Following bilateral safety assurances, Australia is ?happy to trust India with (its) uranium,? in the words of its Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who visited Delhi to forge a lasting alliance in energy, for ?months, years, decades?. The civilian nuclear deal permanently ends all anxieties about nuclear fuel supplies, since something between a third and 40% of known uranium reserves are Down Under. Abbot?s timeframe is slightly hyperbolic, but it expresses the urgency on both sides to action the deal, for reasons that are both commercial and strategic. Narendra Modi?s assurance of growth is negated by a looming power crunch, with at least half of all coal-fired power plants holding fuel reserves of less than a week. Since India is coal-rich, this is an issue of managing markets and subsidies, which Modi had done successfully as the CM of Gujarat.
However, he may find the going harder as head of a federal government, though he has reached out to the states with the promise of better Centre-state relations in anticipation of such difficulties. While government deals with the mess in coal and power distribution, nuclear power looks attractive. But it has its own problems. It is green in comparison to coal, but the issue of radioactive waste disposal is insufficiently discussed. Besides, it takes time to create fail-safe nuclear assets. Significantly, Abbott is offering fuel supplies in a timeframe of months and years, but this would be infructuous if generation capacity remains insignificant.
The India-Australia uranium deal alleviates the only disappointment from the PM?s visit to Japan: the expected nuclear deal did not materialise. However, like nuclear plants, bilateral nuclear deals need time to be built, since each must include its own safeguards. The Aussie deal is the result of two years of work initiated by Abbott?s Labour predecessor,
Julia Gillard, with the UPA government. Japan is the only country ever to suffer nuclear holocaust, and Shinzo Abe naturally finds it much harder to reassure his constituency. However, the present deal, the most important since the Indo-US civilian deal of 2008, establishes that India can look forward to assured nuclear power from bilateral deals, while continuing to reject the NPT, which it sees as discriminatory. At the same time, Modi has established a triangle of trust between India, Japan and Australia?Abbott and Abe were already allies?which will have profound strategic implications in Asia, as a counterpoise to an assertive China.