In early January, the US Biden administration’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan made a visit to India and met with Indian NSA Ajit Doval as well as with Prime Minister Modi. The urgency for this top US official to visit India can be considered unusual since the Biden administration had just two weeks left in its tenure before it made way for a new government led by Donald Trump.
The highlight of the meetings were clearly Sullivan’s promises about “updates brought out by the Biden administration to U.S. missile export control policies under the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) that will boost US commercial space cooperation with India”, as well as “US efforts to finalize necessary steps to delist Indian nuclear entities, which will promote civil nuclear cooperation”. In other words, the US indicated it was willing to take measures to remove obstacles on its part to supply technology and materials for India’s nuclear program as well as share other advanced technologies with India.
The background
On July 18, 2005, the US government headed by George W. Bush and the Indian government headed by Manmohan Singh signed a Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement. This was considered a major change in US policy towards India, since after India’s Pokhran nuclear test in 1974, its nuclear weapons program was blacklisted by the US — and consequently by its allies and other signatories to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. This meant that India could not get access to materials or technologies from those countries that could be considered as aiding its nuclear program. At that time, India was viewed by the US through the lens of the Cold War, and was seen as being too close to the Soviet Union. In the absence of external support for its nuclear program from the US and other countries, the Indian state took the help of the Soviet Union (and later, Russia) for boosting its nuclear program.
However, from the first decade of the twentieth century, the US’ strategic priorities had changed. The growing power of China was seen as the main obstacle to US imperialism’s grand strategy of asserting its global hegemony. Therefore, strengthening the Indian state as a power that could confront and contain China in its neighbourhood was seen as very important to US strategy. It is in this context that the last twenty years have seen steady moves by US imperialism, under each of its successive administrations, to expand and consolidate its military and strategic ties with India, beginning with the Civil Nuclear Cooperation agreement of 2005. This includes the formation of the Quad, a group consisting of the US, Australia, Japan and India, with the express purpose of containing China in its maritime neighbourhood. It also includes the concluding of four “foundational agreements” to greatly increase Indo-US collaboration in the military, intelligence, logistical and technological spheres. Most recent has been the “Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies” (iCET) launched in 2022. There has also been a significant increase in the trade in military hardware between the US and India in the last few years.
Despite this, there have been obstacles to the collaboration in the areas of nuclear power and advanced technology transfer. American nuclear power companies have not come forward to engage with India because at present India’s nuclear liability laws place the onus for compensation for any nuclear “accident” clearly on the nuclear plant suppliers, rather than on the nuclear plant operators as they want. Indian people have had very bad experience, in the case of the Bhopal gas disaster, where the US capitalists who owned the Union Carbide plant were able to escape from their criminal responsibility. This has made it hard for the ruling class politicians to advocate a watering down of India’s nuclear liability law. At the same time, despite the 2005 agreement, US laws continue to blacklist Indian nuclear power establishments and impose restrictions on the transfer of materials and technologies to India because of its nuclear weapons program. This ban extends even to technologies that may be seen as feeding into India’s nuclear program, such as AI, quantum computing, and space technologies.
Holding out the carrot of nuclear cooperation and advanced technology transfer
Sullivan’s last-minute trip to India is a sign that the US continues to view India as pivotal to its strategy to contain China and dominate Asia and the world. He made promises to remove hurdles to the advanced technologies and components that the Indian state wants, without revealing any details. This can also be seen as a way in which US imperialism can weaken Indian’s ties with Russia which at present is its only foreign supplier of nuclear reactors. Far from being seen as a “victory” for India, US imperialism’s measures to tighten its collaboration with the Indian state pose a grave danger to the Indian people. Through the supply of weapons, materials and advanced technologies, US imperialism can more closely control and manipulate the Indian’s state and its policies and draw our people deeper into conflicts and tensions generated by it for its own interests, and which endanger our own peace and security.