US–India Nuclear Relations Post 2008

Chapter 6 focuses on debate over the crucial issue of liability in India and the emergence of liability legislation that has prevented the operationalization of the nuclear deal and negated euphoric predictions by US businesses that the deal would create thousands of hi-tech jobs in the US through the sale of nuclear reactors to India. The memories of the Bhopal disaster and residual suspicions of the US amongst the Indian polity gave rise to liability legislation that channelled liability to the suppliers of nuclear reactors, in variance with the prevailing norm of holding reactor operators responsible for accidents. The loud protests of American corporations that the liability law exposes them to unsustainable amounts of liability and the attempts of the Modi government to find a ‘workaround’ at the bureaucratic level have borne little fruit.

Nuclear Politics

Chapter 5 describes how the Left upped the ante following the announcement of the Indo-US bilateral 123 agreement and successfully prevented the UPA from moving forward with the agreement until November 2007. A key question arises as to why the Left suddenly turned around to allow the UPA to proceed with the nuclear deal in mid-November 2007. The chapter delves into the political situation in the Left’s bastion of West Bengal during the September–November period and shows how the fear of adverse political fallout from a botched up police operation to resolve a festering land acquisition conflict in Nandigram ahead of crucial village body elections caused the Left to reverse course on the nuclear deal. The evidence indicates that the Left’s concession was only temporary and was designed to prevent an alliance between the Congress and the All India Trinamool Congress (AITC), the Left’s regional rival ahead of village body elections.

Nuclear Partition

The second chapter begins with an explanation of the origins, evolution, and organizational infrastructure of the Indian nuclear programme. Three Science and Technology Studies (STS) case studies deploying the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) approach are introduced in the theory section and their combined insights are used to organize various individual and collective actors in India based on their initial reactions to the nuclear deal. The chapter then focuses specifically on the debate between two powerful bureaucracies (Department of Atomic Energy [DAE] and Ministry of External Affairs [MEA] within the Indian state over the civilian-military proportions of the separation plan and the status of the fast breeder reactors). The MEA’s generalist vision and the DAE’s narrower departmental vision are observed in the form of two contending separation plans with different civil-military facility balances and rival safeguarded versus unsafeguarded statuses of the fast breeder reactor. The DAE’s tactics to win the debate are elucidated.

The Eight Horsemen

This chapter examines the period from March 2006–August 2007 and describes the debate over waiver legislation in the US Congress, the Hyde Act that emerged and the debate in India among serving and retired nuclear scientists over the Act’s implications for India’s nuclear programme and its ability to conduct future nuclear tests. The core of the chapter is a description of how the perceived strictures in the Hyde Act on nuclear testing such as the termination clause reignited the simmering debate over the success/failure of India’s lone 1998 thermonuclear test and exposed rifts between the serving scientist (Dr R. Chidambaram) who publicly vouched for its success and a group of retired nuclear weapons scientists who believed otherwise. The chapter ends by detailing how this domestic debate influenced the Indian negotiating position on nuclear testing.

Pipeline versus Reactors

This chapter concentrates on the period from July 2005–March 2006 and examines the way in which the nuclear deal and the US-India strategic partnership wrapped around it influenced India’s energy and foreign policy, in particular the Iran–Pakistan–India (IPI) natural gas pipeline and Iran–India relations. The chapter follows the shifting relationships between Petroleum Minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar; External Affairs Minister, Natwar Singh; and Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. An important part of the chapter is the US Ambassador to India David Mulford’s role vis a vis the IPI pipeline and the factors that gave rise to the idea of a nuclear deal with India among a small coterie in the State Department. The chapter concludes with the collision of the rival energy initiatives, the strategic paradigms wrapped around them and the way in which the nuclear deal prevailed over the pipeline with Natwar’s exit and Aiyar’s dismissal being important milestones.

How the Deal Was Born

The chapter begins with a brief history of lukewarm Indo-US relations during the Cold War and the reasons for the lack of depth. The chapter then traces the converging trends including the collapse of the Soviet Union, India’s neoliberalization, India’s 1998 nuclear tests, the Indian American diaspora, the rise of China and re-emergence of Russia that resulted in movement towards a Indo-US strategic embrace undergirded by a grand nuclear accommodation of India’s hitherto sanctioned nuclear programme culminating in the July 18, 2005 joint statement. Multiple narratives of the nuclear deal’s origins are explored and the more salient ones are highlighted. The chapter ends with a brief summary of the constructivist Science and Technology Studies (STS) approach’s key principles such as thick description, multidimensional narration and rejection of technological determinism.