So What Say EU?

• Work towards blocking access to terrorist financing and cooperate in the fight against money laundering
  
• Promote cooperation between Europol and the CBI
  
• An EU-India security dialogue on global and regional security, disarmament, non-proliferation
  
• Cooperate in the energy sector to develop more efficient, cleaner and alternative energy chains. Work for India membership in the ITER n-fusion project
  
• Conclude a framework agreement on India's participation in Galileo Satellite Navigation Systems.

All this is a cumbersome process, largely because of the consensus principle inherent in any EU decision. Once a draft is negotiated, all member countries are given a copy of the document which they have to return with their views within a specified period. Any country harbouring reservations does not pronounce it openly; instead it informs the Commission which projects it as an EU issue. So, the framework agreement isn't yet ready, Manmohan and Blair only decided to take the process forward. No wonder, the summit declaration is bland: "We will conclude a framework agreement on India's participation in Galileo Satellite Navigation Systems."

New Delhi, however, is unwilling to renegotiate. Said a government source, "We have had problems getting the EU to understand certain issues. Some states are apparently concerned about export controls. They want us to give more guarantees. The fact is, bigger countries in the EU have no problems. It's a challenge for the EU to get them together." Adds another source: "We have told the EU it is not possible to sign on their conditions. It's not possible to go back and rework what we had already agreed to. We'll initial the agreement with the understanding that the European Commission will work to remove the roadblocks." In other words, the ball is in the EU's court to convince its dissenting members to agree to the negotiated framework agreement.

Some other differences run deep. The EU wanted to have a separate dialogue on human rights, non-proliferation and environment, say sources. Its concern about the subcontinent being a nuclear flashpoint isn't residual, it wants a separate dialogue with India on proliferation issues. New Delhi has countered saying it is a responsible power which hasn't been guilty of proliferation and observes a voluntary moratorium. New Delhi instead offered to initiate a security dialogue aimed at focusing the Europeans on the security dynamics of the region.

The EU's evangelism doesn't stop there. It wanted a deeper interaction with SAARC, which New Delhi did not want to encourage. Officials explain this is because of the tendency to extrapolate European experiences into the subcontinent, leading to the erroneous belief that the Indo-Pak peace process mirrors the Irish peace process. Moreover, some cooperation already exists between the EU and SAARC, and New Delhi wanted to confine the EU interaction at the economic level, not political.

New Delhi wasn't open to initiating a separate dialogue on the human rights issue either, sources say. But it has agreed to the idea of an ad hoc dialogue, of which there have been two rounds. The EU wanted to regularise it, bolstered considerably by the Chinese agreeing to such a process.

On environment too, the EU has major concerns.Prospective consumption patterns are giving them sleepless nights; India and China will together contribute to over 40 per cent of the globalemissions. India has held that developed nations should first adhere to Kyoto protocols, reduce their emission levels and provide clean development technologies like wind energy, solar energy, fuel cell technology toIndia.Europeans counter saying these technologies are with the private sector which cannot be made to part with them, especially as intellectual property rights issues also come into play. Says a source, "The game of the West is clear. They want developing countries, particularly India and China, to come out with some kind of guarantees on emissions, if not in the first phase of the Kyoto Protocols, in the second."

As regards energy cooperation, the declaration says the EU will work to "secure India's membership in the ITER nuclear fusion project", which is widely seen as the future source of energy. Based in Cadarache in France, ITER—International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor—will use magnetic fields generated by superconducting coils to confine a plasma in a doughnut-shaped chamber called a tokamak. The plasma will be heated to a temperature of 100 million degrees so that the deuterium and tritium nuclei can overcome their mutual repulsion and undergo nuclear fusion—the process that powers the sun. The ITER is designed to produce 500 MW of power; on its success depends the feasibility of generating power from fusion.

India too has been involved in plasma research, having already built a tokamak in 1989. Last November, an EU delegation visited the Institute of Plasma Research in Gandhinagar where they were given a briefing on India's experience in this field. The director of the institute, Prof P.K. Kaw, told Outlook that the institute is only four months away from holding a plasma shot for a 1,000 seconds. Americans have said that they will help midwife India's arrival in the ITER club which has so far the EU, China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and US as members.