India Will Continue Gas Ties With Iran

Nice to see that we've finally grown up.  

India wants to keep getting oil from Iran: Pakistani daily

India intends to keep importing oil from Iran and it appears that Indians, and even Chinese, will explore paying Tehran ''with gold, the Japanese yen or even in part with their own national currencies'', said a Pakistani daily.

An editorial in the News International Monday said that the US wants Pakistan to drop the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline project altogether. 

"It has stepped up efforts to lobby Pakistan to abandon not only the IP gas pipeline project but also liquefied natural gas purchases from its western neighbour in return for cheaper gas from the US," the editorial added.

Pranab Mukherjee confirms that: India won't scale down its petroleum imports from Iran: FM

India, which imports 12 per cent of its oil from Iran, will not scale down its petroleum imports from Tehran despite US and European sanctions against the Islamic republic, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has said.

"It is not possible for India to take any decision to reduce the imports from Iran drastically, because among the countries which can provide the requirement of the emerging economies, Iran is an important country amongst them," Mukherjee told reporters here.

Speaking at the end of a two-day visit aimed at wooing US investment, Mukherjee yesterday said: "Some other countries, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, the other Gulf countries they also contribute but Iran contributes substantially."

"We (India) imports 110 million tonnes of crude per year. We will not decrease imports from Iran. Iran is an important country for India despite US and European sanctions on Iran," the finance minister said.

Nuclear Deal/Bill And Our Natural Partnership

Brahma Chellaney in The Hindu:

Creating an artificial market with no-strings subsidies and electricity supply at state-supported rates is no prudent way to meet energy needs. The proposed arrangements actually seek to create a win-win situation for foreign vendors by ensuring there is no downside to their business. By rigging commercial terms in favour of select foreign suppliers, the arrangements, in effect, promote unfair business practices and cartelisation.

Manmohan Singh's dogged persistence in this whole nuclear deal/liability bill matter is mystifying. And the BJP support bought by opaque behind-the-scenes dealings: "Narendra Modi let off in barter for Bill".

And what is our natural partner and the object of Manmohan Singh's devotion up to? Making thinly-veiled threats: U.S. tries to armtwist India on Dow issue. From the email sent by the Deputy National Security Advisor to Montek Ahluwalia:

“We are aware of this issue and we will look into it. While I've got you, we are hearing a lot of noise about the Dow Chemical issue. I trust that you are monitoring it carefully. I am not familiar with all the details, but I think we want to avoid developments which put a chilling effect on our investment relationship.”

Natural partners in crime.

BJP: Virtual Opposition

There is really no difference between the BJP & the Congress as far as some things are concerned. And kow-towing to the US is one of them, as the deal on the nuclear liability bill shows:

A smooth passage in Parliament of the proposed nuclear civil liability Bill was ensured by the Union government on Tuesday after it took on board most of the suggestions made by the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Among the changes agreed upon are trebling of the operator liability cap from Rs. 500 crore to Rs. 1,500 crore and specific exclusion of private operators in the nuclear sector.

Rs 1500 crore as compared to Rs 500 crore earlier? They must be joking. It is left to the Left to raise a dissenting voice:

The Left had raised four issues: India should not be part of any international convention, which, it felt, would limit the options to hold the suppliers liable; expand the scope of the proposed legislation to include non-civilian nuclear installations since in the case of an accident it might impact civilian population too; raise compensation cap to Rs.10,000 crore; and bring the supplier within the ambit of liability against the provision that mentions of such a clause in case of wilful problem in design.

Nuclear Liability: Accidents Happen

So why ignore that fact? From The Hindu:

The ongoing disaster of the petroleum volcano caused by blowout of the BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico should provide a sobering object lesson. Thinking that does not consider high-consequence but low-probability events borders on folly. BP also considered an uncontrolled blowout to be very low probability. As it turns out, BP, as one of the world's largest corporations, can provide the tens of billions of dollars of damages. But no nuclear company in the United States has the financial muscle to compensate a significant fraction of the maximum officially estimated damages.

Makes sense.

Nuclear Liability: Do As We Say, Not As We Do

Siddarth Varadarajan writes in The Hindu:

The irony is that even as it has pushed the regime of legal channelling on the rest of the world, the U.S. system of economic channelling of liability allows tort claims as well as an unrestricted right of recourse for the operator. That is how, for example, Metropolitan Edison, the operator of the Three Mile Island reactor, sued its supplier, Babcock & Wilcox, after the 1979 accident.

