What Vajpayee began as the NSSP was completed by Dr Manmohan Singh with the conclusion of the Indo-US nuclear co-operation agreement. The US needed India as a balancer of power in Asia which will have, in the coming decades, China, Japan, South Korea, Russia, Indonesia and India as major economic powers. The US feels -- and other major powers like European Union, Japan and Russia agree -- that India's economic growth is needed to have an appropriate Asian balance of power and global balance of power.
If India is to grow at a 10 percent growth rate, it does not make sense to subject India to technology apartheid. Therefore, India has to be freed and hence the Indo-US civil nuclear cooperation agreement has to be followed by dismantling of all technology denials. The initiative in this respect has been taken by the US since the web of technology denials -- the NSG, the Australia group, the Waassenaar arrangement and the Missile Technology Control Regime -- was fashioned by the US.
Secondly, the US is interested in India as a strategic partner which could export brain power to US and provide outsourcing R&D centres at cheap cost. A nation likely to have the largest population of employable age in the world, with proven skills, English-speaking, democratic, a population bridge of Indo-Americans of two-and-a-half million and growing is a natural partner for US... Vajpayee foresaw that.
With this development, India gets accepted as one of the actors of the global balance of power system. The Security Council seat in the United Nations and membership to the G-8 will follow in due course. Having waited for 60 years, we can afford to wait a little while longer.
Photograph: US President George W Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh before their meeting in New Delhi, March 2, 2006. Photograph: Raveendran/AFP/Getty Images
Also read: The Indo-US nuclear tango
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