Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, has been forced to tell the US president, George W. Bush, that his government is struggling to win domestic support for a historic nuclear agreement between their two countries.
In a telephone conversation Monday, Mr Singh told Mr Bush ”that certain difficulties have arisen with respect to the operationalisation of the India – US civil nuclear cooperation agreement”.
The nuclear deal, which promised to end 30 years of nuclear pariah status for India was Mr Singh’s best chance to secure his legacy as prime minister, analysts said, pointing to the government’s failure to push through substantial economic reform.
Mr Singh, 75, a technocrat with no political base of his own, became prime minister when Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born leader of the Congress party, declined to lead the government following May 2004 elections.
Analysts said India’s credibility would suffer if the deal collapsed, noting that Mr Singh has twice shaken hands on it with Mr Bush, once in Washington in July 2005 when the agreement was first outlined and then again in March 2006 in New Delhi.
Advocates of the deal have expressed disappointment with the Congress-led coalition government’s decision to put the deal on hold rather than risk a confrontation with the Communist parties that could have triggered an early election.
”The US will be thinking the Indians are very strange people who do not know what’s in their national interest,” said K. Subrahmanyam, a strategic affairs analyst and chairman of the government’s Task Force on Global Strategic Developments.
Seema Desai, an analyst at Eurasia Group, said the sudden change of sentiment was ”all the more puzzling given that a panel appointed to look into the objections of the Left had not yet completed its deliberations on the issue”.
The government’s abandonment of a confrontational approach vis-à-vis its Leftist backers came after three mid-sized political parties in the United Progressive Alliance coalition warned Mrs Gandhi of the dangers of triggering an election.
The shift became public on Friday when Mr Singh told a conference audience in New Delhi that failure to conclude the deal would be ”a disappointment” but not ”the end of life” and Mrs Gandhi expressed her firm opposition to an early election.
”Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi were under tremendous pressure from the Left parties and from their own allies,” Mr Subrahmanyam said. ”They’ve put the deal in cold storage. Whether it can be taken out at a later date is still to be seen.”
The apparent decision to put the deal on hold is a personal setback to Mr Singh, who has repeatedly stated that securing access to international nuclear fuel and technology was essential for energy-starved India’s economic development.
”Nuclear power is recognised as an important and environmentally benign constituent of the overall energy mix,” he said recently. ”We cannot afford to miss the bus or lag behind these global developments.”
Mr Singh has also strenuously defended the deal against the Indian left’s claims that it would compromise India’s ability to conduct an independent foreign policy.
To implement the deal, India needs to negotiate a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, persuade the 45-country Nuclear Suppliers Group to permit nuclear commerce with it, and secure the US Congress’ backing.
Tom Casey, a US State Department spokesman, said on Monday, that Washington wanted to see the deal concluded ”as soon as possible”. Analysts have warned that a delay of even weeks could see the deal fail to pass through Congress before the end of the Bush administration.
