India to Snub Australia Over Refusal to Sell Uranium

From the archive: first published October 16, 2011.

When Commonwealth leaders gathered in Perth for their 2011 heads-of-government meeting, one prominent chair was conspicuously empty: India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The Indian delegation was instead led by the country's vice-president, Hamid Ansari — a former diplomat, but a deliberately lesser signal than a prime ministerial presence.

The message was aimed squarely at the host. Australia's Labor government continued to refuse to sell uranium to India for its civilian nuclear program, on the grounds that India has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. India, in turn, saw the refusal as hypocrisy: Australia happily supplied uranium to China — a nuclear-weapons state outside the treaty framework, and a country with a record of aiding Pakistan's clandestine weapons program — while blocking energy-starved India.

India's rejection of the NPT is longstanding and, domestically, nearly unanimous across party lines. New Delhi's argument, going back decades, is that the treaty enshrines a double standard: five recognized nuclear-weapons states keep their arsenals while everyone else must forgo them. As then–Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi told the United Nations in 1988, presenting an action plan for a nuclear-weapons-free world, the "alternative to co-existence is co-destruction." India has maintained it will give up its weapons when everyone else does — and never before, given that China, with which India went to war in 1962, holds a nuclear arsenal aimed at it.

The snub was particularly sharp because the two countries otherwise had so little to fight about: shared language, shared democratic institutions, shared cricket obsession. Only two years earlier, the relationship had been strained by attacks on Indian students in Melbourne and Sydney — a crisis defused by diplomacy on both sides. The uranium issue now threatened to reopen the rift.

The standoff did not last: within months, Prime Minister Julia Gillard would push her party's national conference to overturn the uranium-sales ban, arguing the position was outdated. But in October 2011, an empty chair at the Commonwealth table spoke louder than any speech.

Editor's note: this article was rewritten during our editorial review. The original 2011 version reproduced a syndicated opinion column verbatim and broke off mid-sentence; the text above is an original summary of the reported facts.