Diaspora gets into the act in NSG countries

Diaspora gets into the act in NSG countries
Section: National Date:May 31,2007
Devirupa Mitra, Soecial Correspondant

NEW DELHI, May 31: Last year marked the ‘coming-out’ party for the Indian-Americans as a visible and effective lobbying bloc at Capitol Hill. Now, one of the main professional lobby groups, Washington-based US India political action committee wants to extrapolate their success in the legislative process in the US into a more widely spread campaign among the Diaspora residing in countries that are members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group. This public diplomacy effort was actually launched in January, only a couple of weeks after the US President signed the Henry Hyde US-India peaceful atomic energy cooperation act in December 2006. At that time, there was a lot of optimism, at least on the US side, that it would take only a few more meetings to seal the 123 agreement and bring it before the US congress for an “up” or “down” vote. They also knew that India was only willing to conclude a safeguards agreement with the IAEA for its civilian nuclear facilities only after the completion of the bilateral agreement. The 44-member Nuclear Suppliers Group would only take up the US proposal to allow members to transfer items on the trigger list to India, a non-signatory of the NPT, after the 123 agreement was in the bag. Also, several members had insisted that they wanted to assess the safeguards agreement with IAEA, before reaching a decision. The US had first circulated a draft proposal to NSG members in March 2006. Since all decisions are taken by consensus in NSG, there have since been a lot of discussions by both American and Indian officials separately with individual members of the NSG. While the supporters’ bench has heavyweights like US, UK, France and Russia, the Scandinavian countries, Austria, Netherlands and Switzerland had expressed strong reservations. Based on their experience of the lobbying effort learned during the American process, USINPAC has decided to teach their “lessons learnt” to Indians settled in some NSG countries, whose approval would be crucial for India’s efforts to be included in the worldwide nuclear trade regime. A senior information technology executive, Dr. Indranil Nath, is the main driver for the NSG campaign in Japan, where he has been first trying to drive home the importance of NSG issue to the relatively small Indian community. “You do not need to be big and old to make an impact. Even being small and focused would win the race,” he told The Statesman, adding that he expected the majority of the thousand-odd Indian residents in Japan to get involved in the campaign. While the Indian government has brought up the NSG issue with Japan at several forums, there has never been an explicit statement from the Japanese government ~ not exactly surprising considering the traditional non-proliferation position of Japan. Dr. Nath said they were currently planning an intensive contact program through articles in Japanese press, seminars organised by industry chambers, Indian and Japanese companies, invitations to lawmakers in Japan to urge them to support India’s case. In the United Kingdom, Dr Linda Spedding, a corporate lawyer with an international consultancy practice, said that besides e-mail campaigns and workshops with think tanks, the “special focus” would be to encourage the local Indian community to utilise their links with their lawmakers. “We also have close connections with lawmakers through the legal community and the public sector, so the links are already in place,” she told The Statesman. Since Britain is already one of the strongest supporters of India’s case, she said the efforts would be to push UK to be more pro-active in persuading other NSG members who are sitting on the fence. “We will be carrying out an outreach programme to MPs here once the 123 deal is done with the US and we will lobby on the basis that British activity should bring a ‘force multiplier’ effect at the NSG for India given the special position of the UK. Meanwhile, the USINPAC co-founder, Mr Robinder Sachdeva said that the first plan to be executed under the “NSG campaign for India” will be an e-mail campaign next week targeted at over 100,000 people of Indian origin living in various NSG member states. But, for all this to actually get off the ground, India and the US will have to successfully complete their negotiations for a bilateral agreement, which will be politically acceptable for the leadership of both countries, which is far from a done deal.