NSG membership: How India countered China's Pakistan card
June 20, 2016 14:10 IST
'The onus is now on China to explain to the world why it feels Pakistan should accompany India on the question of NSG membership!!'
'China's not so covert help for Pakistan's nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes will stand exposed,' says Ambassador G Parthasarathy.
IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Modi with US President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, June 7, 2016.
Modi thanked Obama for extending support to India's membership in the Missile Technology Control Regime and the Nuclear Suppliers Group. Photograph: PTI Photo
When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi carried out what she called a 'peaceful nuclear explosion' in May 1974, the reaction of the world was swift and decisive.
Very few countries took our protestations of the 'explosion' being 'peaceful,' seriously. Pakistan, which had decided in January 1972, immediately after the Bangladesh conflict, to make nuclear weapons to counter Indian conventional military superiority, accelerated its efforts to go nuclear.
China's Chairman Mao Xedong assured Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1976 of full-fledged Chinese assistance to fulfill his nuclear ambitions. Chinese assistance to Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme has continued relentlessly over the past four decades.
The designs of Pakistani nuclear weapons have been provided by China along with assistance to strengthen Pakistan's capabilities for the production of weapons grade uranium and plutonium.
India's 1974 nuclear test also had other implications. There was a significant economic cost India had to pay for its 'peaceful nuclear explosion.'
The United States unilaterally cut off supply of enriched uranium fuel for the 420 MW Tarapur Nuclear Power Plant. More importantly, a Nuclear Suppliers Group, which today has 48 members, was formed to end all nuclear supplies and cooperation with countries like India, which had not signed the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and accepted International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards on all its nuclear establishments.
India was the country that was hard hit most strongly by the NSG's formation. It lost access to imported uranium ore even for its nuclear power plants and research reactors.
The NSG's stringent sanctions seriously impeded the development of India's nuclear power programme and even its nuclear research. It was only after the May 1998 nuclear tests and the failure of Western sanctions imposed on India that the George W Bush administration moved decisively to end sanctions.
In July 2006, the United States Congress amended US law to accommodate nuclear trade with India. In 2008 the Bush administration approached the NSG to get all its members to end sanctions. After prolonged negotiations, extending over two rounds, the NSG finally ended sanctions on September 6, 2008.
India, in turn, agreed to detailed provisions to separate its civilian and military programmes, to work for the conclusion of a comprehensive fissile material control treaty, to work for export controls on missile and nuclear technologies and observe its moratorium on testing nuclear weapons.
But India still remained to be accepted as a member of groups like the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) and the Nuclear Suppliers Group.
But for President Bush's personal intervention with world leaders like China's then President Hu Jintao, the NSG would not have ended sanctions imposed on India.
Major industrial powers like Russia, Japan, the UK, Germany, Canada and France supported the American effort. It was this process that has led to India getting cooperation from countries across the world including the US, Russia, France and Canada to develop its nuclear power programme, together with supplies of uranium ore to run its growing number of nuclear power reactors.
Despite these developments, India is still not a member of the NSG. And the opposition to its membership of the NSG comes from China, encouraged and provoked by its 'all weather friend' Pakistan.
India has the support of all major powers including the US, Russia, France, Germany, Canada and Japan to being admitted as a member of the NSG. But China is leading the charge against it being made a member unless Pakistan is treated similarly.
China knows fully well that given Pakistan's clandestine supply of nuclear weapons technology and designs to Iran, Libya and North Korea it stands very little chance of being admitted to the NSG and treated on par with India for the present.
These issues are set to figure prominently at the NSG's meeting in Seoul on Friday, June 24. Quite obviously, Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar's June 16-17 visit to Beijing was to explore the possibility of getting China to end its objections to India's membership of the NSG, by hinting that India would have no objections to Pakistan being accorded NSG membership.
This puts the onus on Pakistan to meet the stringent conditions set by the NSG. There are a number of NSG conditions that Pakistan will be unable to agree to. The most important condition is to sign a Fissile Material Control Treaty and end the production of all fissile material for use in nuclear weapons.
Even if Pakistan agrees to this, it would have to end distrust of its propensity to pass on nuclear weapons technology to Islamic countries and North Korea, as it has done in the past.
It is in this context that one has to understand why External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj asserted that she did not think that China was opposed to India joining the NSG and that India was not opposed to Pakistan's membership of the NSG.
The onus is now on China to explain to the world why it feels Pakistan should accompany India on the question of NSG membership!! China's not so covert help for Pakistan's nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes will stand exposed.
India would, after all, have no objection to meeting the NSG's conditions to become a member. It would be for China to explain to the world why it supports the nuclear ambitions of its 'all weather friend' and ally, Pakistan.
