US-India nuclear deal stirs political debate

The US-India nuclear cooperation agreement has once again become the talk of the town. It started after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh — during his recent trip to the US — gave assurances to President Barack Obama that his government would facilitate US companies to invest in India’s burgeoning civil nuclear energy market. Since then, the nation continues to be entertained by political antics.
While each of the mainstream political outfits in India are engaged in tug of war presenting themselves as the sole protector of the supreme national interests, virtually all are resigned to the fact that it is impossible for any Indian government to ignore US interests. All the more so, because Washington has taken the initiative to extricate a nuclear armed non-NPT signatory by offering an exit route in the form of bilateral civil nuclear cooperation.
The frustration of US lawmakers, who played a decisive role in not only lifting the US moratorium on pursuing nuclear commerce with India but also expediting the waiver granted by the Nuclear Suppliers Group, is reflected in the statements of Mark Warner and John Cornyn, both co-chairs of the US Senate’s India Caucus.
In a letter written to Secretary of State John Kerry, the senators lamented the lack of progress in finalizing a workable nuclear liability agreement to ensure easy access of American nuclear companies to Indian market. Perhaps the secret behind Singh’s hastiness to push through the contract, by way of which Toshiba’s US subsidiary Westinghouse will be providing reactors for building nuclear power plants in Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh, lay in Washington’s low-key persuasion.
This in itself is an interesting development given the fact that the Gujarat chief minister and opposition Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, has been projected as an anti-nuclear dove.
Modi has already been pitched into this delicate debate because his government is ready to deal with the local farming communities’ steadfast opposition to the acquisition of their land for the upcoming nuclear project with an iron fist. With Modi clearly supporting nuclear commerce with the US, albeit surreptitiously, it remains to be seen how best his loyalists or the leftist intellectuals banking upon Modi’s apparent anti-nuclear stance to scuttle the deal, can defend this prime ministerial aspirant’s frequent somersaults.
The BJP’s doublespeak on the issue has already been exposed by the revelation of US Charge d' Affaires Peter Burleigh’s note back home, which clearly quotes the senior BJP leadership of accepting to have played a neat little game with the masses.
“Criticism of the US in public was to score easy political points against the ruling UPA government and when in power (the) BJP would not harm the Indo-US nuclear deal” was the clear commitment given by the BJP leadership to the US envoys during private deliberations.
So, scoring brownie points over the ruling party through such concocted opposition to nuclear commerce and accusing the prime minister of having extra-territorial allegiance can at best be described as crocodile tears shed over a critical strategic issue that needs to be debated sincerely.
There is no doubt whatsoever that the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the largest since Chernobyl blast in 1986, weighs heavily on public memory. Moreover, safety issues has dogged all such discourses in India ever since the 1984 Bhopal chemical accident, the worst in industrial history, which snuffed out thousands of innocent lives and left many more incapacitated in one go. At that point, the administration failed miserably to enforce safety norms in a pesticide factory located in the midst of a densely populated area. It is unlikely that India has developed that sensitivity by now to make sure that those living adjacent to high-risk facilities are not harmed by any leakages caused by safety failures.
But then it is a Catch-22 situation for New Delhi, attempting to diversify the country’s energy basket with addition of 63,000 megawatts of nuclear power in the next 20 years. Moreover, nuclear energy has the potential to become the mainstay of any future attempt to arrest global warming and greenhouse gas emission.
Unfortunately, the crucial safety issue is not settled as yet with US nuclear firms still bogged down by civil liability clauses incorporated in India’s nuclear damage law enacted in 2010.
Confused citizens are justified in asking that if Westinghouse’s reactors are the safest in the world, why are the Americans not confident that there will be no occasion for nuclear damage claim resulting due to equipment malfunctioning.
With the Russians and French also imposing prohibitive cost, Indian taxpayers will end up paying heftily for any prospective nuclear accident if indeed Manmohan Singh is trapped into diluting the liability clauses to provide immunity to suppliers for any nuclear incident. Above all, the significance of Thorium has so far been ignored in India’s largely lopsided nuclear debate. Construction of a series of Thorium-based Fast Breeder Reactor (FBR) would be strategically gainful for a nation, rich in Thorium deposits and which goes around the world begging for fuels to run its existing nuclear reactors. Fuels generated in FBRs can be easily reused in other such reactors leading to less consumption and significant reduction in the cost of power generated. But then, India is squandering her Thorium reserves by exporting indiscriminately — thanks to an amended Mines and Mineral Regulation Development Act — when this naturally occurring radioactive element could have been a game-changer for the nation’s energy sector.

• Seema Sengupta is a Kolkata-based journalist and columnist.

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