US - India Nuclear Deal in the US Congress

After being years of a C-Span (my wife calls it “senator channel”) junkie, I can make something useful out of it now: a blog post. The hearings were very typical, with presumptuous old men and women sit around a semi-circular conference table, pontificate, posture and puff, pitted against an artful, solitary dodger sitting at the centre. I am sort of a regular watcher of the foreign relations committee; love the way Chairman Sen. Lugar asks questions, using up his entire time to preface it and at the end leaving the witnesses scratching their head as to what the heck he asked. The Ranking member Sen. Joe Biden is a treat to watch: his contrived folksiness and the made up “Joey” stories with his grandma, grandpa characters. So is Sen.Sarbannes with his razor sharp pinning down of witnesses with short, seemingly stupid plain joe questions. And of course the Brahmin with a stiff, cultivated, polished manner, Sen.Kerry is hard to disrespect.

Now watching Condi Rice this is what I gather is the administration strategy. The Bush Administration earnestly wants the deal by hook or crook, well, mainly by crook. This is why: the deal requires either one of the following things

1. A new legislation providing India specific exemptions.
2. Approval (or disapproval) from Congress for changing the Atomic Energy Act with respect to India.
3. Using the Presidential Waiver provision in AEA without changing the AEA.

Option 1 requires affirmative majority votes for the new legislation in the Senate and House. Option 3 is the seemingly easiest one but it will not be acceptable to India as under the waiver clause, every year the whole list of transactions has to be approved by the Congress. Under option 2, if the Congress disapproves the amendments, the President can (will) veto it, requiring a 2/3rd vote in both houses to annul the veto. So it is a clever strategy with the Congress: heads I win, tails you lose that is so typical of Bush Administration. Another interesting issue here is once Congress gives its approval, it basically writes itself out of the equation ( Kerry’s words) once for all. Any further changes in implementation of the deal will be solely based on the discretion of the President. Even now the Congress has to vote on this without having to know what the India specific IAEA safeguards will look like as they are being negotiated separately. The assurance is that the US President will use the entry into force clause by delaying the implementation till a satisfactory safeguard protocol is negotiated between IAEA and India. It all comes down to this: the Congress will sign a blank check; the check will be cashed if Bush determines that India has kept its part of the deal in IAEA negotiations. When US Presidents sign a bill there is usually a ceremony and a signing statement issued describing the intent of the bill. Bush administration once argued that the interpretation enunciated in that signing statement is equally important as the congressional intent of the law. So this trick is not at all that ingenious.


Now the hard-line leftist elements of the Democratic Party like Dianne Feinstein & Barbara Boxer (both with a substantial portfolio of investments in China), Feingold (with presidential aspirations) will vote against the deal. Because anything Bush does by definition is to be opposed in their view. World weary Democrats like Kerry, Biden will make noises to add additionalities that were not negotiated as part of the deal to show that they have something to say about it. Biden may demand some help with Iraq and other unknown assurances. Kerry is clinging on to his FMCT and vertical proliferation fetish. He told Rice that it’s a step forward, but he would have advanced the ball even more as far as US non-proliferation goals are concerned. The truth of the matter is no serious power (US, Russia, China, India) is ready for FMCT. Even the less serious ones will cheat on it. On top of this absurd reality, Kerry wants a regional FMCT including China, India and Pakistan. If he ever gets the nerve to propose this to the Beijing Zen masters, one of the 2 things will happen: either he will be recited back an apocryphal Chinese proverb that will be totally irrelevant to his proposal or he will be strangled with his own Hermes tie. What the heck! He is never going to be in such a position. God Bless Ohio!

But I believe this deal according to the Indian Government and Bush administration is about civil nuclear co-operation and treating India just like any other country despite its known strategic program. This deal is not motivated by burning US non-proliferation concerns but by commercial factors in the short run and strategic factors in the long run. That will be manifest to anybody who understands the broad parameters of the deal. But the opponents and squirmers of the deal are trying to package their NP concerns into it. The opponents are not going to support anyway unless India forswears nuclear weapons and signs NPT. But the squirmers like Biden and Kerry are a different category. To satisfy their bloated egos, you will be seeing and hearing lot of show-ops and noises from Washington to give an appearance of engaging their concerns. That’s why suddenly you see Rice taking out the Presidential privilege card on Testing moratorium and Richard Boucher voicing nonsense in New Delhi about minimum deterrent. This is a double “ullala-kattiki” (forgive my nativism here) that Bush administration will have to play to both Congress and Indian Government. But India has to maintain its cool by exercising a serene poise but also let its domestic opposition voices like Vajpayee’s to offset any extraneous additions to the agreement.