What is it that makes the U.S. so hypocritical?

He also considers some alternatives that India could consider in terms of making a liability law:

In a recent article, Evelyne Ameye has confronted the flawed logic of channelling, making a safety-cum-engineering argument in favour of suppliers remaining liable for accidents their products may cause. (“Channelling of nuclear third party liability towards the operator,” European Energy and Environmental Law Review, 2010). This can be done in two ways. Liability for an accident can still be channelled on to the operator but his right of recourse in the event of supplier negligence is left unrestricted. The Russian Federal Act on Atomic Energy, for example, does not impose a limit upon the operator's right of recourse. (Alexander Matveev, “The Russian approach to nuclear liability,” International Journal of Nuclear Law, 2006). South Korea's liability legislation also allows operators to recover damages from suppliers in the event of negligence. A second way would be to allow victims to sue suppliers for fault-liability under tort law so as to win damages over and above what the operator pays through strict liability. Thus Germany, a party to the Vienna Convention on nuclear liability, entered a reservation stressing its right, under national law, to hold persons other than the operator liable for nuclear damage. Besides, several conventions on environmental damage — such as the 2003 Kiev Protocol on industrial accidents in transboundary waters — now explicitly provide for strict as well as fault-liability to run side by side.

Liability Caps

The Americans want the Nuclear Liability Bill which caps the suppliers' liabilities in case of mishaps. One has to agree that they practice what they preach. I mean, $75 million liability cap to cover damages from oil spills. How pro-oil companies can a country's politicians be?

Who Is The Nuclear Liability Bill For?

Prithviraj Chauhan has denied that there is US pressure to pass the Nuclear Liability Bill, while at the same time admitting that 'only US companies' will be affected. Now ET claims that the US ambassador is doing a sales job for the Bill among opposition leaders. So who really wants this Bill?

The Nuclear Deal

And all that it was to do for the Indo-US partnership are in reality far from the touted ideal. Who could have known!

The United States-India nuclear deal was promoted as a transformative initiative — one that would put the bilateral relationship on a much-higher pedestal. In his valedictory speech, President George W. Bush declared: “We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India.” By contrast, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has not made a single statement on the deal — not even to Parliament — ever since the vaunted deal came to fruition, othe r than to admit recently that he got his party to back the deal by threatening to resign.
...
Seven months after the deal’s realisation, there is no sign of its transformative power. Rather, doubts have arisen over the supposed “global strategic partnership” with America. The policy frame in which Washington is viewing India is not the larger Asian geopolitical landscape, but the southern Asian context. But even on regional matters of vital interest to India, the U.S. has sought to ignore New Delhi or pursue antithetical policy approaches. To the chagrin of Indian neocons — who ingenuously marketed the nuclear deal as a U.S. move to build India as a world power and counterweight to China — Washington has declared that its “most important bilateral relationship in the world” is with Beijing.

Link.

Making Up For The Missing Posts

Was unable to post for some days due to various reasons. I'm back and hope to be more regular - 'hope' is the the keyword. Anyway, wanted to highlight some stories that I did not post about but wanted to.

This killing comment from The Hindu's editor about the Kosovo seccession and Bush's comment on it was priceless:

Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence has thrown the fragile Balkan peace into question again and caused much disquiet elsewhere in the world. The reactions of other states will be crucial. U.S. President George W Bush, with his characteristic grasp of international affairs, initially said: “The Kosovoans are now independent”;

Then there was the Rice testimony on the nuclear deal to the US Congress which justifies one of the criticisms put forward by the Left against the deal:

Washington: The Bush administration has said an agreement between India and the Nuclear Suppliers Group which will allow New Delhi to engage in nuclear trade will be supported by the U.S. only if it is “consistent” with the Hyde Act.
“We will support nothing with India in the NSG that is in contradiction to the Hyde Act. It will have to be completely consistent with the obligations of the Hyde Act,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the House Foreign Affairs Panel.
Ms. Rice said if the Bush administration did not adhere to the Hyde Act — which, according to opposition parties in India, takes away the country’s nuclear sovereignty — U.S. lawmakers will eventually refuse to pass the India-U.S. civilian nuclear deal if and when it comes up in the Congress.
“We’ll have to be consistent with the Hyde Act or I don’t believe we can count on the Congress to make the next step,” Ms. Rice said in response to a query from the Chairman of the panel, Howard Berman.

