NEW DELHI - The controversial US-India "civilian nuclear cooperation" agreement met a major setback over the weekend when the US Senate recessed without voting on a bill that would have granted President George W Bush the powers to enable the deal to be implemented.

The Indian government has been rattled by this development and is pinning its hopes on a brief "lame duck" session of the US Congress in mid-November, when it reconvenes after elections to be held on November 7.

Both the Bush administration and the Indian government had invested a great deal of effort into lobbying for a quick passage of the bill through the Senate. The House of Representatives has already passed broadly similar legislation. The two chambers of Congress are later meant to reconcile the two versions and produce a single, unified law.

This law would implicitly recognize India as a nuclear-weapons state and permit civilian nuclear commerce with it even though India has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has become a nuclear-weapons state in violation of NPT principles.

However, the Senate bill first ran into numerous procedural complications and then got tied up with the extraneous or unrelated agendas of some senators.

For instance, Minority Leader Harry Reid moved an amendment that would prevent any spent nuclear fuel coming to his native state of Nevada for storage at the Yucca Mountain Repository. This would presumably include fuel burned in reactors supplied to India by the US or from plants that use materials traded under the India-US nuclear-cooperation deal.

On Saturday, the Democrats tabled as many as 19 amendments and rejected a proposal by Majority Leader Bill Frist to have the bill passed in its present form through a ”unanimous consent” procedure, with the promise of some changes to be considered and discussed later.

Although the Democrats agreed to accord a high priority to the bill in the lame-duck session coming up after November 13 - that is, after the mid-term elections that could alter the makeup of Congress - there is no guarantee that it will really be taken up for vote. The Democrats are expected to do better than the Republicans in the election and may not allow the chamber to re-convene until January.

"All this is bad news for the deal," said M V Ramana, an independent nuclear-affairs expert based at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development in Bangalore. "But it's not terrible news. There is still a good chance that the Senate resolution will eventually go through. But there is now a higher probability that more and more conditions will be imposed which limit the degree of cooperation permitted under the deal or demand special assurances from India, which are not reciprocally sought from the US."

If the deal cannot be approved by the present Congress, it will once again have to go through the entire process of drafting of separate resolutions for the two chambers of the new Congress that convenes in January, and of securing agreement on them all over again.

The more conditions imposed on the deal, the more it will differ in content from the original agreements signed between Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last March.

"It's clear that the fate of the nuclear deal now depends on the arcane processes and parochial concerns that mark US domestic politics, rather than on the dynamics of the burgeoning India-United States strategic relationship," argued Achin Vanaik, professor of international relations and global policies at Delhi University. "Various senators' preferences and sectional interests will influence the way the agreement is shaped. The initiative is no longer in India's hands."

The Indian government is particularly disappointed and nervous at the weekend's result because it had made a strong pitch for the deal through its top diplomat and special envoy Shyam Saran and, more recently, through Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee.

Last week in the US, Mukherjee met with various members of the India Caucus in Congress, as well as the American Jewish Committee and influential representatives of the Indian-American community.

Business groups, in particular the defense-industry lobby and manufacturers of nuclear-power equipment, have also been pitching for the nuclear deal, according to Subrata Ghoshroy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International Studies. He calls the deal a "triumph of the business lobby". But the triumph has not yet been fully accomplished.

Had the Senate vote gone through before the recess, India would have been in an advantageous position at consultations due this month in the Nuclear Suppliers' Group. The deal must be approved by the 45-member NSG before it becomes effective. The International Atomic Energy Agency too must clear it.

There may be some opposition in the NSG to the agreement from the Scandinavian states, Ireland and New Zealand. China too is known to be uncomfortable with it but is keeping its cards close to its chest.

Besides this uncertainty, and problems likely to be caused by a shift in the balance of power between the Democrats and Republicans in the US Congress, the deal faces two obstacles: one in the United States, the other in India.

First, the Senate bill explicitly prohibits the "export or re-export to India of any equipment, materials, or technology related to the enrichment of uranium, the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel or the production of heavy water". But the Indian nuclear lobby is extremely keen on the right to reprocess spent fuel from power reactors, whether imported or domestic, so that plutonium can extracted from it.

India has drawn up super-ambitious plans to produce 275,000 megawatts of nuclear-generated power (or more than double the Indian power-generation capacity today from all sources combined) by the mid-21st century. This presumes the use of fast-breeder reactors based on the reprocessing of spent fuel.

India's Atomic Energy Commission chairman is on the record as saying that he won't accept a deal that does not allow reprocessing of spent fuel.

It is not clear how the Bush and Singh governments will crack this nut. Their difficulties will grow if the Democrats emerge stronger in next month's election. In that case, the influence of the traditional non-proliferation lobby will grow, and the deal's passage will bear its imprint.

The domestic Indian obstacle is the political opposition, especially the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, which rejects any shift away from the goalposts set by the original July 2005 agreement.

It will try to hold the Singh government down to its earlier commitments, which call for unconditional nuclear cooperation. This is likely to narrow the government's room for maneuver and compromise.

Source: The Asia Times
Copyright 2006 Asia Times