123 deal: A diplomatic triumph for India
By Shashi Tharoor
Weekly Column "Shashi on Sunday" in "The Times of India"
September 16, 2007

After 60 years of Independence, we have to learn to see ourselves as shapers of our own destiny, not helpless subjects of the will of others. It will take more than a law written by an over-the-Hill Congressman, anxious to attach his name to an important piece of legislation, to fetter our nation's freedom.

The UPA panel is at work, the demonstrations and marches have not quite spent themselves, and everyone who has an opinion to express on the 123 Agreement has already done so, multiple times, on every available media platform. We have had ideologues and nativists, retired diplomats and untiring politicos, know-it-alls and know-nothings, analysing for weeks every subtle nuance of the 123 Agreement, the Hyde Act, the advantages of thorium over uranium and whether our foreign policy will now become a foreign policy. Is there anything left to say?

Perhaps not, but as the last speaker in a debate might say, "everything has been said, but not by everybody". I feel obliged to add my two paise worth to the national conversation on this subject. As someone who is not particularly enamoured of nuclear weapons in anyone's hands — ours or others' — I have not found myself unduly stirred up by the current brouhaha. But seeing our honourable prime minister being traduced for what is, irrespective of the merits of the nuclear accord itself, an astonishing diplomatic triumph for his government, impels me to weigh in.

The fact is that, whatever one thinks of nukes, or the relative weight of nuclear energy in our national power grid in 2020, this was an extremely difficult agreement to pull off. It gives the government of India everything it could have asked for, given the parameters it was working within. The negotiators' brief was a tough one: they had to obtain supplies for nuclear energy, preserve India's military nuclear programme, and be treated on a par with the officially-recognised nuclear powers and signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (without actually signing it). Two years ago, if you asked a panel of experts about the probability of obtaining a signature from Washington on an agreement that fulfilled every one of these criteria, you would unanimously have been told it was impossible. That the government of India — any government of India — could have achieved this is really remarkable, and the prime minister and his negotiating team have to be commended for their triumph. The shrill voices in Washington assailing the Bush administration for having given away the nuclear store to New Delhi is proof positive of this. I have absolutely no doubt that had the BJP government been able to obtain an identical accord, it would have looked for applause from the nation. That it chooses to attack the prime minister now for this agreement is a sad reflection of the level of opposition-for-opposition's sake to which our politics has descended today. American democracy used to be built on the premise that disagreements over policy stopped at the water's edge. India long boasted of a foreign policy consensus across the political spectrum. Despite the current debates there over Iraq, that still remains truer of the US than of India.

Of course, the real problem for many critics is not the agreement itself, but the Hyde Act, which requires the administration of the day in Washington to certify annually that India's foreign policy is congruent with the US's. The GoI's stalwarts point out that the Act is not binding on India; its critics retort, with relish, that it is binding on the US. But neither side, for reasons one can readily understand, has publicly admitted that certification is a hollow requirement, routinely accepted by American administrations in the full knowledge that they can certify whatever they wish to certify. The famous Pressler Amendment required the administration to certify that Pakistan was not developing nuclear weapo-ns; successive American Presidents did just that, even though they were completely aware of Pakistan's clandestine nuclear programme. When relations with Islamabad cooled, the certifications stopped. In other words, as long as an administration in Washington wants to preserve good relations with India — for whatever reason — it will certify that India's policies meet the standards of the Hyde Act, even if we are regularly burning American flags at India Gate every week. And if we cease to matter, or a US administration wants to get tough on a government in Delhi, it can just as easily withhold such certification, even if India has been going out of its way to play footsie with Washington. The real issue is the state of the bilateral relationship, not the certification requirements in a piece of legislation. The Hyde Act would be irrelevant even if it had been drafted by Dr Jekyll.

I hold no truck with those who have been accusing the Left leaders of peddling China's interests in the name of anti-imperialism. I do not for a moment believe that the likes of Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury are agents of a foreign power. But reading of their crusade against the naval exercises with the Seventh Fleet this week leads me to think that their real problem is that they are prisoners of the past. Reminding people that the Seventh Fleet was mobilised to intimidate us in 1971 demonstrates to me that, all too often, the lessons we learn from history are the wrong lessons. The year 2007 is simply not 1971; not in Washington, not in New Delhi, and certainly not in the Bay of Bengal. George Santayana famously said that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. But in fact history rarely repeats itself, because the circumstances in which it is enacted change enormously over time and space. Washington is about as likely to send the Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal without India's consent today as New Delhi is likely to put the Queen on its currency notes tomorrow. After 60 years of Independence, we have to learn to see ourselves as shapers of our own destiny, not helpless subjects of the will of others. It will take more than a law written by an over-the-Hill Congressman, anxious to attach his name to an important piece of legislation, to fetter our nation's freedom.