Another thing, that was actually good to see, was the Congress giving back to the BJP on the issue of terrorism, over two days. Here and here. That's right - say it loudly and clearly and very publicly. After all, the last thing we need is another right-wing party coming to power on the basis of being 'strong' on terror.

Another story which I saw on cnet.com reinforces that the Internet has made so many things possible. And a lot of them are a force for the good. Like exposing Swiss Banks that apparently help launder money among other shady activities:

A federal judge in California has pulled the plug on Wikileaks.org, a Web site that specializes in posting leaked documents often provided by whistleblowers.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White on Friday ordered that the domain name be disabled at the behest of a group of Swiss bankers who filed a lawsuit alleging that confidential information appeared on Wikileaks.org.
... Wikileaks' summary of the leaked documents centers on Rudolf Elmer, the former chief operating officer of Bank Julius Baer in the Cayman Islands. The summary alleges the bank supports "ultra-rich's (sic) offshore tax avoidance, tax evasion, asset hiding and money laundering." The bank has refused to comment.

Nicholas Burns

Retires. He will take up a private job. Intriguingly he'll still be looking at the 'Indian file'. How so? Well, apparently:

"There are special provisions within the law that allow people for discrete periods or limited periods of time, not necessarily measured by the calendar year but by the number of days you spend doing something, that allow people who are not part of the government to work on specific functions."

Nuclear Deal

I see headlines like this everywhere today:

India, China pledge to strike N-dosti
India, China to cooperate in civil nuclear energy

But I thought the accepted wisdom was that China was trying to scuttle the nuclear deal and our nuclear ambitions and that the Left was acting more or less as an agent of China in opposing the deal.

Politics & Facts

NR Narayana Murthy on fact-based decision-making (page 13):

Chennai: Infosys mentor N R Narayana Murthy on Saturday flayed politicians for taking “ego-centric” stand on several critical issues, including Indo-US nuclear deal, without properly studying the facts. “Most of our politicians do not have the details of the Indo-US nuclear deal. However, they are taking a stand”, he said speaking at a management seminar organised by the Great Lakes Institute of Management here on Saturday.

“When I ask them have you read the 123 agreement, please tell me what areas which you see are bad, very few of them are in a position to give facts. However, they have already taken a position,”

...Advising the students, he said, “please avoid taking decisions based on ego, based on perceptions and go for an analysis based on data and facts. In the end, everybody is happy.”

No one denies the merits of fact-based decision-making. And one respects NR Narayana Murthy immensely for doing what he has done with Infosys and for his 'High thinking and simple living', but there are some issues with the above formulation with respect to the nuclear deal.

1. The other party involved in this deal is not fact-based. It's record on Iraq, Iran, Kyoto/global warming, Pakistan - and all this in the very recent past that I remember - speak of a singular contempt for fact and a love of self-interest above everything else. Do we want to deal with such an entity without closing all loopholes in the agreement?

2. There are some salient facts quite apart from the text of the 123 agreement itself which should make one reject the deal.

• The record of the UPA government in being pressurised by the US on account of the deal, into acting quite differently from how it would have normally is quite poor. The Iran vote, the IPI gas pipeline, removing explicitly pro-pipeline Mani Shankar Aiyer from the Petroleum Ministry, cooling off of relations with Russia - all these are examples.
  
• The Hyde Act which everyone agrees is quite disagreeable, and the fact that there is no explicit clause which prevents the US from taking recourse to its domestic laws (e.g., the Hyde Act) to pull out of the 123 agreement - though such a clause is explicitly mentioned in the 123 agreement with China.

3. Politics and foreign policy cannot be entirely driven by fact. If it were, the West would not need to be dragged kicking and screaming to sign the Kyoto deal. Hundreds of thousands would not have lost their lives in Iraq. The courts would not be required to force, say, the Delhi government to make CNG compulsory in vehicles. I think that is why politics is called the art of the possible.

4. Forget politics, even some corporate policies are based on some vague thoughts without any basis in facts. Take for example, the matter of clothes in some IT based companies. Some of them require formal clothing on almost all days. This includes wearing of ties on certain days, which meets with lots of natural chaffing at the bit given the day-time temperatures in many Indian cities. Some companies going to the extent of advising their female employees not to forget to use dupattas! What are the possible reasons for such a policy?

• Productivity? Google among other highly productive companies don't have formal clothing rules. In fact, I believe Googlers/googlies are allowed to bring their pets to the office!
  
