Nuclear alphabet soup

Let us caution ourselves about getting over-excited on this MTCR business. After we had eaten a sumptuous crow and allowed the ‘detained’ Italian marine to go home, Rome condescended to drop its objection to India’s membership in the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) club, paving the way for our formal “entry.” In fact, this is a process that began 10 years ago, with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh promising, in 2005, India’s “harmonisation and adherence” to the MTCR guidelines [as part of the under-negotiation  Nuclear Deal]; this ‘work in progress’ got finished  on Monday. 

Shorn of technicalities, an MTCR membership will enable India to access advanced technology, including armed Predator drones from the United States. An MTCR membership should, theoretically, allow New Delhi to sell advanced weapons to others. It has been breathlessly suggested that India would be an arms exporter. 

However the MTCR ‘success’ is no compensation for our failure to gain entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group.  China and several other countries joined hands to bar our way and to hand Prime Minister Modi his first comprehensive foreign policy defeat. Experienced foreign policy experts have noted Prime Minister Modi’s extraordinary — and, unnecessary — involvement  in making the sales pitch for membership of a club. The Prime Minister was needlessly pitched into an enterprise that never looked very promising. The foreign policy establishment should have advised — even insisted — on a less-dramatic and less-public wooing of the NSG members. It is far from clear what strategic advantage accrues to India from joining this ‘select’ group.  As a former Foreign Minister of India and senior BJP leader, Yashwant Sinha, has argued that “whatever we had to get, we have got it,” even without the NSG.  In the process of getting rebuffed at Seoul, we had conceded an important — and probably ill-conceived — parity with Pakistan, when we felt desperate enough to come close to saying that India would have no objection to Islamabad also getting a seat at the NSG high table. But what is inexplicable is South Block’s insistence that if Seoul was not a success neither was it a failure. Why imitate the ostrich!