Last Chance For Nuclear Suppliers Group To Get India As Its Member
When he put a question mark over India’s ‘no first strike’ stance, Raksha Mantri Rajnath Singh effectively THUMBED his NOSE at the Nuclear Supplier Group. Now to get India into the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), the ball is squarely in their court.
The Indian Raksha Mantri stoked the issue again last week from the watch-deck of INS Vikramaditya; though this time, he only spoke of India’s “second strike capability”. On the other side of the border, an incoherent Imran Khan has been hopping around like a man on hot coals, waving towards an unlikely nuclear specter on the horizon. Pakistan’s sense of a nuclear war needs to clarified ……it means complete erasure of Pakistan from the World Map. India will still remain.
So if the Indian foreign minister walks into an NSG meeting in these circumstances. It will be a very pragmatic decision for the entire NSG to quickly make a gilded invitation card and invite India into the club. Pakistan, joining the club, especially with its nefarious connection with Turkey on the subject of Nuclear proliferation, is out of the question.
In case NSG fails in their last chance to rope in India, then India will not even say goodbye NSG. This membership does not really matter to India ? NSG membership is symbolic. Getting India a place at the high table, now will be more important for the NSG itself rather than India. In practical terms, it means nothing for India.
For, even with the one-time waiver facilitated by the US, not a megawatt of nuclear capacity has been added by India through the NSG route.
Two units of the Kudankulam plant, grandfathered from previous times, are what has been permitted by India with foreign help and fuel, and they have nothing to do with the one-time waiver.
Once in a while, GE, Westinghouse or Areva furthering talks with India may be there, but it quickly passes. While the 10 pressurised heavy water plants (700 MW each) of Nuclear Power Corporation of India are coming up at a fast pace, there seems no hope for the Western power plants, which — apart from issues such as environment and liability — have simply priced themselves out of the market. An NSG membership would do zilch. So, while bidding goodbye to the NSG, India is also not going to miss it.
