Eyes On The American Poll

WASHINGTON

A Democrat-controlled United States Congress may put the brakes on thepassage of the U.S.-India civilian nuclear deal on Capitol Hill.

Democrats need to win six seats in the Senate and 15 in the House ofRepresentatives in Tuesday’s midterm elections to snatch control of bothchambers of Congress from the Republican Party.

According to political analysts, if the Democrats gain the majority theywould be less than enthusiastic about giving President George W. Bush, aRepublican, the satisfaction of achieving a key foreign policy goal – theimportance of which members of the administration have frequently underlined.

Some Congressional analysts predict Democrats may seek to wrest moreconcessions from India, but others point out that Democrats in the House votedoverwhelmingly in support of the bill in July, and the party’s key members inthe Senate openly support the bill.

Admitting there is a "very good chance" that the Democrats will takecontrol of both houses especially if there are no "Florida-like votingirregularities and the weather holds," Sumit Ganguly, Rabindranath Tagoreprofessor of political science at Indiana University in Bloomington, said, "Ido not know that they would seek more concessions unless the nonproliferationcommunity in Washington, D.C., goes into high gear."

Prof. Ganguly said the nonproliferation lobby has been "doing all they canto try and falsely link India's case with the North Korean case whileshamelessly eliding over Pakistan's organic links with North Korea." He wasreferring to the proliferation concerns raised after North Korea tested anuclear device last month.

The fate of the bill will also depend on the length of the so-called lameduck session that is scheduled to start on November 13 and, should the Democratsgain a majority, on the will of the Republican leaders in Congress to push thedeal through in what will be their last days on the job.

When Congress meets in the lame duck session key priorities will be thepassage of legislation creating permanent normal trade relations status forVietnam, a victory Mr. Bush wants to tout when he travels to Hanoi to attend theAsia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit on November 18 and 19. The proposedlegislation is an essential step in normalizing relations between Washington andHanoi and making possible Vietnam's accession to the World Trade Organization.Another priority is the passage of the domestic terrorism surveillance bill.

Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, said"the size of the shift on Capitol Hill after the elections," will be a bigfactor determining the fate of the nuclear deal this year. "The bigger theturnover in the House and Senate, the harder it could be to take up unfinishedbusiness from the outgoing Congress," Mr. Krepon said.

Sanjay Puri, executive director of the U.S.-Indian Political ActionCommittee, contends that if the deal does not go through in the lame ducksession "it means sometimes politics overrides everything else." Mr. Puriwas referring to the hurdles some analysts expect Democrats to erect in front ofthe Republican administration’s initiatives in the last two years of Mr. Bush’sterm in the White House.

However, Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state in President BillClinton's administration, while criticizing the exceptions the Bushadministration has made for India, last week predicted that the agreement wouldbe "the law of the land at some point of the lame duck session."

If the Senate passes the bill it must then be reconciled with the Houseversion in a process known as a conference before it is sent to the presidentfor his signature. If the Senate does not vote on the bill before the end of theyear both Senate and House versions of the bill will lapse and the process ofdebating new legislation will have to start from scratch in the 110th Congressin 2007.

Under the deal, India would be exempted from a 30-year-old policy thatforbids the transfer of civilian nuclear technology to any country that has notacceded to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and accepted full-scopeinternational safeguards.

The Indian American community has lobbied hard for the passage of the billand some members feel they have put their political clout on the line. So whatwould the deal’s failure to pass this year mean for the Indian Americancommunity? "For a community that is relatively new, very new in the politicalengagement process, I think it's incredible what has been happening," said Mr.Puri. "If this doesn't happen, I don't think you can say the community hasfailed because you have a community that has beyond its numbers reached out andso to speak exerted its clout."

He pointed out that it was the community that revived the deal that was "deadin the water" a few months ago. Mr. Puri believes the deal will easily pass inthe Senate if it brought to a vote in the lame duck session. "We have thenumbers," he said.

A failure to pass, he said, would be seen as an affront to the IndianAmerican community, and "will definitely affect public opinion" in India,where both the Bharatiya Janata Party and the left parties have been vocal intheir criticism of the agreement.