Pulitzer-prize winning author and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman bobbed and weaved when buttonholed by rediff.com on why a self-confessed Indophile like him had crticised the US-India civilian nuclear agreement in one of his columns and warned that it could only undermine the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
In his column in the Times on March 8, 2006, titled 'Letting India in the Club?', Friedman basing his opposition to the deal almost solely on the arguments provided to him by non-proliferation hawk Robert Einhorn, former assistant secretary of state for non-proliferation in the Clinton administration and for the first year of the first term of the Bush Adminstration -- who is vehemently against the envisaged agreement -- said the US should "not go ahead with this deal until India is ready to halt its production of weapons-grade material."
Speaking to rediff.com after he delivered a talk on his best-selling book The World is Flat 2.0 at a reception hosted in his honour by Ambassador Ronen Sen on Wednesday evening at his residence, that was attended by the Washington elite and some of the leading Indian American entrepreneurs in the information technology industry, Friedman declined to admit whether he's had a change of heart now.
At the time, he was pilloried for this column by several leading experts, including India's foremost strategic affairs expert K Subrahmanyan, who took him to task for completely falling for the contention of a non-proliferation ayatollah like Einhorn with all of his biases and opposition to the deal, while other Indian and Indian Americans who loved him for his gushing writings about India in his book, particularly it's IT sector, felt betrayed by his attack of the deal, which is seen as the sine qua non of the transformed US-India relationship that is envisioned to metamorphose into a strategic partnership.
Friedman said, "As I explained in the article, it's very hard for me to oppose anything like that because I feel so strongly about India. But I had my own principle before this India-America deal about the NPT, and I would have been inconsistent with my broad principle on non-proliferation had I said, 'Well, this is okay'."
"That said," he added, laughing sheepishly, "you haven't seen me write a single thing about it since. There a big difference. So my attitude is, if it goes through at this stage, I can certainly live with it."
But Friedman reiterated, "It would have been inconsistent of me -- given the principle I had taken on NPT, to have said, 'Oh, you know, I don't care about this.' That was really what I was wrestling with."
When pressed whether he has had a change of heart, particularly now in the wake of North Korea's nuclear test, which has led to two schools of thought in that on the one hand it casts a shadow on the US-India deal, but on the other, it lends credence to the Bush administration's argument that admitting India into the club would only strengthen the non-proliferation regime when the likes of North Korea and Iran are accelerating the possible unravelling of the NPT, Friedman said, "I want to think this through. That's a very good question and I really need to think that through."
He agreed, "That could very well be (that India's advent into the nuclear club could only lead to the strengthening of the non-proliferation regime) and I am ready to look at it again and that's why I haven't written about it -- because I am ready to look at it again."
However, Friedman, added yet once again, almost apologetically, "I had to be consistent to my principles. I was a huge advocate of the NPT and the two clashed basically and so that was why."
