Finally, the suspense is over! After hectic diplomatic parleys and intense negotiations, India has got the critical NSG waiver in Vienna, signalling it's emergence and acceptance as a world power, dehyphenated from Pakistan forever. Remember, we are the only country in the world for whom, and for whom only, this powerful international body has bent it's rules, the very rules that were framed to stop us after our 1974 nuclear blasts. The US worked overtime on our behalf, signalling a deepening strategic relationship between the world's most powerful democracies...
What does this mean for India? It means access to high tech dual-use technology that will have major implications for our growth in pharma, IT and space research. It will mean access to uranium to fuel our nuclear reactors, and to the latest technology in nuclear plants, enabling our unsatiable quest for power. And interestingly, it means our own internal nuclear fuel supplies can be diverted for making weapons.
So what next? Bush will have to try and push the Indo-US deal in the house, and he has very little time for it. But France and Russia will probably be looking at signing their own deals very soon! After all, there are billions of dollars to be had...
2 comments:
I'm very glad with the way things have turn round on the NSG front.. Starting from the chaos at the confidence votes and now with the recent noise that BJP tried to create once again, around the letter from Bush, Congress seems to have held its ground and turned the deal around to favour the nation. My faith in Singh has been strengthened a lot with the NSG deal.. Definitely a moment of pride for us.. :)
By the way, on a slightly different note, everytime there is a major event of this kind, I tend to wonder if it will make it to history textbooks for class 8 in the future.. I mean think about it, my kids will ask me how the deal had actually worked out and hopefully, since I've been tracking the news these days, I'll be able to give them some dope.. What say? :P
Yes, I always thought History should be more relevant than what happened in 1834 :)
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