MMS’s foreign policy legacy: Nuke deal with US, political parameters for settlement of boundary row with China

'At home, Dr Singh will be remembered for his economic reforms that spurred India’s rapid economic growth. We mourn Dr Singh’s passing and will always remember his dedication to bringing the United States and India closer together,' Blinken said.

New Delhi: As Manmohan Singh breathed his last, the United States, like many in India, recalled his leadership in advancing the bilateral civil nuclear cooperation agreement – an idea, that took shape when he, just 14 months after taking over as the prime minister, visited Washington D.C. and met President George W Bush on July 18, 2005.

“Dr Singh was one of the greatest champions of the US-India strategic partnership, and his work laid the foundation for much of what our countries have accomplished together in the past two decades,” Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, said in Washington DC after the demise of the 13th prime minister of India. “His leadership in advancing the US-India Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement signified a major investment in the potential of the US-India relationship.”

The framework of the India-US civil nuclear agreement was laid in a joint statement issued after Singh hosted Bush in New Delhi on March 2, 2006. It, however, took 30 more months before Singh’s External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee and Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made history at the Benjamin Franklin Room of the US State Department in Washington DC by signing the landmark agreement on behalf of the two governments.

Singh led the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government through the labyrinth of separating the country’s civilian and military nuclear facilities, placing the civilian ones under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and winning the waiver from the Nuclear Supplier Group to clear the way for signing the landmark agreement – despite obstruction from the ruling coalition’s leftist constituents.

The Indo-US nuke agreement, or, to be more precise, the ‘clean waiver’ Nuclear Suppliers Group granted India to make the deal possible, indeed opened up ways for New Delhi to ink similar pacts with other countries too, and thus ended the ended the ‘nuclear apartheid’ that the US and the rest of the West imposed on India after the first nuke tests it had carried out in Pokhran in 1974.

Singh, himself, cherished the signing of the Indo-US nuclear agreement as the best moment of his 10-year-long tenure in the office of the prime minister.

The commercial implementation of the agreement with the US was slowed down in the subsequent years for a variety of reasons, including the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act of India. But it laid the foundation of India-US cooperation in advanced technologies, leading to the latest bilateral Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology, or iCET, which was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Joe Biden in June 2022.

“We mourn Dr Singh’s passing and will always remember his dedication to bringing the United States and India closer together,” Blinken said in his statement on Friday.

Singh passed away on the 20th anniversary of the 2004 Tsunami, which had ravaged coastal regions of India and many other Indian Ocean nations. He had decided not to take external aid for rehabilitation and reconstruction in the aftermath of the disaster. India rather extended support to many other nations devastated by the tsunami and it was the coordination between the navies of India, Japan, Australia, and the US that laid the foundation of the Quad – now a formal bloc comprising the four democracies challenging China’s hegemonic aspirations in the Indo-Pacific region, albeit in a benign way.

Beijing, however, on Friday recalled his positive contributions to the development of China-India relations. About a year after Singh took over as the prime minister in New Delhi in May 2004, the special representatives of India and China agreed on “Political Parameters and Guiding Principles for the Settlement of the Boundary Question” in April 2005 – which remains the only outcome of the negotiations to settle the territorial dispute till date. “During his tenure as Prime Minister, China and India announced the establishment of a strategic cooperative partnership for peace and prosperity,” Mao Ning, the spokesperson of the communist country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in Beijing.

“As prime minister and when serving in other high-ranking positions, he accomplished a lot in promoting India's economic development and asserting its interests on the world stage," President Vladimir Putin of Russia said in a condolence message. “He also made a major personal contribution to strengthening friendly ties between our two countries by elevating them to the level of a special and privileged strategic partnership.”