With the Nuclear Liability Bill passed overwhelmingly by the Lok Sabha on Wednesday on the heels of some unseemly controversy resting on not much else other than anxiety and suspicion, the way is clear for the government to engage in serious negotiation with international companies to procure nuclear reactors for power
generation. In the absence of this measure receiving the approval of Parliament, the tortuous negotiations with the United States to pave the way for ending the era of consigning India to nuclear apartheid, and the bruising political debate within the country that nearly threatened to bring down the first UPA government, would have been of little practical relevance. The reason this country so assiduously sought the freedom to engage in nuclear commerce with the rest of the world was that such latitude should enable the creation of a massive nuclear power generation sector to power India’s economic aspirations in as green a manner as feasible. The Lok Sabha debate and vote showed that the country is solidly in favour of substantially raising the share of nuclear power in the national electricity matrix. This makes the passage of the proposed legislation in the Rajya Sabha something of a formality. It is pretty obvious that the Left contingent alone — among the main ideological currents in Parliament and in the nation’s political life — stood out as naysayers. It is a pity that the Left has squandered yet another opportunity to endorse the national endeavour on the issue of civil nuclear energy, the first being its ill-considered repudiation of the government’s efforts to negotiate with US help India’s entry into the international nuclear mainstream.
The narrow, navel-gazing Left stance was reflective of an ideological distaste of doing any business with the United States, including one that would expand this country’s autonomy in world affairs, and this cannot cause anyone surprise. However, it was extraordinary to see the BJP align with the Left in Parliament to discredit the efforts of the Manmohan Singh government by suggesting not so obliquely that Dr Singh was motivated to serve the cause of American companies in bringing the nuclear liability bill. This astounding claim cannot redound to the credit of a party that has been in power at the Centre and hopes to be returned to that status. The most charitable explanation for hurling such a charge by the Left and the BJP is that their perception of India is of a country of low self-worth whose leadership is eager to be a servitor of others. Such a gross public misreading of facts on the ground is not shared by the rest of the country. Indeed, it suggests that the ghost of having been colonised continues to haunt a segment of our political opinion, no matter how lowly and self-defeating such an imagination is. In the end, however, it was with relief that one saw the BJP extricate itself from the narrow cavity it was inserting itself into, just as it had done on the Parliament vote on the question of the India-US civil nuclear agreement in July 2008.
True, the BJP was able to force amendments to the original bill on nuclear liability. Fundamentally, however, it would seem that in the event of a nuclear accident, foreign suppliers of nuclear reactors and other materials would be liable to some degree under the law of tort whether the much debated clause 17(b) were part of the proposed legislation or not. The question is, to what degree. It is hard to say that all the sound and fury seen in Parliament on the question has settled the issue. Eventually, everything would depend on what the market can bear. That would necessarily test the negotiating prowess of the government in office at such a time.