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India-US Relations Blog

The Obama Visit and U.S.-India Relations

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During those remarkable years when Indian students were flocking to U.S. colleges, acquiring skills and reputations that eventually made them the highest earning ethnic group in the U.S, the two governments were doing their damnest to destroy the relationship. Many in both governments still don’t know any better, although it is the government in Delhi that is drifting closer into dangerous waters, led by a captain without the strength to curb odd ministers running their own foreign policy. The reasons the U.S. government didn’t like Delhi in those years lay chiefly in Indira Gandhi’s bizarre attempt to enter the nuclear club in 1974, and of course the CIA’s mischievous assessment that India was a Soviet ‘ally’. The end of the cold war and George Bush’s nuclear deal should have flattened those hurdles, once and for all. The hurdles are gone, but ending a bad relationship is not the same as getting into a new one. Manmohan Singh’s courageous and tenacious performance in Parliament on the nuclear deal saw Indian political leadership at its best. The U.S. government’s worldwide arm twisting to get India the NSG waiver, demonstrated what a super power can do, when it stretches itself for a friend. Since then it’s been all downhill.

France and Russia have got the civil nuclear contracts, after the U.S. did the heavy lifting. Russia has been given the fifth generation fighter contract after the U.S. promised 100 GE 414 jet engines for India’s collapsed jet fighter project. Despite the government’s directive to all ministries to crank up the agenda for President Obama’s visit, a huge hole was created by Antony’s Ministry of Defense which is facing in a different direction. The Ministry believes that the Communications Security Agreement (CISMOA) is a devious and deliberate American plot to eavesdrop on Indian communications, as if the National Security Agency in Washington has no other means to achieve the same objective. The Logistics Agreement would have been hugely beneficial to the navy and air force to extend their reach, using U.S. assets worldwide. It was an agreement that the PLA would have paid billions for. Reciprocal facilities for unpopular U.S. wars could always have been turned down in special circumstances as Turkey did in 2002.The Indian MOD has shut the Indian armed forces off from advanced world technology by refusing to consider both. The U.S. President’s visit was eventually carried off by President Obama and Michelle Obama’s hugely effective public posturing, and some heroic behind the scene actions by corporate India and the U.S.-India CEO’s forum. Even so, the French and the Chinese signed an equal if not larger clutch of business deals with India. The President of the U.S. has a limited charter, unlike New Delhi, where there are Ministers for Coal, steel, petroleum, water, fertilizer, shipping, airlines, roads etc. So New Delhi has not yet grasped the essentials of the new world that it has to live in.

China has overtaken Japan as the world’s second wealthiest nation. Its GDP is $ 5 trillion against India’s $1.3 trillion. By 2020 both GDPs could quadruple, thereby increasing the gap from $ 3.7 to 14.8 trillion (India $ 5.2 trillion vs. China $ 20 trillion). From dams on the Brahmaputra to the Tibetan border, to the Indian Ocean – China’s power and arrogance is something India will have to live with. But how?

Will we see another Krishna Menon cozying upto China, our great Asian ‘brother’, when eventually Nehru had to write to JFK for 12 squadrons of fighter bombers, ‘flown by U.S. pilots’? There are even more unanswered questions. Will the Indian Air Force and Indian Navy sit out a Himalayan war, as they did in 1962 in the collective belief that their contribution to help the army could only make things worse? We don’t need an alliance with the US. We don’t need to get into a fight with China- not now, not ever. But how do we avoid one? Only by playing to China’s belief in Real Politik. To do that, India needs the U.S’ world class defense technology. Israel, France and Russia are alright for the middle level stuff. To get the world class stuff from the U.S. we need a relationship run by governments. The U.S.-India business councils, the Indian-Americans and the CEO’s forum can only do so much. India’s MOD cannot run its own foreign policy either.

Defence And Strategic Affairs Blog

U.S. and India need a grand Thorium Partnership

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This memo is proposed for urgent consideration by President Barrack Obama on the course ahead in U.S.-India relations. Today, when machineries of both governments are whirring to engineer a big bang from the upcoming Obama-Singh summit in Delhi in November, it is recommended that top class horsepower must immediately be allocated to the cold calculus and implementation of a Thorium Partnership between the United States and India.

Thorium Partnership

A Thorium Partnership between the U.S. and India shall yield pioneering benefits and fast-track a technology path towards radical energy security of both countries, as well as for global needs. It is inflexion time in global search to get off fossil fuel dependency and to identify an alternative source that can deliver gigantic scale of energy generation. Thorium fuel is the answer.

Nuclear energy can be generated by using uranium or thorium as fuel in the reactors – however thus far it is only uranium that is being used worldwide, while the technology to exploit thorium as a fuel is many years away. Though there has been some research and development on thorium in a few countries, India is the only country which has invested major research into this technology, and today is a world leader.

Importantly, using thorium as fuel for generating nuclear energy is the only technology path that will hugely reduce the growing risk of nuclear waste management and proliferation – a renaissance of nuclear energy now looms all over the world and it will create large pools of nuclear waste with which no one knows what to do, including in security-risk prone countries. The problem of thorium based waste management will be initially about the same as it is at present.  However, when recycling and closed fuel cycle is implemented in terms of their full potential the thorium based waste will make the problem virtually disappear. This will bring a huge relief to both countries and to global community.

A Thorium Partnership with India will give the United States access to the resulting industrial grade technology, and assured supply of a benign and potent fuel (thorium) for its domestic needs for next hundreds of years from a stable, democratic country – India holds 30% of world reserves of thorium; while the partnership will help India to significantly accelerate its energy and food security. Also in the long term, world supplies of uranium are expected to last no more than 50 – 80 years by various estimates, and thereafter thorium fuel shall be the only route to generate nuclear energy.

