The much-trumpeted nuclear deal has failed to yield strategic benefits for India. Such is its burden that even as U.S. policy ignores vital Indian interests in the region, New Delhi stays mum.
The United States-India nuclear deal was promoted as a transformative initiative — one that would put the bilateral relationship on a much-higher pedestal. In his valedictory speech, President George W. Bush declared: “We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India.” By contrast, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has not made a single statement on the deal — not even to Parliament — ever since the vaunted deal came to fruition, othe r than to admit recently that he got his party to back the deal by threatening to resign.
Dr. Singh’s reticence has to do with the fact that the conditions and riders the U.S. Congress attached while ratifying the deal demolished the assurances he had made to Parliament. Consequently, Dr. Singh was unable to keep the promise he made to the Lok Sabha last July 22: “I will come to Parliament before operationalising the nuclear agreement.” On several occasions before the deal was set in cement, Dr. Singh, however, had trumpeted its transformative character.
Seven months after the deal’s realisation, there is no sign of its transformative power. Rather, doubts have arisen over the supposed “global strategic partnership” with America. The policy frame in which Washington is viewing India is not the larger Asian geopolitical landscape, but the southern Asian context. But even on regional matters of vital interest to India, the U.S. has sought to ignore New Delhi or pursue antithetical policy approaches. To the chagrin of Indian neocons — who ingenuously marketed the nuclear deal as a U.S. move to build India as a world power and counterweight to China — Washington has declared that its “most important bilateral relationship in the world” is with Beijing.
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