The Bharatiya Janata Party, India's official opposition, has decided to fight the deal in the Indian parliament, with string backing from India's influential nuclear scientists. For separate reasons, some of the left-wing parties that support the current government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are also likely to oppose the deal, or at least to abstain in the parliamentary votes.

At a press conference in New Delhi Sunday, an assembly of BJP leaders challenged the deal, seen by the Bush administration as the keystone of its new strategic partnership with India. The BJP group included former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, former Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh and former Union Minister Yashwant Sinha.

"The Act passed by the U.S. legislature leaves us in no doubt that the purpose of the deal is to bilaterally impose on India conditionalities which are worse than those in the (nuclear non-proliferation treaty) and the (Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty). This is why a slim four-page bill is now a 41-page document," said Sinha.

They claimed that the main purpose of the deal was to limit India's nuclear weapons program by subjecting it to highly intrusive inspections and effectively banning future Indian nuclear tests. India had no guarantee of future nuclear fuel supplies even for its civilian reactors, they went on. Moreover, the critics claimed, India could neither reprocess the spent fuel nor send it to the United States for processing without approval from the U.S. Congress. In sum, they argued that this was not a deal between two equal and sovereign states, but a ploy to subordinate India's nuclear and strategic independence to the United States.

Other critics have claimed that India is being brought within the controls of the NPT just as North Korea and Iran have destroyed its effectiveness. The main advantage to India of the U.S. deal that it would end India's "outlaw" status as an independent nuclear state that refused to join the NPT and this qualifies for nuclear fuel and technology from the NPT's existing nuclear powers, is thus close to worthless.

The prospect of a rejection by the Indian parliament is likely to come as a surprise to the Bush administration and the U.S. Congress, where most of the opposition to the deal claimed that India was being given too easy a path back to respectability within the NPT system, and that the concessions being made to India created a precedent that further weakened the NPT. The growing clamor of nationalist opposition to the deal within India went almost unnoticed in the U.S. media and the Congressional debates.

The Indian critics to the deal have made no secret of their opposition. Last week's issue of "The Organiser," the paper of the Hindu nationalist RSS group that it highly influential within the BJP, last week claimed: "The U.S. political elite is unwilling to accord India at least the same status as it does to much smaller (and less threatened) countries such as France and the U.K. In contrast, India is still considered almost a colony, expected to shoulder heavy burdens with little reward, the way more than two million Indian soldiers risked their lives for the Allies in World War I and World War II without their mother country getting anything more than crippling taxes and continued slavery in return."

Lurking behind this concern is the fear that India is being seen by the United States as a useful strategic tool to challenge the growth of China within Asia. Many Indian nationalists accept that there will be an inevitable rivalry between India and China for influence in Asia. Indeed, the former defense minister George Fernandes said bluntly that India's nuclear arsenal was aimed at China, rather than at Pakistan, and India's new generation of Agni missiles are designed to reach Shanghai. But they want to conduct India foreign policy on Indian terms, rather than as a subordinate of U.S. strategic goals in Asia.

"Hopefully, the India-U.S. military engagement can be insulated from the fallout of this attempt to bring India into an NPT that has been knocked to the floor by Iran and North Korea," one of the national security advisers to the BJP told United Press International, speaking on condition of anonymity. "In my view, in less than five years, the changes in the ground situation will mandate that Washington come up with a deal that is fair. And that is a period that everyone can live with."

President George W. Bush sought to present a different argument for the deal in his statement welcoming Saturday's vote in the U.S. Congress. "I am pleased that our two countries will soon have increased opportunities to work together to meet our energy needs in a manner that does not increase air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, promotes clean development, supports non-proliferation and advances our trade interests," Bush said.

The Indian government says that critics of the deal should not focus on the terms of the bill passed in Washington Saturday, but should wait for the four separate agreements that will follow. These are the Indian Safeguard Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency; the "123 Agreement" for bilateral cooperation with the United States; the new guidelines of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the Additional Protocol, also with the IAEA.

If Prime Minister Singh does manage to rally sufficient support within Parliament to get the deal approved, it will be at a price. He is likely to be forced into making concessions to his unruly left wing on economic policy, slowing the process of liberalizing and internationalizing the Indian economy that has shown such dramatic results in India's growth rate over the past decade.

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