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Indian point of view gaining ground in the US

Vaishali Honawar in Washington

Almost a week after India burst its way into world headlines and earned the ire of the United States, Congressional leaders and political analysts in Washington are veering around to the view that diplomatic engagement rather than sanctions will help solve the crisis in the subcontinent.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an old India hand, said in an interview with ABC's This Week on Sunday that India now has to be recognised as a nuclear power and that it has genuine concerns of security over China.

What makes Moynihan's statements more significant is the recent allegation in the US media that Washington has been soft on Beijing because of successful Chinese attempts to buy influence in the US through campaign contributions to the Democratic Party. The Clinton administration has been increasingly under attack for going soft on China while making India the victim of its "watchdog" policy.

Even though it was generally believed that China has been behind Pakistan's nuclear weapon and missile plans, following international outcry over Pakistan's Ghauri missile launch, Washington responded by giving China a clean chit and clamping sanctions on a North Korean agency. While the only interaction between North Korea and the United States has been some humanitarian aid, China has been a huge market that the United States cannot afford to ignore.

Reflecting Henry Kissinger's justification for reopening ties with China in the early '70s, Moynihan said that the United States must now recognise India as a nuclear power and that a nation of one billion people could not be ignored.

Moynihan, who was the US ambassador to India in 1974 when India conducted its first peaceful nuclear test, recalled the words of former prime minister Indira Gandhi who had told him that India would be willing to participate in a non-discriminatory nuclear test ban treaty if it was created.

India's nuclear tests, he said, had been provoked by the Pakistani testing of the Ghauri missile "named after a Muslim who chopped off Hindu heads."

The senator from New York, who had once called for the disbanding of the CIA, took up for the intelligence agency in the Indian test case. He blamed the "failure of statecraft" for not detecting the Indian test preparations early.

The BJP, he pointed out, had claimed in its election manifesto that the party would go in for nuclear weapons, but the US administration failed to guide the intelligence establishment in monitoring the Indian activities.

George Stephanopoulos, Clinton-aide-turned-basher, revealed that Clinton had to overrule opposition from the National Security Council in deciding to impose sanctions on India. Another analyst pointed out that it was "hard to blame India when China was so equipped and without sanctions."

The media too is taking up increasingly for India, pointing out that the US policy of keeping its bomb while denying others is an option that just won't work. John J Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, wrote in The New York Times on Sunday, "It is surely in India's self-interest to build a nuclear deterrent -- as it will be for Pakistan to follow suit. But from the perspective of the United States, the ideal world is one in which it alone has nuclear weapons.

"Then the United States would not risk direct attack on its homeland or indirect damage from the fallout from nuclear wars between other nations. It could also use its nuclear monopoly to coerce or intimidate other states, and could intervene with conventional forces around the globe without fear of nuclear attack on its forces. For these reasons, the United States has gone to great lengths since 1945 to thwart nuclear proliferation."

He also pointed out that the "United States will have to learn to live with the spread of nuclear weapons in the decades ahead. We should try to manage and contain this process, but we cannot stop it."

Others commentators said the sanctions will work only if accompanied by "realistic diplomatic tradeoffs" and that it is still possible to bring India round to the US view on nonproliferation.

Selig S Harrison, a former South Asia bureau chief of The Washington Post, wrote, "There still is a way for the Clinton administration to stop New Delhi from embarking on a costly and dangerous nuclear arms race with Pakistan and China."

"Every politically conscious Indian I know deeply resents the American attitude that the United States and the four other nuclear powers are entitled to have nuclear weapons while India and other aspiring powers are not. This feeling is a more important factor driving Indian nuclear ambitions than fear of Chinese and Pakistani military strength," he wrote.

As a solution, Harrison said, "The (Clinton) administration should offer to seek congressional approval for civilian nuclear technology transfers to India, now barred by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act, in return for three major concessions by India."

The three concessions suggested by Harrison include the opening of all seven of its nuclear power reactors to international inspections, a binding commitment not to export nuclear technology, and a compromise with the United States on the issue of a nuclear test ban.

This again opens up the question of whether India would agree to sign nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as just another country -- which would mean opening itself to international scrutiny --- or insist on signing as a nuclear power, which the present Big-5 are in no mood to concede, at least for now.

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