These issues will not necessarily be sorted out at the NSG's Seoul meeting, but Beijing will learn that it will have to pay the price of having its credibility eroded if it continues to equate Pakistan with India on issues like nuclear proliferation.
G Parthasarathy, a former high commissioner to Pakistan, is one of India's most outspoken commentators on foreign affairs and security issues.
G Parthasarathy
http://www.rediff.com/news/column/n...a-countered-chinas-pakistan-card/20160620.htm
Foolish to even think China will support India's NSG bid
Far from offering something, Beijing believes it is seeing increased New Delhi's truculence
Foreign secretary S Jaishankar's visit to Beijing last week indicates that New Delhi is undertaking direct diplomacy to obtain China's support for India's membership into the Nuclear Suppliers Group.
This is as it should be. It was foolish and futile to try and somehow shame China into supporting the Indian case.
Actually the first round of diplomacy began earlier, with President Pranab Mukherjee's visit to Beijing last month.
Also read - How Pranab pulled off a balancing act in China
What is not widely known is that the foreign secretary, who was accompanying the president, took the opportunity to engage the Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi in a one-on-one meeting.
What transpired in either meeting will not be known, but the success or failure of the effort will soon become evident in the forthcoming NSG meeting in Seoul.
Trade
Suffice to say, it will make little difference. India has already sought and obtained a waiver to conduct civil nuclear trade from the body and also pledged to follow its rules, whether or not we are members.
However, it will be a dent in the prestige of the government which had hyped up India's efforts to enter the body to the point where being denied entry will be seen as a major setback for Indian diplomacy.
The NSG debate is a good primer of the manner in which world politics functions. To start with the NSG is itself a body that is not based in international law, but a cartel of the powerful, in this case, countries with the capacity to conduct nuclear trade, with whom the only language that talks is power and the only method of negotiation is give and take.
Pranab Mukherjee on China. (PTI)
There are other similar bodies, beginning with the G7/G8 - now somewhat chastened - but which once played the role of the arbiter of the rules of international economic system.
So there is the MTCR (Missile Technology Control Regime), a club of countries which have the knowhow of making missiles, space systems or their components, the Australia group which is a cartel of countries making chemicals and precursors of chemical weapons and the Wassenaar Arrangement with advanced conventional weapons technologies.
Also read - NYT ran an ignorant editorial attacking India's NSG claims
As part of the India-US nuclear agreement of 2008, America promised to ease our entry into all these groups and that was a big thing, because the only country that could achieve this goal was the US, the sole global superpower.
Being cartels and not international agreements, these regimes are not always universal, the major missile and arms exporting power China is not a member of the MTCR or the Wassenaar, though it claims to harmonise its rules with them.
Position
Given this perspective, China's formal position raising the issue of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty was a red herring.
It was not India's refusal to join the NPT that led to the NSG's creation, but its first nuclear test. With the world more or less accepting India as "a state with nuclear weapons," and marking this by the 2008 waiver, that issue should no longer have any salience.
Neither should the Chinese need to assuage Pakistan's angst. Beijing has been a major beneficiary of Islamabad's obsession with India.
It is in its interest to prolong this situation, rather than bringing in Pakistan from the cold.
Also read - Why US senate failed to recognise India as major strategic partner
It is actually all about that oldest issue in diplomacy - give and take. What is India willing to offer to China, in exchange for its support for the Indian application for NSG membership?
Far from offering something, Beijing believes it is seeing increased Indian truculence. New Delhi has gone out of its way to connect freedom of navigation issues with the South China Sea; tried to shame China into placing Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar in the ISIS-al Qaeda sanctions list at the UN; Indian entities with government backing sought to organise a conference of the entire galaxy of Chinese dissidents, and that, too, at the headquarters of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile. As it is India has been disdainful towards Beijing's pet initiative, the One Belt One Road.
Membership
New Delhi, however, believes that it has sought to balance its ties with China by participating in the New Development (BRICS) Bank and the Asia Infrastructure Development Bank. India has sought membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and sought to put an even spin on its position on maritime issues in the communiqué issued after the Russia-India-China meet in April upholding UNCLOS and addressing disputes through "negotiations and agreements" between the parties concerned.
Also read - Tragedy of Modi's India: Where doves don't fly
In June, it dropped references to South China Sea in relation to freedom of navigation issues. It has also indirectly signalled that were it to become a member of the NSG, it would consider the Pakistani application on its merits.
But what will clinch the issue is the deal Jaishankar will be seeking to strike with Beijing. Such deals are not made in public. We can only surmise their existence through the outcomes or in hindsight.
(Courtesy of
Mail Today.)
http://www.dailyo.in/politics/nsg-m...lear-trade-south-china-sea/story/1/11277.html