India has a substantial technical lead in the development of thorium based nuclear power and has the only operating power plant based on thorium in the world.  However, it might still take another 15-20 years for India to reach mass implementation for power generation based on this technology. A strategic partnership with U.S. will cut this time to technology maturation in half or more and thus the benefits to India’s economic development will be immense.

While it doggedly continues on its R&D path to develop thorium based solutions, in order to fast track development of thorium based technologies India needs large scale research labs set in remote areas since the radioactivity levels in such labs are high. At present India does not have any such facilities – whereas the United States does have infrastructure where such experiments and trials can be carried out. Additionally, the U.S. has a huge problem of nuclear waste at its hands which is ticking like a time bomb – the partnership shall bring a solution to this dilemma also, since thorium based power plants will use this nuclear waste material to generate power.

Upon industrial grade readiness of thorium based reactors, the two countries can jointly export and market a complete bundled technology and fuel solution to other third countries – thereby reducing threats of nuclear proliferation, weaning global communities away from fossil fuel dependency, aiding rapid scaling of energy capacities, and alleviating dangers to climate change – and thus rendering a historic shift in global energy, geopolitics, and food security.

In long term, the scale of technology and economic benefits reaped by the U.S. and India from this partnership may rival the scope of what DARPA enabled in technology and economic benefits to the U.S. by sponsoring and fast tracking R&D of the Internet. This partnership shall help to create high technology and green energy jobs in the U.S. and India, and bring technology spillover benefits to various other sectors in domestic economies of both countries resulting from the fast track R&D initiative in a most complicated technology.

Thus, the partnership is not about money or scientific assistance to either party, but is primarily born out of recognition of core competencies, assets, and needs of each party. With an aggressive can-do attitude this partnership shall bring a true revolution for the energy, food, and geopolitical security needs of this century.
Towards such objective, it is therefore proposed that India and the United States immediately establish a partnership for research, development, commercial planning, strengthening the educational and human resource expertise and implementation of thorium based power plants and energy solutions in India and the United States, and third countries.

Various details of the partnership – the mechanism, the policy, the physics, the engineering, the IPR, and several such matters, and protection of sovereign interest will of course be fiercely negotiated and addressed by each country during discussions on this partnership, along with the scientific assessment of mutual roles. Ours is only to lob this road-map in the public sphere – and to push for an assessment of acute national, and mutual domestic and global interests.

On November 7, 8, or 9, 2010, in the Indian parliament when President Obama addresses over a billion Indians via their elected representatives, or when Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh hosts a joint press conference with President Obama, with a megaphone to the world that addresses the global six billion, both countries must announce this bold and visionary partnership.

Defence And Strategic Affairs Blog

US-India Strategic Partnership: Irritants Cast a Shadow

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The U.S-India strategic partnership is moving on an upward trajectory, though not a predictably smooth one. In fact, after the euphoric “indispensable partners” phase of the second administration of President George W. Bush when the Civil Nuclear Energy Cooperation Agreement was successfully concluded in July 2005, the pace of growth has slowed down.

Though President Bill Clinton had realised the potential of engaging India and had begun the process to get India out of the nuclear dog house, it was President Bush who made it a key foreign policy initiative. India was recognised as a state with nuclear weapons outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), given an NSG waiver to import nuclear technology and fuel, and allowed to sign an Additional Protocol with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The Additional Protocol only placed  India’s civilian nuclear reactors under international safeguards while keeping strategic facilities out of the scope of the safeguards. India was also permitted to reprocess uranium under safeguards for its pressurized heavy water reactors leading to the development of the three-stage thorium fuel cycle.

Under the Next Steps for Strategic Partnership and the Defence Framework Agreement of June 2005 signed under the Bush administration, the technology denial regime is being gradually eased and defense cooperation considerably enhanced. For both the countries, the growing partnership is a hedging strategy against Chinese hegemony in Asia and will prove to be mutually beneficial in case China implodes due to its internal contradictions.

Another crucial area of cooperation between India and the U.S. includes enhanced counter-terrorism cooperation. The CIA has not only given India substantial evidence about the Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008, but also allowed Indian agencies to interrogate its key plotter David Coleman Headley. The sale of U.S. defense equipment to India has also gained momentum. Besides the P8I Poseidon maritime reconnaissance aircraft, C-130J Super Hercules aircraft for Special Forces, C-17 Globemaster strategic airlift aircraft and the USS Trenton, an amphibious warfare ship, many other defense acquisitions are in the pipeline. India is likely to spend up to $ 100 billion on defense purchases over the next 10 years. However, India would like to move away from a buyer-seller relationship towards transfer of technology and joint development, joint production and joint marketing of latest weapons and technology.

In the midst of this flourishing defense relationship, India feels slighted at being left out of negotiations for the resolution of the conflict in Afghanistan despite its obvious strategic stakes, and immense contribution to the development effort. The sale of conventional arms to Pakistan, including F-16 aircraft and 155mm artillery, ostensibly for counter-insurgency operations, also rankles with India as U.S. arms have emboldened Pakistan to launch both covert and overt military operations against India in the past.

While the End User Monitoring Agreement was signed recently, the U.S. would like to see early progress on the Logistics Support Agreement (LSA) and the two technology and information safeguards agreements – the Communications Interoperability and Security Memorandum of Agreement (CISMOA) and the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement for Geo-spatial Cooperation (BECA).

There is no doubt that the growing U.S.-India strategic partnership will define the contours of the geo-politics of the 21st century. However, expectations from president Obama’s forthcoming visit to India are rather low as he has so far not provided the type of leadership and impetus to the relationship that his predecessor had. At best, the two countries might sign a free trade agreement, which in itself will be a good step forward for bilateral trade.

(Gurmeet Kanwal is Director, Centre for Land Warfare Studies, New Delhi.)