• Making favourable impressions on visiting clients? Has any fact-based study been made on whether clients give more weightage to clothes that their vendors' employees wear compared to the quality of deliverables. I've not heard of any such study.
• Getting employees used to wearing formals and getting the tie-knot just right? But a training session (or sessions) before the employee flies to the land of formality would probably be just as effective - have any facts been gathered on the efficacy of the two methods?

Where are the facts on whos basis this policy exists?

5. Sometime ago, NR Narayana Murthy called for a road on piles to Electronics City in Bangalore to reduce commute times. The government jumped to it promptly and the road is coming up. I have not come across any facts about the cost of the road, what its benefits are compared to the costs, what alternatives were considered, how exactly it would help when the rest of the city is still jamming away like Jimi Hendrix, etc. What does one say about that?

Of course, one would also love to know how many of the deal's supporters have read the 123 agreement in full.

Climate Change

Why the hell don't we make enabling nuclear energy for India a pre-condition for us to take steps towards reducing emissions instead of bleating about it?

No Threat To Sovereignty, But

Sometimes, we need to act in a certain way to please you know who uphold certain important moral principles. Like acting against friends and leaving other friends without a clue.

Two Styles

It's getting difficult to take Rajdeep Sardesai seriously, on TV and especially in print. Especially when he writes like this.

The Left opposition to the Indo-US nuclear deal must again be seen as part of its attempt to impose its ideology on the country’s political agenda. This is not about the details of the 123 Agreement any longer, not even about a robust discussion on the country’s energy needs, this is simply now about the unseen “dangers” of forging a closer strategic relationship with the “Evil Empire” in Washington.

No, not "unseen" dangers - seen dangers of aligning with the evil empire. Instead of comparing the Left to a child that needs to grow up he should have seen that it is the US which is the selfish, petulant child with none of the innocence of childhood. The US is like a spoilt kid that will not stop till it gets what it wants - oil, markets for its military-industrial complex, geo-political power.. And it will be the same which ever party comes to power - Democratic or Republican.

All Rajdeep needs to do to know that it is not 'unseen' dangers is read this piece:

Consider the negotiations themselves. Right from the first day, or rather the eve of the first day, the government has been beset by bitter battles over the limits of what was acceptable to India and what was not. In Washington on July 17, 2005, the Department of Atomic Energy had to fight for the right to redraft a statement that the Ministry of External Affairs had already negotiated with the American side and which it considered final. It was only thanks to this eleventh hour internal battle that the strict reciprocity of U.S. and Indian commitments in the July statement was established. What happened that evening set a trend for the next two years. Invariably, these internal battles became more serious on the eve of difficult decisions: the anti-Iran vote at the IAEA in September 2005 (when a tightly argued note by Secretary Rajiv Sikri recommending abstention was overruled at the highest level); the contours of India’s separation plan in January and February 2006 (when some senior officials pushed for putting the fast breeder reactors into the safeguarded list); and the ‘right of return’ and reprocessing in the 123 talks — when the Government’s Apex Group on nuclear matters was forced, as recently as May 2007, to overrule a weak draft that the MEA thought was acceptable.

At every stage, the government was divided into those who felt it was easier to submit to U.S. pressure and those who argued India had nothing to lose from sticking to its principled positions. And it was not always that the latter prevailed. If a negotiating process that went through so many dubious twists and turns still managed to produce a reasonable 123 agreement, this was largely because India finally realised it pays to stick to one’s guns. But the country as a whole remains sceptical and the onus is on Dr. Singh to dispel this scepticism.

Now that is an article that relies on actual facts and presents evidence for its arguments. Much better Rajdeep sticks to TV- there the moment passes and one forgets.

Bush Does It Again

Removes some of the sticking points in the nuclear-cooperation act - or at least makes them basically not worth the paper they are presumably written on:

In an effort to allay official Indian concerns about several aspects of the nuclear cooperation legislation passed by the U.S. Congress earlier this month, President George W. Bush declared on Monday that he would not be bound by some of the law's provisions.

In a formal statement issued shortly after signing into law the Henry J. Hyde United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of 2006, Mr. Bush introduced three specific caveats based on the executive's constitutional prerogative to conduct foreign policy.

This is a president who rules more like a king, and uses signing statements - the above is an instance of them - to do it. Or abuses them, though I'm not complaining in this case.

The Prime Minister seemed uncannily confident about India's conditions being met - maybe his people had done their homework on Bush. I'm not sure if all the criticisms have been allayed by this signing statement - it does not look like it. But things probably bode better for the 123 agreement which is in the works.