Ten years after India crashed the nuclear weapons club, the Bush administration is planning on rewarding it for its bad behavior.

When India conducted nuclear tests on May 11 and May 13, 1998, the Clinton administration condemned them and imposed sanctions. But now the Bush administration is condoning India’s actions.

By provisionally agreeing to supply fuel, reactors and other technology to India’s civilian nuclear sector, the United States is legitimizing a weapons project that India conceived in dishonesty. Back in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, India misused material and know-how provided by countries such as Canada and the United States for its nuclear energy program and diverted these toward nuclear arms.

Now, if Congress and India’s governing coalition go along, the Bush administration will become a big booster of India’s nuclear program.

“This deal is a disaster for the nuclear nonproliferation regime on the planet,” says Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass. “It blows a hole through any attempts in the future that we could make to convince the Pakistanis, or the Iranians, or the North Koreans, or for that matter any other country in the world that might be interested in obtaining nuclear weapons that there is a level playing field, that there is a real set of safeguards.”

So why is the Bush administration being so generous with India? The answer is twofold.

First, it wants to enlist India as a junior partner in its global crusades. India will be expected to join the United States in its efforts to contain countries such as China and Iran.

Second, U.S. corporations want to profit from selling nuclear reactors and supplies to India.

The pact “will present a major opportunity for U.S. and Indian companies,” Ron Somers, president of the U.S-India Business Council, has said. The council is frantically lobbying Congress for passage of the deal.

The agreement needs to be scrapped.

It legitimizes a nuclear weapons program that is primarily an ego trip on the part of the Indian ruling elite.

It accelerates the nuclear arms race in the region, forcing Pakistan to expand its program and inducing China into a more aggressive nuclear posture, too.

It encourages the squandering of the Indian government’s scarce resources even when the country desperately needs to uplift its people.

It draws India into the Bush administration’s ill-conceived global project.

And it reinforces the notion of nuclear weapons as legitimate, when they are repugnant and unworthy of any decent nation.

Surely, the world’s oldest and largest democracies should both know better than to enter into such a devil’s pact.

Amitabh Pal

is the co-editor of the Progressive Media Project and the managing editor of The Progressive magazine. He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.