"The best moment for me was when we were able to strike a nuclear deal with the United States to end the nuclear apartheid which had sought to stifle the processes of social and economic change, and technical progress of our country in many ways," Singh said.
The deal was the high point of UPA 1 when Manmohan Singh — despite his claim today that he had never thought of resigning — in a rare moment did indeed consider quitting if the deal did not go through. What he did not say was that in UPA-2 it was again his own government that went out of its way to actively undermine the deal to render it almost unusable.
The nuclear deal struck a fundamental blow to an international technology-denial regime that targeted India since its first nuclear test in 1974. For most people, the deal appeared to be about buying foreign nuclear reactors. But for Manmohan Singh, who personally piloted the deal on the Indian side, it was much much more.
Returning from Washington in july 2005 after signing the deal with George Bush, Singh told accompanying journalists that in his view the nuclear deal would do for India's strategic future what the reforms of the 1990s had done for the Indian economy.
The deal gave India the right to engage in nuclear commerce with the rest of the world. It allowed India to import nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel from countries who were hitherto prohibited from dealing with India. This was intended to change the landscape for renewable, clean and dependable source of energy in India. Simultaneously, India's nuclear weapons programme came out of the closet and got a stamp of acceptance by the Nuclear Suppliers Group — by separating the energy and weapons programme, Singh ensured the sustainability of both. He also ensured that the civilian programme could use international expertise to up its game — the DAE was in desperate need of new technologies — which could assist the completion of the fast-breeder programme, the jewel in the DAE crown, which was refusing to come together. By letting the energy programme compete with the rest of the world, India took its nuclear scientists out of hiding and they could test their mettle with the best the world had to offer. Singh also envisioned that India's nuclear industry would be able to evolve in a way that could enable India to become an exporter of nuclear technologies and reactors itself.
On a larger canvas, the PM wanted to push India through the glass ceiling of technology denial — in every sector from space to pharmaceuticals, all technology eventually becomes dual-use i.e. has military and civilian uses. The nuclear deal allowed India to break through that barrier to be able to access the technologies that could enable India to manufacture simple things like fishing rods, for instance.
But the PM's besetting sin, his silence, meant that her could never explain the importance of the deal to either his party, or his government or the opposition, or even the public at large. Just like his Pakistan policy which suffered from the perception that everything was about his travel to Islamabad, the nuclear deal was believed to be all about Manmohan Singh's "love" for the US.
And it was the disastrous nuclear liability law which his own government passed in 2010 that chocked off the oxygen to the nuclear deal. Not only have India's nuclear partners — Russia, france and US — drawn back from their nuclear projects in India, the law has struck a body blow to India's nuclear industry. Precisely those companies that saw the Indian nuclear programme through the dark years of nuclear sanctions, were now floundering because the costs of the liability law threw them out of the reckoning.
That was the flipside of PM's nuclear legacy, and one that would have to be undone if the vision of the nuclear deal is to be achieved. The PM though continues to bat for nuclear energy. After his press conference, Singh drove to Jhajjar in Haryana to inaugurate a nuclear energy centre of excellence and a cancer centre. "Nuclear energy is a dependable and clean option to produce power. India is among the very few nations which have developed technology to install nuclear power plants and have achieved the capability to make nuclear fuel. Our aim is that in the coming ten years, we should achieve the capability to generate more than 27,000 MW nuclear power," Singh said in Haryana's Jhajjar district.
He has only a few months to seal his nuclear legacy.
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