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: As a news report on Thursday in The Indian Express made it clear, there was nothing new or disturbing, either on nuclear tests or on technology transfer, in the US state department’s January communication on the nuclear deal. The real business is being conducted at the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group meeting and there, negotiations, as always expected, are tough. But the drama over the nuclear letter reveals a worrying national symptom: the inability or the unwillingness of many interlocutors to understand what international negotiations involve and their inability or unwillingness to properly estimate India’s strength in dealing with conditionalities. For example, India’s negotiations in trade talks, whether under GATT or WTO, have been always greeted by many ‘radical’ critics as an exercise in capitulation. The fact that all trade talks call for give and take, the fact that India simply can’t go and come back with what it wants, was never considered. And all of them have missed that in recent years, India has dealt with trade conditions so well that the country is now blamed for wrecking trade talks, which is an admission of its strength. Recall that when IMF conditionalities were in the news during the 1991 financial crisis, there were dark prognoses about India bartering away its economic freedom. Actually, the real dark days for India’s economic negotiations were when Indian socialism was thriving and the country was dependant on food aid and budgetary support from America. And the IMF always asks for policy change when it gives money. How that plays out depends on the policy rationality and strength of the country, not the IMF. Now, when India considers 7.5% growth as being too low, does anyone remember IMF’s list of to-dos?
Mainstream nuclear deal critics, as opposed to those on the fringe and on the political Left, are in some ways more culpable because they have been part of such negotiations before, and they have exhibited the political and tactical maturity required to see through complex bilateral and multilateral negotiations. India’s WTO negotiations, for example, have been conducted with equal determination and maturity by the BJP and the Congress, by Arun Jaitely and Kamal Nath. It would have been easy for either person to charge the other with selling ‘people’s interest’, but neither did. That’s why the BJP’s illogical maximalist position on the nuclear deal is so disappointing.
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