was a strategic gain for India, in that India’s isolation within the international nuclear regime would end, the gains were projected to the general public as an easing of the domestic energy supply situation. Ordinary people across the country would easily understand that, deprived as they are of assured electricity.

Between August 2005 and February 2006, the negotiations focused on the separation plan. India had a total of twenty-two nuclear power plants in 2005. The US side suggested that India could classify four of these as required for its strategic programme. The Indian side wanted eight of the twenty-two, including two research reactors, classified as part of its strategic programme, with fourteen separated out as civilian facilities that would be brought under IAEA safeguards. For seven months these negotiations went on with no agreement.

 

 

President Bush was scheduled to visit India on 2 March and even a fortnight ahead of his visit, there was no agreement on a separation plan. Without a separation plan the Bush administration would not be able to go to the Congress to secure its approval of the deal. If the two sides were unable to arrive at an agreement, the Bush visit would be long on rhetoric and short on substance.