Even before the text of the 123 agreement is made public, with the approval of the Cabinet Committees, the deal seems to be as good as through as far as India is concerned. It will go through the motions of Parliament deliberations perhaps with no scope for making any changes to the text as it has already been put on a straight jacket. It appears to be a clever move by the government not to release the text until they had an opportunity to soften possible adverse reaction by releasing in bits and pieces to the political parties, press briefings and media interactions painting a rosy picture thereby giving a spin on the favourable aspects of the deal selectively.
There are some reports that suggest the US cooperated to hold back the text until India is ready!
While the text is expected to be released any time now, the July 27 press briefing by the US Under Secretary Nicholas Burns on the status of the 123 text gives it all. It has been clarified that US has made sure that the text is completely consistent and well within the bounds of the Hyde Act. With the Hyde Act having been debated exhaustively and even our Prime Minister having expressed concerns regarding some of the provisions of the Act and exhorting his countrymen to await the 123 Agreement, perhaps hoping some miracles will happen, we are now left with the inevitable.
All along we have been cautioning that the US cannot and will not overstep the Hyde Act which is their legal basis for the whole agreement irrespective of what is explicit or not in the 123 text. Let us consider how some of the most contentious issues have been dealt with.
It has been stated that reprocessing is the major principal issue and things started moving after India offered to build a new state-of-the-art reprocessing facility, fully safeguarded, fully transparent to the IAEA, to the US and to the international community. This is a heavily loaded requirement extremely difficult to live with practically and by committing to these we seem to have put our foot in the mouth so to say. Burns kept on repeatedly stressing that the plant will be state-of-the-art and it could be deliberate. This term, unlike in many other cases, has no real meaning as there is no internationally available yardstick to qualify a reprocessing facility, with no facility built in recent times anywhere in the world except India and the designs of a handful of plants operating in a few countries are kept a secret and considered as sensitive.
Will India be able to import some of the special items of equipment and components for the dedicated plant? With the commitment to state-of-the-art design, transparency to IAEA, US and other supplier countries, anybody can have a go at this plant and pick holes to put restrictions on reprocessing which has been grudgingly conceded.
We have to take permission to reprocess from those countries supplying uranium! What appears to be on offer is only consent for reprocessing in principle with a set of arrangements and procedures under which reprocessing will take place, as called for in Section 131 of the US Atomic Energy Act of 1954, to be worked out later when the facility is built which may take many years. This complex provision is worse than the Tarapur agreement in which we are stuck even to this day. This could have far reaching consequences and we could be kept under tenterhooks without getting the reprocessing benefits on some pretext or other!
Safeguardability issue will again crop up. Reprocessing is one of our biggest strengths and it is at the core of our long term nuclear programme. Instead of negotiating with strength, we seem to have compromised too much and in future we may have to suffer for it.
The next issue is testing. It is now abundantly clear that the agreement will not tolerate testing. The text may have done some language fixing to circumvent and make it not so glaring. The fact remains, for all practical purposes, we have to forego testing and this may be a big compromise for national security with our neighbours having no such constraints and with the developing terrorism atmosphere.
There seems to be a consent for our building a strategic reserve of uranium. However this is nullified by the provision that the US reserves the right of return of equipment and materials in case of withdrawal of cooperation. This eventuality may not arise as we have compromised on our right to test.
There are so many other irksome provisions in the Hyde Act which are not even being debated. On the whole it appears that while the US is always concerned with its laws, conforming to Hyde Act and so on, the same is missing on the Indian side. Even the Prime Minister’s assurances are not complied with in many respects.
(The writer is former Director BARC, and a former specialist with the IAEA on safeguards matters.)