Where are the Nuclear cheerleaders?

When life gives you a lemon, make lemonade. After the dust settles, we suspect that is what the Indian public will have to contend with and move on.

When the Nuclear deal issue came up, especially just around the time of the trust vote, all media outlets were running specials on the Nuclear deal issue. Every intellectual worth his salt had weighed in. A small sampling:

Win-Win Nuclear Deal (TOI Editorial)

Sagarika Ghose (Howdy Pardner)

Sagarika Ghose (Red letter day)

Nuclear Deal: Benefits for India

Hindustan Times specials

Rediff special

Outlook India special

Plus non-stop TV shows, discussions, Devil's advocate interviews etc. If you have the appetite, there is always google. At the time they were quick on the draw. Each one of them discovered a new facet or "merit" in the deal, like a Mommy discovers new goodness in her baby every single day.

Right now though, except for the disastrous TOI article and an ambiguous sounding column from Pratap Bhanu Mehta, intellectuals are showing amazing restraint and reluctance in discussing the deal, as blogger RealityCheck points out. Is it a case of success has many fathers, failure is an orphan?

Of course, we are starting to hear the usual elitist argument - that the deal is too complex for the understanding of the aam aadmi.

Actually, it will be hard to find an aam aadmi that does not understand the deal. It would take less than a minute for auto drivers, rickshaw pullers, day laborers to get to the gist of it. This deal is as old as civilization itself, it is called switcheroo or if you prefer, bait and switch.

We have been dealt this hand repeatedly for more than 60 years. The nuclear deal is no different, except that it is turning out to be the mother of them all:

NEW DELHI: India's endorsement of the climate declaration at the Major Economies Forum in Italy has split its top climate negotiators. In a strong dissent, one of the negotiators called Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's signing on to the statement a "body blow to everything that we (the Indian officials) have fought for".

In his letter to the government, the negotiator, a senior government official, said "India's poor will pay the price for this political declaration".

He added, "Irrespective of the positive spin we might give, the honest truth is that the document boxes India in an extremely weak corner. I feel broken and let down. I hope I am wrong and I am afraid to be proven right." The communication lays it bare that the statement had taken the negotiators by surprise and can potentially set off the stage for huge uproar. [link]

If you recall, this wasn't part of the deal, neither was signing NPT, allowing intrusive inspections or coupling it with other defense purchases.