The Deal Spiel

Tracking the Indo-US civilian nuclear partnership is akin to watching a hurdles race: no sooner does the euphoria of clearing one obstacle subside, another promptly looms large. Hold back your cheers for the Bush administration for clinching the nuke pact with India; it now passes the baton to the US Congress which will have to amend laws before the deal can become a reality. Congress has a battery of sceptics waiting to tear apart the agreement.

Administration officials say they will do their best to sell the deal to Congress, now that they have procured from India a credible and defensible plan for separation of its civilian nuclear facilities from those military. Undersecretary R. Nicholas Burns offered an example of their earnestness. Within hours of Bush arriving from the subcontinent, Burns made an effective sales pitch for the deal at the influential conservative think-tank, Heritage Foundation. Burns said the Bush administration was "very proud" of the pact, that by committing to declare 14 of its 22 nuclear reactors as civilian, India has been brought into the "non-proliferation mainstream" without according it the status of a nuclear weapons state.

The word "non-proliferation" is expected to occur frequently in the debate on the Hill. Opponents of the N-deal argue that since New Delhi has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty(NPT), the Bush administration shouldn’t have agreed to supply nuclear technology to India. The supporters of the deal counter that India has an exceptional track-record of not proliferating nuclear know-how, implying that it merits reward.

Congressional sources, however, say there is concern on Capitol Hill about giving India too much. Critics of the deal, said a senior congressional aide, "just don’t like weapons of mass destruction. The issue for them isn’t whether or not India has proliferated nuclear technology, it is that India hasWMDs". Non-proliferation advocates are concerned India may never place another nuclear facility, beyond the 14 it is committed to, under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards and inspections, thereby enabling it to expand its supply of weapons-grade plutonium and nuclear arsenal in the future. This could lead to an arms race with China and Pakistan—both of whom would want to increase their nuclear weapons programmes, they warn. But Burns dismissed such a notion, saying the administration was "having trouble understanding the argument that somehow this deal makes it more likely that India is going to engage in an arms build-up." That’s not at all the sense that Washington has from the Indian government, he said.

Already the Bush administration, led by the president and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, has begun briefing members of Congress on the deal, hoping to test congressional waters before making a formal request to amend relevant US laws. Since Congress has a full plate this session, the deal is expected to take several months from now to fructify. High-powered lobbyists employed by the Indian government, including Washington law firm Barbour Griffith & Rogers, headed by ex-US ambassador Robert D. Blackwill, will play a critical role steering the deal through Congress.

Some Congressmen feel the Bush administration has been sloppy in its attempts to sell the deal on the Hill. Even Ackerman believes the president has "done a horrendous job of convincing Congress that the agreement is a good idea." Warning that the nuclear deal could "blow up in (Bush’s) face", he noted that many Congress members who do not support the pact are already working to defeat it.

The deal will be debated in the powerful House International Relations Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. While Henry Hyde, chairman of the House committee, has been noncommittal, Senate committee chairman Richard Lugar, who has raised several questions about the deal, said he had to still study the details. Congressman Tom Lantos, senior Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, warned that the unprecedented nature of this deal warrants Congress to examine the details of the separation plan "to assure ourselves and our international partners that this pact will support our shared political and security objectives."

Similarly, Indiana Republican Congressman Dan Burton, an inveterate India critic who has of late warmed up to New Delhi, said the "devil is always in the details". He said he knew a number of his colleagues in Congress who "still have serious questions regarding India’s commitment to separating its civilian and military nuclear programmes, as well as India’s position on the proliferation of nuclear technology and enriched fuels; and whether this agreement will undermine regional stability and US relations with our good friend and ally Pakistan." He intends to ask these queries during the debate on the Hill, though he would be "inclined to support" the deal should it contain an "ironclad guarantee" that US technology would only be used for civilian purposes.

Congressmen Edward Markey and Fred Upton are two of the critics Burton had in mind. The pair is campaigning to kill the deal, having introduced a bipartisan resolution on December 15, 2005, opposing the plan. They contend that current law prohibits the sale of nuclear technology to any country, like India, which refuses to sign theNPT, doesn’t allow full-scope safeguards, and which develops new nuclear weapons and conducts nuclear tests in defiance of the treaty. Markey chastised, "In a last-minute rush to get a nuclear deal with India at any cost, President Bush appears to have caved in to Indian demands and compromised US security by blowing a hole in theNPT." In an interview to ABC’s This Week, Congressman Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, warned Bush that he was trying to "ride the nuclear tiger".

India need not get unduly pessimistic. For, supporters of the deal too are working overtime. South Carolina Republican Congressman Joe Wilson and Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Joseph Crowley sent a letter of support for the agreement to all members of Congress. Both previously served as co-chairmen of the India Caucus. Again, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist describes the agreement as a "major step forward" in the US-India ties, and is confident Congress will support it. But he believes that Congress must study the implications of the deal, because some members are worried it would set a wrong precedent as the US struggles to curb nuclear programmes in Iran and North Korea. Burns dismisses these concerns, claiming the administration does not see the connection between what Iran is doing and what India seeks to do.

As the debate now shifts to the Hill, Ackerman best summed up the challenges. "It was tough work to seal the deal while in India, but the president’s true difficulties with it now lie here at home," he said. Expect another tortuous round of discussions and debate.