India-US nuke deal hit

TENSIONS between India's ruling, 12-party United Progressive Alliance Government and the communist parties it relies on for support in parliament reached a head this week as leftist MPs denounced the historic civilian nuclear deal with the US and threatened to trigger an early election by withdrawing their backing.
"Honeymoon's up, marriage limps on," The Times of India declared on its front page. Times columnist Ronojoy Sen wrote: "The Left parties are doing what they are best at -- saying no ... The Left might have brought the country to the brink of instability. But the Indian Left is also at the crossroads. In the conceivable future, the Left parties will continue to win around 40-50 seats in parliament and play a crucial role in government formation. However, they have to make a choice between cynical opportunism and engaging in meaningful politics."
Hindustan Times columnist Barkha Dutt spoke of the exasperation "at constantly watching a government on its knees, blackmailed into submission by the Left". She criticised the communist argument that the nuclear deal undermined India's autonomy, arguing: "Their (the Left's) criticism has less to do with India's autonomy, and much more to do with an innate anti-Americanism."
The Pioneer agreed. "Irrespective of how the Left-Congress drama ends ... the conduct of the communist parties stands in the dock of history. Their adherence to constitutional democracy and to coalition protocols is extremely questionable."
But the communists were not without support. The Hindu backed their demand for the nuclear deal to put on hold. "Heavens will not fall if the 123 agreement (for the deal) is put on hold and all the issues opened up for discussion. There is a risk that it may fall by the wayside, but that is clearly a risk worth taking, especially if it is measured against the virtual certainty of the nuclear deal being buried if the UPA Government falls."
The controversial intervention in the crisis by India's ambassador to the US, Ronen Sen, one of the architects of the deal, who described opponents of it as "headless chickens" prompted an angry response in The Hindu. "The UPA Government will be wasting its, and parliament's, time if it expects to get away with anything short of Mr Sen's recall -- and will indeed find itself in a deeper political mess should it attempt to defend the indefensible and the disgraceful."
"Nonsense," responded Arundhati Ghose in The Indian Express. "Ronen Sen is a diplomat, and one of the best at that," she wrote. "He has been part of an extraordinary negotiating team which reasoned, persuaded and cajoled the tough US negotiators over the past two years, to extract from them in the detail what had been agreed to in framework at the highest political levels in both countries. Of all the countries in the world, an exception was to be made for only one, India."
Writing in The Japan Times Brahma Chellaney blamed Singh for the mess. "When he signed the original agreement-in-principle with US President George W. Bush in July 2005, he caught his country by surprise but promised to reach out to political parties and build a national consensus in favour of the deal, seen as unduly impinging on India's strategic autonomy. Instead, through a public-relations blitzkrieg, Singh has consistently sought to spin reality to suit political ends and blocked parliament from scrutinising the deal."
Singh's reassurances to MPs that India retained its right to test nuclear weapons and that the US had no say over India's weapons program, worried The Boston Globe. "Maybe India will exercise self-restraint in the matter of testing; maybe it will not produce new nuclear weapons using fissile material from the eight of its 22 reactors that are to remain under military control. Still, the deal represents a poor precedent for bringing other nuclear powers currently outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty into compliance with some set of rules constraining their behaviour."