The Nuke Deal: An open RTI petition

Come to think of it, the mango must be a mysterious enough fruit for foreigners that they need a step-by-step instruction on cutting and consuming it. Some folks like to suck on the sweet nothingness of the mango seed, long after the flesh is gone. Of course the foreigners miss out on the fun.

The nuke deal is one such issue all sides will keep on sucking, even after the issue is bone dry. We have not gone into too much analysis of the nuke deal. I am sure the NationalInterest folks and many others will have a lot more to ruminate on this topic for days to come.


So, we decided to take a layman's approach and see through what the deal is about. Specifically, we took this Tehelka article to put some structure around our thought process. If you find any inaccuracy in what we say here, please let us know.

To summarize, the nuke deal can be explained as follows:

The Nuke deal will allow India to procure civilian nuclear technology from American firms in exchange for some covenants on its military nuclear programs.

Several questions immediately pop out of that statement alone.

• How is Iran able to procure nuclear technology? How about China?
  
• Will we get a discount? Any freebies?
  
• Who will guarantee that the stuff that we get are the good stuff and not some watered down version?
  
• Who will make sure that there is no Bofors style underhand dealing?
• Do we really need nuclear energy? Will it be viable? How long before we scale up (current capacity meets 3% or energy need)?
  
• Any estimate and timelines on how much of India's energy needs will be met from nuclear power?
• How will we finance the technology? Will the overall picture make economic sense? If the costs are too prohibitive, maybe we will be better off just using coal and oil.
  
• How about the green lobby? Will they like the risk exposure (nuke! ooooh!)

As you can see, this is decidely murky territory and we haven't even gone into the other aspect yet!

So let's see what the people's paper has to say on the deal. As mentioned, we do not wish to go into the details of the issue at this point, so we will restrict ourselves to some eye popping quotes from the article (written by Ram Jethmalani, no less):

• The criticism [ed. of A Gopalakrishnan, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board] , from whatever quarter it emanates, just makes no sense.
• India is not preparing for nuclear aggression against any one, nor is it threatened with nuclear aggression at the moment.
• The Chinese are not interested in Indian territory now. Their target is the Indian market and we have allowed them complete capture.
• The International Court of Justice or a commission acting under its supervision can turn out a binding judgment in a fraction of the time that we have wasted on useless negotiations for the last 45 years.
• Can India continue to make progress without the deal? The answer again is a resounding 'no'.
• The most conclusive evidence in favour of the deal is that all our known enemies are against it.
• We must be grateful to Pakistan that though it has lost its democracy, its President Pervez Musharraf has realised that Mahatma Gandhi was right that impurity of means is bound to taint even a pure end.
  

The Government can not pretend that they are helping out the Bush administration by keeping the documents secret. For far too long socialist ponzi scheme after ponzi scheme has robbed our nation. The recent exposes of CIA links, explosive books by RAW insiders, clearly indicate that nefarious deals have been done in the past, to the great detriment of the people. The invokation of Mahatma Gandhi is a red flag right there.

Deal or no deal, we deserve to see the goddamn document, in full.