The Toxic Wasted Deal

DAE chief Anil Kakodkar's recent broadside against the Indo-US nuclear deal is a very significant political moment.

By going public with his reservations, he has robbed Dr. Singh of his legacy -- respect for the deal on which he has staked so much.

If the deal goes down now, Dr. Singh would have been torpedoed by an underling. There are too many ambitious people in the Congress not to see this as an opportunity to try to topple him. There are the Natwar Singhs and Mani Shankar Aiyars of the world who Dr. Singh sidelined, and there is the Iran lobby that Dr. Singh betrayed. With little support from the BJP and the Left, he'll become even more dependent on Mrs. Gandhi's patronage to lead India. The caricature would have become entirely real.

If the deal goes through somehow, his opponents in his party and the vast majority of the opposition will use Dr. Kakodkar's comments to claim the deal was a sell-out. They'll tell India -- heavily propagandized to consider our nuclear scientists as heroes -- not to believe politicians but listen to Dr. Kakodkar and his scientist allies. Who would Indians believe on nuclear issues -- Dr. Singh or Dr. Kakodkar? This is heady stuff on which elections can be wagered. Dr. Singh's legacy would have become toxic waste from its own success.

Dr. Kakodkar is a political villain because he has deliberately destroyed Dr. Singh's leadership. Heads he wins, tails Dr. Singh loses.

This still leaves us the question of the nuclear deal. What are we to make of it now?

Let's understand the big picture. India needs civilian nuclear power and global respectability for its strategic nuclear capability. Absent amendments to the NPT (extremely unlikely), the only path forward is a de facto acceptance as a nuclear state. This is what the deal offers.

But, there is no free lunch. In return for this exceptional status, the nuclear godfathers seek to limit India's strategic capability. In a way, we put ourselves in this box when we proclaimed our interest in a "minimum credible deterrent". Why minimum? This concept -- Mr. Vajpayee's legacy -- is a ridiculous notion. Now that we are stuck with this self-inflicted constraint, America can safely argue we already have a "minimum" deterrent -- why not then cap our strategic capability at this minimum level?

This is the deal that's on the table -- whether or not we like it. The negotiations will not change this overall structure. All they can do is to change, on the margin, what the meaning of the word"minimum" is. To the extent, Dr. Kakodkar was willing to engage in negotiation in the first place, he'd already accepted the notion of limits on our strategic plan. Therefore, his outrage at this late stage is somewhat amusing -- and highly disingenuous.

Personally, we have a problem with Mr.Vajpayee's (and Brajesh Mishra's) notion of "minimum credible deterrent". If it were up to us, we'd have used a language like "maximum possible deterrent".

Then, we'd have leveraged India's expanding place in the world, the profit urges of American nuclear industry salivating to serve India, and the fact that a failed deal now means India will turn away from America again -- at least for one generation -- to cut a more favorable deal for India.

But, India rarely plays up to its strength; we negotiate as if we've already lost. Besides, if the deal goes down for fear of harming our strategic capability, it's not as though we are about to catch China or even Israel in terms of aggregate deterrent capacity with our own efforts.

These are the terrible cards we are dealt. Given this, Dr. Singh's deal is not as terrible an option as some seem to suggest. With this deal, we'll have significantly increased civilian nuclear power, will be accepted in NPT as a de facto (and in international law, de jure) nuclear weapons state, and will retain our minimum credible deterrent. Without this deal, we'll remain in nuclear isolation hence forever dependent on tricky hydrocarbon energy, without respect for our strategic strength, and with the same minimum deterrent as in the other scenario.

Neither option is perfect, or as we'd script it ourselves, but of the two, the first is clearly better. Dr. Singh's legacy may have been poisoned, but he has our full support to conclude the deal. And, oh by the way, he should fire Dr. Kakodkar.