EDITS | Thursday, August 6, 2009 | Email | Print | 
Look beyond Hillary’s visit
G Parthasarathy
Hillary Clinton’s first visit to India as Secretary of State was overshadowed by the Sharm el-Sheikh fiasco. The visit was important for her personally and for addressing doubts about the Obama Administration’s policies on India. President Barack Obama’s somewhat insensitive comments about the need for American industry to promote jobs in Buffalo rather than Bangalore suggested support for protectionism. The US-sponsored G-8 resolution banning the export of enrichment and reprocessing material and technology to India was viewed as a return to policies designed to ‘cap’ our nuclear programme. Ms Clinton’s visit also came at a time when voices in Washington were claiming that she was being sidelined by the White House, with one commentator remarking: “It’s time for Barack Obama to let Hillary Clinton take off her burqa!”
Ms Clinton rejected advice to combine her visit to India with a ritual visit to Pakistan, signalling she was not moving to ‘re-hyphenation’. Her sensitivity in visiting and staying at Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai showed continuing solidarity with India in the quest to bring the perpetrators of 26/11 to justice. But, we can no longer paper over differences over high profile initiatives being undertaken by the Obama Administration on climate change and nuclear non-proliferation. Interestingly, the statement that caught the widest international attention during Ms Clinton’s visit was the blunt assertion of Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh: “There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have among the lowest emissions per capita, face to actually reduce emissions. And as if this is not enough, we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports from countries such as yours.”
Mr Ramesh also made a detailed presentation on actions we are taking to curb carbon emissions, ranging from regeneration of natural forests to increasing use of non-conventional sources of energy and nuclear energy, and improving efficiency of coal-fired reactors. But, there has not been an imaginative initiative to educate world public opinion about measures we have taken on environmental protection and on our approach of demanding equity on issues of carbon emissions. Moreover, there has been an assiduous Western attempt to drive a wedge between developing countries, including the two most populous countries in the world — India and China.
China has, however, undertaken a far more imaginative effort than us to publicise measures it has taken for environmental protection. This needs to be addressed as American and European pressures grow on us to fall in line with their demands with disastrous consequences for our economic growth. We also need to work with China and other developing countries to make it clear that the acceptance in Italy of the desirability of limiting temperature rise due to global warming to two degrees does not indicate acceptance by developing countries of binding targets for reducing emissions.
The American action to persuade the G-8 to target India by agreeing that no enrichment or reprocessing technology or items can be transferred to countries not signatory to the NPT was not unexpected. The chairman of the AEC, Mr Anil Kakodkar, had warned publicly that such moves were afoot. He stressed that these actions would be contrary to the ‘clean waiver’ granted by the Nuclear Suppliers Group, constituting a “breach of trust”, which would be ‘contrary to the spirit which has been spelt out in the Bilateral Agreement with the USA”.
It remains to be seen whether countries like Russia and France, which are major partners in nuclear energy cooperation, go along with this decision, or, like in the case of Russian cooperation for the first two nuclear reactors in Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu, they abide by the spirit of bilateral agreements for nuclear cooperation signed with us before the G-8 decision. In the meantime, India will have to ensure there are foolproof and irrevocable arrangements in place for guarantees of fuel supplies and reprocessing of spent fuel before any agreements for nuclear energy cooperation are signed with American companies.
There has been unwarranted criticism of the end users agreement for defence supplies signed during Ms Clinton’s visit. We, after all, signed an agreement for such monitoring when the previous Government decided to acquire gun-locating radars from the US when this acquisition was considered imperative after the Kargil conflict. In fact, we have accepted such inspections for over two decades now for dual use technologies in areas ranging from supercomputers to space programme. The Prime Minister has clarified that the timing and location of inspections will be determined by us and that the US would, therefore, have no access to operational deployments.
While Russia, France and Israel have been reliable suppliers of defence equipment and spares, one has to naturally ask whether our confidence in the Americans has reached a stage where we can give the US a major or predominant role in any sector of national defence. Given our recent experiences confidence in the US as a reliable supplier of equipment and spares needs to substantially increase if America is to play a significantly enhanced role in defence supplies. On the other hand, Russia, France and Israel have never let us down, even in moments of crisis. Thus, while in selected areas, where American equipment is cost effective and gives us a clear edge in dealing with threats in our neighbourhood, we should not fight shy of cooperation with the US. It would, however, only be prudent to keep our sources of defence supplies, production and development diversified.
Ms Clinton’s visit has produced agreement that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will pay a state visit to the US later this year. There are vast and uncharted areas of cooperation to be explored in areas ranging from space and high technology cooperation to education, health, energy security and agriculture. But it should be remembered that in areas ranging from nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament to climate change and trade liberalisation, much ground needs to be covered to bridge existing differences.
With the British, who deploy obese soldiers “too fat to fight”, showing signs of wanting to flee from Afghanistan as soon as possible, New Delhi needs to assess whether the US is prepared to stay the course and ensure that a rejuvenated Taliban does not return to power in Kabul. There are, after all, voices even in the Pentagon claiming that it is the Al Qaeda and not the Taliban that threatens American interests.
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