NSG Meeting

Today I afternoon I was reading mint online from Livemint.com and I got this article. And after dinner, when I saw the timesofindia.com, I got news, just check out…

Mint Article (gist)…

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that when push comes to shove, China will not be the one standing up and objecting to a waiver by the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) when the all-important NSG meeting on India is held in Vienna on 4-5 September.

Day before yesterday the Peoples Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China, had run an article by a scholar from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, saying that if the Indo-US nuclear accord went through, it would be a major blow to non-proliferation efforts worldwide. Question is why are the Chinese speaking with a forked tongue? Or it is a deliberate effort to unsettle India?

The thing about the Chinese, the head of Jawaharlal Nehru University China department, Sreekant Kondapalli, says, is that they are never going to openly oppose India’s ambitions. Instead, like-minded nations will be persuaded to speak up. For example, China was widely believed to be behind Pakistan’s objections to the Indo-US nuclear deal when it was being debated at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Now, at the NSG, says Kondapalli, it will be in Beijing’s interest if countries like Switzerland, Ireland, Austria and New Zealand prolong India’s agony and object to the special nuclear exemptions being granted to India. After all, if the Bush administrations stated aim is to get India into the nuclear fold so as to contain a rising China, then Beijing would certainly not want an increasingly powerful India.

China’s complex political relationship with India has been most evident over the last few years, both on the nuclear issue as well as when India began to lobby, along with Germany, Japan and Brazil in 2004-05, for the expansion of permanent seats (but without veto power) in the Security Council. As the so-called G-4s effort began to gain ground, the Chinese sent around a hundred envoys around the world (especially to Africa), to lobby against this effort.

The G-4 plan at the time was supported by Britain and France and strongly opposed by the Chinese while the US sat on the fence. Beijing put out informally that its anti-expansion lobbying was aimed at Japan, not India, but New Delhi wasn’t really impressed.

After the G-4 effort failed to take off and India began to focus on the Indo-US nuclear deal in 2005, the Chinese never let India know what it was really thinking.

TOI News

The US on Thursday said "steady progress" was being made to rope in NSG members to end India's nuclear isolation as some countries insisted on inclusion of a specific commitment in the draft waiver for stopping nuclear cooperation if New Delhi conducts an atomic test.

A number of countries like New Zealand, Austria, Norway, Ireland, Netherlands and Switzerland were not satisfied with the present draft even as the US pushed for a consensus by projecting the waiver as a "historic opportunity" to bring the largest democracy and one of the biggest economies into the global nuclear mainstream.

"The US believes firmly that the steps we are considering for India will strengthen non-proliferation and help to welcome one of the world's largest economies and biggest democracies more fully into the global fold," American Undersecretary of State William Burns told reporters on the sidelines of the meeting.

Sources…

Livemint.com

Timesofindia.com