M.D. Nalapat
Manipal, India — Indian Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh returned Wednesday from a four-day visit to Beijing that even
his spinmeisters could not categorize as a success. Having made the India-U.S.
nuclear deal the foundation of his legacy, Singh had expected Chinese Premier
Wen Jiabao to follow through on the promise of "nuclear cooperation"
that he had made during a 2005 visit to New Delhi.
While there was a reiteration of that
pledge in the Vision Statement released during the visit, this was qualified by
subsequent explicit references to any such partnership being within the
boundaries set out in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. As the justification
for the deal was that it opened the way for international civil nuclear
cooperation with India outside the restrictions imposed by the NPT on powers
other than the five recognized nuclear weapons states, this caveat reduced the
Chinese offer to a meaningless pleasantry.
Neither in the International Atomic Energy
Agency nor in the Nuclear Suppliers Group did the Chinese leadership give any
indication during the Jan. 13-15 talks of softening their earlier position that
India would have to sign on to the NPT as a non-nuclear weapons power -- in
other words, to denuclearize -- before securing international cooperation.
Then came another blow. The new Labor
government in Australia reversed the decision by former Prime Minister John
Howard to sell uranium to India once the India-U.S. deal becomes operational.
Canberra said that India's signing the NPT would be a precondition for such
transfers. This is a non-starter in the Indian context of the need for a
nuclear and missile deterrent against possible attack.
Manmohan Singh had also hoped to persuade
his hosts in Beijing to nudge the long-stalled border talks forward by
accepting India's condition that areas with "settled populations"
would be excluded from any exchange of territory. Although Wen Jiabao had
accepted this condition in 2005, a year later Beijing returned to the earlier
hard line that even populated zones were open to negotiation.
