Nuclear Brinksmanship

Even in the cacophony of Indian politics, there is one thing that everyone seems to agree on: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has absolute faith in his country's controversial civilian nuclear deal with the U.S. So unshakable is his commitment to the agreement, which would give India access to U.S. technology to help slake India's soaring demand for electricity, that Singh has bet his political future on it. "It's completely personal for him," says Prem Shankar Jha, a columnist for New Delhi's Outlook magazine. "The Prime Minister is determined to do this."

On July 22, Singh will find out whether his gamble has paid off — or if it has cost him his four-year-old administration. That's the date when Singh's centrist Congress Party faces a vote of confidence on the floor of Parliament, a vote brought about by the recent exit from Singh's coalition government of the country's two main leftist parties, which bolted in protest over the nuclear deal. Even if Singh manages to rally enough supporters to retain a majority and stay in office, there could be lasting fallout. In parliamentary elections expected to be held early next year, Singh's Congress Party colleagues could find themselves targeted by an angry electorate for putting so much effort into foreign policy while India's citizens face an economic slowdown and the worst inflation the country has seen in 13 years.

The agreement that has caused so much turmoil in Indian politics — and so much trouble for Singh — is a version of a pact that the U.S. has signed with more than a dozen other nations. It would open up nuclear-materials trade between the U.S. and India, with the proviso that some of India's nuclear reactors be open to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. That's a big concession for India, which withstood international sanctions and withering criticism after its 1998 nuclear weapons tests and has chafed ever since at the idea of submitting its nuclear program to any outside review. But the country needs clean energy, and signing the agreement would be a first step toward joining the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) — the club of 45 nations committed to both nuclear energy and nonproliferation. With U.S. backing, the NSG may allow India to join even though the country has not signed the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

What makes the deal so controversial in New Delhi is the antipathy many Indian politicians feel toward the U.S. During the cold war, India was a nonaligned nation but its leaders were friendlier with Moscow than they were with Washington. The country still has vibrant communist parties whose politicians reflect grass-roots anti-American sentiments that run through the country despite Indians' enthusiastic consumption of tight jeans, French fries and Friends. Doraiswamy Raja, national secretary for the Communist Party of India, accuses Singh of "succumbing to the pressures of American imperialism" by signing the nuclear deal, warning that the U.S. "has a grand design for Asia, especially South Asia. They want India as part of the global strategy, a military ally."

If they are to keep their jobs, Singh and other Congress Party members have to convince voters, as well as lawmakers who are sitting on the fence, that the leadership hasn't sold out and turned India into a U.S. pawn. The challenge is to spin the nuclear deal as necessary for the country's continued prosperity — and as a bellwether signaling India's rising stature in the global community. The agreement, writes columnist Seema Chishti in the Indian Express newspaper, is a step toward "deciding what kind of India would rise to engage with the rest of the world and its neighborhood."

Many middle-class Indians, who consider closer ties with the U.S. to be crucial to continued economic growth, support the deal, says Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst and professor of history at Delhi University. But India's middle class, while it is expanding quickly, is still not large enough to decide elections. That power lies with the rural poor and urban working classes who make up the vast majority of the country's voters. They are less concerned about geopolitical realignment than they are about the economy. "I don't know anything about the nuclear deal," says Khursheed Alam Siddiqui, an electrician in New Delhi. "For poor people like me, who work all day, eat two meals and go to sleep, it's rising prices that are the real issue. That's what I want the government to fix."

Ironically, the flap over the nuclear deal may give Singh and the Congress Party a chance to address some of those concerns by pursuing much needed economic reforms. Singh's allies on the left have generally allowed the Congress Party to set the agenda, but they opposed certain reforms that threatened their labor-union base, including a plan to liberalize the banking sector and changes to India's socialistic labor laws. Now that left-leaning lawmakers have bolted from the coalition, Singh, an economist, could find it easier to push reforms through — although his allies say they'll proceed with caution to avoid alienating the millions of Indians who haven't shared in the country's economic boom. "No policy should be forced down people's throats," says Kapil Sibal, a Congress Party stalwart and minister in Singh's government. "Growth with equity will be the mantra going forward." The Congress Party recently began running newspaper advertisements trumpeting its commitment to rural development.

With the confidence vote looming, it's unlikely Congress politicians will be drawing the public's attention to Singh's unpopular nuclear deal. The vote is expected to be close. Singh plugged the hole in his coalition created by the withdrawal of the leftist parties by teaming up with the democratic socialist Samajwadi Party, whose 39 seats almost make up for votes lost to the left. (One Samajwadi Party leader, Amar Singh, is a pro-American industrialist who has a framed picture of the Brooklyn Bridge hanging in his office.) With about a dozen lawmakers undecided, the Prime Minister can probably swing enough votes by making a few compromises. One compromise he will almost certainly not make: backing down on his deal with the U.S. Singh sees the pact as a path to India's future. Now he has to ensure that it does not turn his administration into a thing of the past.