The NSG waiver finally clears the decks for India to engage in nuclear commerce with the world. Political reactions were varied as expected. The Congress went into hyperbole while the BJP repeated the questions it has raised before. Given the sequence of events at the NSG that led to this approval, India cannot afford to be under any illusion that it will be able to conduct another test and continue to keep its waiver - that will almost certainly trigger the end this deal and everything associated with it (claiming that even if the US were to sanction us, other countries may be willing to play ball is simply unrealistic). Sinha's point that India has surrendered the right to conduct future tests is, in practice, therefore close to the truth.
The text is yet to be made available and analyses may be expected to follow in the days to come. Daryl Kimball has posted his view already. He makes one noteworthy claim: "In addition, in the course of the NSG meeting, the United States confirmed that participating NSG governments expressed assurances that they did not intend to transfer enrichment or reprocessing technology to India." If this is true, then the expectation seems to be that other countries will toe the US line in terms of what they will or will not sell to India. Any notion that India can somehow manage to circumvent US arms control regulations may also end up being belied by events.
The CPI, citing Pranab Mukherjee's statement yesterday, preposterously claimed that India has surrendered its right to future research and development! Apparently, the party is not talking about conducting future nuclear tests but of our research efforts for Thorium-based technology, something not pertinent to the issue here. One can read Mukherjee's full statement on the MEA website - there is absolutely no mention of R&D at all.
China, it turns out, was one of the last holdouts waiting to be convinced about the deal (see this news item). Apparently, it took a call from Condoleeza Rice for the Chinese to give the final okay to the text of the deal. It was previously reported that though China was not taking the lead in opposing it, the other holdouts like Austria and New Zealand were working with its tacit support. I am driven to speculate from this: did China have something to do with the communists' unrelenting opposition to this deal? Is that also the reason The Hindu has been actively promoting opposition to the deal by prominently and extensively publishing letters against it? The paper has no doubt provided space for various points of view in its op-eds but for one thing, there have been more articles against it than in its favor and secondly, the 'Letters to the Editor', a fairly accurate bellweather of the prevailing editorial sentiment clearly points to an antagonism belying its initial disposition to the contrary.
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