As you tune into India’s great debate on the nuclear pact that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has signed up with President George W. Bush, don’t let the experts flummox you with all the jargon. If you leave the nuclear detail to the government and the experts, you will find the latest Indo-US pact a tectonic shift in geopolitics. All such shifts in global order produce delicious ironies. Just savour them.

The first irony is that the “unilateralist” Bush Administration has chosen to modify one of the most important treaty arrangements in the world to favour an India that is allegedly passionate about “multilateralism”. The Indo-US nuclear pact is about a convergence between the Bush Administration, which views treaties from the pragmatic rather than legal perspective, and a “revisionist” India which has long sought a change in global nuclear rules.

As the Bush Administration makes a nuclear exemption for Delhi and justifies it on the ground that India is “exceptional”, all sorts of “multilateralists” in Europe and the US will oppose it.

Thanks to Indian nuclear vacillations in the 1960s, India found itself outside the NPT, which now has universal membership barring India, Israel and Pakistan. India’s refusal to sign the treaty had little to do with the in-built discrimination in the NPT. It had to do with the fact that under the NPT, India could not be accepted as a nuclear weapon power.

As the rules of nuclear non-proliferation steadily tightened under the NPT, India found itself increasingly cut-off from the flows of global nuclear commerce. Under the treaty, India was neither non-nuclear fish nor nuclear fowl. Trapped in this nuclear “trishanku” state, India desperately sought to change its standing vis a vis the nuclear system. With the nuclear tests of May 1998, Delhi ended the self-created confusion about its nuclear status. India told itself and the world that it is now a nuclear weapon state and began to engage the US to alter the nuclear regime in its favour.

Singh’s nuclear pact with Bush is a triumphant culmination of the effort that involved a series of negotiations, launched by the then External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh and US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott during 1998-2000 and continued by National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra and his US counterpart Condoleezza Rice during 2001-04.

President Bush was better disposed towards India than his predecessor, Bill Clinton, and lifted most of the sanctions imposed on Delhi after the 1998 tests. Mishra wanted more — civilian nuclear and space cooperation with the US. Rice largely accepted the principle and the two produced the “Next Steps in Strategic Partnership”. While the NSSP produced a change of direction in US nuclear policy towards India, it did not clinch the unresolved differences. Nor did the NSSP open the door for substantive civilian nuclear energy cooperation.

The Bush-Singh pact now goes beyond the NSSP and offers India de facto recognition of its nuclear weapon status and access to the global nuclear energy market in return for separating India’s military and civilian nuclear programmes. It is a deal, worth its weight in gold, that the Vajpayee government would have loved to cut. Probably that explains Vajpayee’s ire against the government than the details of the deal itself.

Besides changing the nuclear rules, Bush has met a second, equally fundamental grand strategic objective of India. For decades now, Delhi has been struggling to find nuclear parity with China and atomic separation from Pakistan. Thanks to its grand illusions about disarmament and a fetish for the United Nations, India could not respond quickly or effectively to China’s first nuclear test in October 1964. As a consequence, the doors of the international nuclear order were shut on its face.

As India slept, barring a brief nuclear moment in 1974, Pakistan too acquired nuclear weapons by the late 1980s with Chinese assistance. India’s nuclear tests of May 1998 did not resolve India’s security problematique. The Indian tests, followed by those of Pakistan, in fact underlined the nuclear parity between India and Pakistan. China along with the Clinton Administration took a strong position against India’s “proliferation” and its threat to the global nuclear order.

As one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and one of the five nuclear weapon states recognised by the NPT, China passed the UNSC resolution 1172 demanding India and Pakistan give up their nuclear weapons. Ironically, from that collusion with China against India in 1998, and the obsessive focus on “South Asian proliferation”, the US is now offering to recognise Delhi’s strategic parity with Beijing and treat India differently from Pakistan. The Indo-US nuclear pact allows India to expand its civilian nuclear energy programme without undertaking any political obligations that China does not.

The nuclear exception for India that Bush is seeking in the US non-proliferation legislation as well as international rules is premised on the proposition that India’s non-proliferation record has been impeccable and that India is a “responsible” nuclear weapon state.

The same, however, cannot be said of Pakistan. Thanks to the A.Q. Khan affair, which has revealed the expansive nuclear black market run by sections of the Pakistani establishment, there is no support in Washington either in the executive or legislature to extend the kind of nuclear cooperation the Bush Administration wants to undertake with India.

While the Indo-US nuclear pact allows India to break out of its nuclear isolation that has deepened since the first test of May 1974, creates nuclear equivalence between India and China and differentiates between Delhi and Islamabad, some in Delhi would love to see India play second fiddle to China and remain confined to a South Asian nuclear paradigm.

Since 1974, the world gave us a simple choice: either you have a peaceful nuclear programme or a nuclear weapons programme. The Indo-US nuclear pact is a historic breakthrough, because it allows us to have both. It is a deal India has waited for decades, and no government in Delhi would be foolish enough to reject it.