Setbacks in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's nuclear arrangements with US President George W Bush have already intensified attacks on his government from both the right and left in Indian politics.

The former, led by Lal Krishna Advani of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, demands India should go ahead with the bomb, disregarding US objections.

The real aim of the latter - spearheaded by supposed allies like Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury of the Marxist party who support Singh's ruling Congress party without joining the coalition he leads - is to slow down the pace of liberalisation. With friends like the two comrades, who enjoy the privileges of being part of both government and opposition, Singh scarcely needs enemies. Further setbacks in burgeoning India-US strategic ties would fuel their anti-free market campaign.

North Korea's suspected Pakistani connection has given a fillip to both camps. It also explained Singh's recent comment in London deploring "clandestine proliferation emanating from our neighbourhood". The reference was to allegations voiced by US and Indian intelligence services that the secretive Kim obtained his centrifuge-based uranium-enrichment process in a swap with Pakistan.

Ironically, this may have been accelerated - if not initiated - by earlier American efforts to persuade North Korea not to pursue the bomb. Kim agreed under the 1994 Agreed Framework with the US to close his plutonium reprocessing programme in return for two 1,000MW nuclear power reactors and an annual supply of 508 million kilograms of heavy fuel.

But he seems to have decided to have his cake and eat it too. If plutonium was out, uranium was in. Former US president Bill Clinton's assistant secretary of state Robert Einhorn wondered whether, when the North Koreans transferred the 1,500km-range Nodong ballistic missile to Pakistan, there was a "quid pro quo in the form of enrichment technology". Pakistan denies the transfer. But like Iran's Shahab missile, the Ghauri (which Pakistan flight-tested in 1998 and 1999) is believed to be only a renamed adaptation of the Nodong.

The tests were supervised by the evil genius of Pakistan's nuclear programme, Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, at his eponymous research laboratory. Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf stripped Khan, who made no fewer than 12 trips to North Korea in four years, of his official rank in March 2001 under mounting American pressure. The Bush administration was becoming increasingly alarmed that his transactions with North Korea, Iran and Libya might lead to nuclear secrets being sold to al Qaeda.

Singh's immediate worry is that Kim's recalcitrance can only further reinforce opposition within the US to the nuclear pact he and Bush signed on July 18 last year to in effect legitimise India's position as a nuclear power.

If the agreement, which has been hanging fire since then because of congressional foot-dragging, falls through, Singh will have a tough time defending his initiatives to critics who accuse him of selling out to the Americans. Bush, they say, never did intend to recognise India's nuclear status.

Singh has declared time and again that "the thrust of our policy remains the promotion of our national interest" - meaning India will never surrender the bomb - but who's listening?

New Delhi is carefully watching how the US response to the North Korean crisis develops. Indians had hoped that 30 years of nuclear isolation, with a ban on accessing fuel and equipment, were about to end when Singh and Bush followed up on last year's treaty by signing a Separation Plan during Bush's New Delhi visit in March. This would have enabled India to classify its nuclear reactors as civilian and non-civilian and meet the soaring energy needs of one of the world's most rapidly growing economies.

The US House of Representatives approved the deal but the Senate scuttled it. The fear is that the anti-proliferation lobby will now oppose it hammer and tong.

Had the plan succeeded, the soft-spoken, mild-mannered Singh, who has revived India's flagging economy, would also have gone down in history as the man who gained international recognition of India's global aspirations.

It's a measure of the interdependence in the globalised world that now his - and India's - fate should be at some risk because of the American response to North Korea's reclusive dictator.

Sunanda K Datta-Ray

The Straits Times

Singapore

The Straits Times is a member of the Asia News Network.