The 123 Agreement that allows for civilian nuclear cooperation between the United States and India that was satisfactorily concluded in July and whose full text was made public on August 3 has aroused considerable debate in India. The heat and dust generated in Parliament seems to have obscured much of the substantive content and the long term relevance of this “deal”.
The Opposition parties have emotively and vociferously inferred that India’s sovereignty is at stake and that entering into this agreement would convert India into a client state of the US. Much has been said about the Indian “right” to conduct a nuclear test at some indeterminate point in the future and that this has been forfeited by the UPA government.
However, a careful, objective and apolitical reading of the text of the 123 Agreement and its fine-print suggests that many inaccurate assertions are being made by those opposed to the July 2005 agreement. Nowhere does the 123 Agreement — which incidentally is the only binding document that India has entered into — prohibit India from carrying out a nuclear test in the future.
Yes, what it states in some detail in Section 14 is the manner in which the agreement can be terminated by either party and here the allusion is to a nuclear test by India, which would be in contravention of the US law that precedes the July 2005 agreement. In other words, the current agreement is a carefully crafted balance that provides for India’s sovereign right to test even while allowing the US to exercise its right to respond as it deems appropriate. Thus the two leaders, who have made this radical breakthrough — Bush and Manmohan Singh — can faithfully assert to their legislature that their principal objectives and respective national interest or priority in the nuclear domain have been duly respected.
Here it merits to recall that while entering into the July 2005 agreement, India and the US had innovatively pursued different interests and packaged them accordingly for their respective domestic audiences so as to deftly square a very prickly nuclear circle. The sum and substance was that the nuclear issue that had embittered the bilateral relationship for 31 years — from India’s peaceful nuclear explosion of May 1974 — was to be converted into an area of potential cooperation.
In accordance with the give and take policy, India sought to retain its exceptional status of being a state with nuclear weapons (SNW) outside the NPT that would be admitted into the global nuclear fold of civilian commerce, currently denied to it, with no fetters on its weapons and R&D programme. In return, India agreed to place up to 60 per cent of its nuclear facilities under international safeguards and assuage the nuclear proliferation concerns that exist in many quarters. The US in turn sought assurances that the cooperation it extended would in no way advance India’s strategic profile and that its non-proliferation commitments were in no way transgressed.
The text of the 123 Agreement is in many ways a semantic tour de force that straddles both objectives and hence the current turbulence in both the US and India. Opponents to the July 2005 agreement have been very vocal in both countries and the reason is that the text allows for persuasive interpretations that point to two very different objectives being realised simultaneously.  But as of now the factual part is that India retains the sovereign right to test and the US retains the sovereign right to respond and terminate the agreement if it so desires.
However, the distinctive part of 123 is that embedded in it are many layers of what may be termed insurance clauses. Section 14 for instance, allows for both sides to examine the context in which a termination clause may have to be invoked — to wit, why did India have to test — and the remedial measures that will follow. India’s legitimate anxiety derived from the Tarapur experience has been factored in and the US assistance to ensure a fuel reserve has also been mooted. When compared to many other similar 123 agreements that the US has entered into with other nations, this degree of embedded insurance to mitigate adverse exigencies is unique and a testimony to the US determination to stay the course as far as July 2005 is concerned.
It will be very ironic if, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Indian Independence, the long term gains for India from July 2005 are lost sight of due to ideological inflexibility and Pavlovian anti-Americanism. The nuclear and related hi-tech denial regimes that have inhibited India for three decades plus are about to be lifted and the   obligations India is being asked to bear in no way shrinks its sovereignty. Distorting facts to advance a sectarian objective will be very detrimental to India’s abiding interests in the long-term.
(The writer is former head of Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses)