Why China Is Backing Pak And Blocking India At NSG

The agony and ecstasy of being a member of the exclusive Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) was brought home to India on Monday afternoon when China said that the question of India's membership was not even on the agenda of the NSG meeting on Thursday and Friday in Seoul.

The next 72 hours are crucial. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will extricate himself from the asanas performed with 32,000 others at the International Yoga Day in Chandigarh to fly two days later to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting in Tashkent, on the margins of which he will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping. 

Modi is eyeball-to-eyeball with Xi, and according to one government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, "he has refused to blink."

Modi will push India's application with Xi, just as Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar did with the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing last week. If the Chinese leader doesn't agree, it will be clear that he doesn't want to see another Asian nation, India, on the same high table along with the world's most powerful nations, including itself.

On Sunday, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj told the media that she was hopeful India would become a member. She said China was not against letting India in, but was more concerned about the violation of rules and regulations and criteria that had established the NSG as the world's most powerful decision-making body on nuclear matters.

Swaraj was certainly being kind to the Chinese, according to them their own much-vaunted cultural prerogative of "saving face," especially in front of an international audience. 

After all, none other than the Americans have launched a campaign to get India into the NSG, with both US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry working the phones requesting all 48 NSG members to fall in line. Swaraj has spoken personally to 23 Foreign Ministers out of those 48 and Prime Minister Modi's recent trip to the US, Switzerland and Mexico was an exercise in telling the group's small and middle powers that they must acknowledge that India's time has come.

But Swaraj's comments didn't have much effect on the Chinese. At her press conference in Beijing on Monday afternoon, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said, "The inclusion of non-NPT members (like India) has never been a topic on the agenda of NPT meetings. In Seoul this year, there is no such topic." 

Member countries, Hua added, were not only divided about India's membership, but about including any country which had not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Certainly, India considers the NPT a discriminatory treaty, because it acknowledges only the five nuclear powers - who are also permanent members of the UN Security Council - as nuclear weapons states. India believes the time has come to revamp and make more representative the world's security architecture, which remains a lamentable manifestation of what the world looked like after the Second World War.
 Within hours in Delhi, Vikas Swarup, spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs was contradicting Hua Chunying. There is no need to indulge in "needless speculation," Swarup said, confirming to this reporter that India's application - made on May 12 and received with loud approval by several nations including the US, Russia and UK - was certainly on Seoul's agenda.

"Becoming a member of the NSG, a bloc that governs civilian nuclear trade worldwide, will grant India global acceptance as a legitimate nuclear power," said an article last week in the Chinese "Global Times" daily, part of the stable of publications run by the Chinese Communist Party.

"If it joins the group, New Delhi will be able to import civilian nuclear technology and fuels from the international market more conveniently, while saving its domestic nuclear materials for military use," it added.

But there is a second reason for China's obstinacy, which the "Global Times" acknowledged, and that is Pakistan. "The major goal for India's NSG ambition is to obtain an edge over Islamabad in nuclear capabilities. Once New Delhi gets the membership first, the nuclear balance between India and Pakistan will be broken," it said.

So during his visit to Bejing, Jaishankar offered a hard bargain: if China dropped its objections to India, Delhi would not stand in the way of other members who have not signed the NPT from becoming members of the NSG.

The Foreign Secretary's reference was, of course, to Pakistan, which has come much closer to China since 2008, when a similar drama played out at the NSG session in Vienna. Pakistan has also applied to become a NSG member and China, its "all-weather friend" and ally, is invoking the old rules because it wants to keep the hyphenation alive between Delhi and Islamabad.

If Pakistan cant get into the NSG - which China knows will be very difficult because the US will oppose Islamabad tooth and nail - then India should be kept out as well, feel the Chinese.

At the time in 2008, then US President George Bush had leaned on his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao and persuaded him to drop his objections to India getting a waiver from the NSG and allowing it to begin nuclear commerce with the rest of the world.

But now India wants in as a full member, a rule-maker and not only a rule-receiver. To shape the world, or at least its nuclear architecture, and not constantly sit on the sidelines, waiting for things to happen to it.

So when the NSG plenary in Seoul discusses India's application and other matters over June 23-24, Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar is likely to be in the Korean capital, watching and waiting to see what the world says.

All eyes will be on whether China will be the last holdout, the only country to resist India's rightful entry into this prestigious club.

The irony - and this is certainly not lost on the Chinese - is that the NSG came into being in 1975, in the wake of India's first "peaceful nuclear explosion" in 1974, carried out when Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister. At the time, the western world exploded in anger and imposed sanctions. Canada, self-righteously, withdrew all collaboration with India on civil nuclear matters.  

The NSG was created to keep nations like India out - nations who wouldn't toe the line the international community had created and abide by its nuclear apartheid.

The NSG operates by consensus. Which means that if even one country blocks India - last week's holdouts Argentina, South Africa, Mexico, Switzerland and Ireland have since fallen in line, but New Zealand and Austria remain, along with China - India will not be allowed in.

For the first time since 2008, when former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wagered his government on the Indo-US deal and on getting a waiver for India at the IAEA as well as the NSG, India is confronting China again.

The 2008 waiver allowed India to conduct nuclear commerce with the rest of the world - an incredible achievement, because this was the first time any country which had not signed the NPT had won this commendation. Since, Delhi has been in talks with several countries like Russia and France to buy civilian nuclear power plants, and two weeks ago, got the US to sell six plants to India, at the cost of a cool $8 billion. The EXIM bank loan and other credit parameters are currently being negotiated.

But despite Sushma Swaraj's sweet words for China during her Sunday press conference - and her peaceable answer to a Chinese journalist's question on India's position on the South China Sea real estate that China claims, as do several other south-east Asian nations - it seems that the Modi government is also preparing for the consequences, just in case, it fails at the NSG.

Officials were not willing to speculate on the nature of those consequences, but one thing will be clear: former National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra's description of China, as a "bitter neighbor in the north" will be reconfirmed, 18 years after India invoked Beijing's hostility as the reason to go nuclear. 

(Jyoti Malhotra has been a journalist for several years and retains an especial passion for dialogue and debate across South Asia.)

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