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India has walked into a trap: BJP

NEW DELHI: The Bharatiya Janata Party on Saturday said it would offer its structured response to the Nuclear Suppliers Group waiver for India after it saw the fine print of the text.

Its immediate view was that India had “walked into a nuclear non-proliferation trap” and had “surrendered its right to a further nuclear test.”

Party leader Yashwant Sinha was not at all optimistic of any gain India might have made with the India-U.S. nuclear deal.

The three points that were of utmost importance were: right to exercise the option to test, availability of enrichment and reprocessing technology and dual-use technology, and uninterrupted and guaranteed fuel supply for the life-time of the reactors India might buy.

Asked whether the BJP would be satisfied if these three concerns were met by the waiver, Mr. Sinha said he believed that was not possible. The Hyde Act ensured that India would not get these benefits.

Mr. Sinha said: “The United States will ensure that no other country, be it Russia or France, engage in nuclear commerce with India on terms different from those spelt out in the Hyde Act.”

In the event of India going for another nuclear test the steps that the United States and other countries would take would be “punitive in the extreme.”

He believed that with this deal, India’s nuclear technology would be “frozen at its current level forever.”

There was always a continuous need for upgrading technology and “we cannot say that after 1998 Pokhran we have all the technology we need and will never need to test again.”

The BJP leader described Saturday, the day India won a waiver at the meeting of the NSG in Vienna, as a “day of historic shame for India.” The legacy of Indira Gandhi’s Pokhran I and Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Pokhran II had been destroyed, Mr. Sinha said.

He said “national interest had been surrendered by the Manmohan Singh government.”

Finally, on the benefit of getting nuclear energy for civilian use, Mr. Sinha wondered what the cost of each unit of nuclear power would be. He warned that the benefits of nuclear energy in terms of additional electricity would not become apparent for a decade or more and the cost would be very high.

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