Ameen Izzadeen, "Is Manmohan Singh bound to the burning Bush?" Daily Mirror, July 18, 2008.

[The view from Sri Lanka -jlt]

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Why is Washington going all-out to help the nuclear programme of a country which has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)? Compare the US policy towards India with its policy towards Iran, which has signed the NPT. The United States is threatening Iran with military action if Teheran does not abandon its uranium enrichment programme. On the other hand, it rewards India, a country which possesses nuclear weapons, with US technical and financial assistance. Why did the Bush administration say 'no' when Pakistan made a request that a similar agreement be signed with Islamabad, too?

Answer: The US-India nuclear deal is largely to with US geo-strategic policies.

Given the United States' desire to militarily dominate the world with a neocolonialist economic agenda, it is widely believed that India is being dragged into a US military alliance against China. The nuclear agreement is designed to build up India as a monolith against China which is rising as the most powerful naval force in the Indian Ocean, even posing a challenge to the United States.

To make India a powerful check against the Red Army requires massive transfer of military equipment to India. At present, US sanctions imposed after India's 1974 and 1998 nuclear tests block transfer of strategic equipment and technology to India. If India goes ahead with signing agreements with the IAEA and the NSG, it will allow the US government to remove impediments that block transfer and sale of military and nuclear technology to India.

China, on its part, is not unaware of the US agenda. However, it has intensified trade and diplomatic relations with India to defeat the US scheme. But a section of India's foreign policy mandarins, who have been highly Americanised, believe that India's future lies in close cooperation with the United States. Remember Ronen Sen, India's ambassador in Washington when the deal was being negotiated. He hit out at his countrymen who said that the deal would impinge on India's sovereignty as "headless chicken".

The Americans are not ruffled by the prospect of Manmohan Singh losing the July 22 no-faith motion. If the Singh government is defeated, they have a stauncher ally — the BJP, which, with its Hindutva zeal, feels it is Washington's natural ally in the fight against the so-called Islamic terror.

In the United States, the strongest advocates of the nuclear deal are the pro-capitalist, pro-Zionist neoconservatives or neocons, who are responsible for more than 1.3 million deaths in Iraq in the past five years and bloodshed in countries like Afghanistan and Lebanon. One of the chief promoters of the deal was US Vice President Dick Cheney who is said to have used his coercive diplomacy to get Singh to agree to the deal.

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