The words “national interest” has re-entered the nation’s lexicon with a new urgency, thanks to the controversy over the Indo-US nuclear deal. It is necessary to unpack the idea and the implications of the phrase. At a very simple level, it means that India as a nation has certain interests. These interests are supra-government and supra-political parties. In other words, if something is seen as being beneficial to the national interest then it is good for India, irrespective of the party that rules India at a given point of time. The opposite is equally true: something that is harmful for India is bad, no matter which party is in power, the Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party or the Communist Party of India (Marxist). At a more complex level, there could be questions about who defines what the nation’s interests are, who decides what is beneficial or not, and so on.

Yet the controversy over the nuclear deal reveals that the confusion lies at the simplest level. The deal and what constitutes national interest have come to be identified with the Congress. The fate of the deal has come to be tied to the continuation of the government that is led by the Congress. The BJP, which is second only to the CPI(M) in its opposition to the deal, took the last and dramatic step to make India a nuclear power. It would not be wrong to assume from this that the BJP has no principled objection to nuclear power and its uses. It believes that nuclear power is in India’s national interest. It was under the BJP government that India moved closest to the United States of America in terms of foreign policy and related matters. Thus the BJP has nothing against the US and nothing against India’s use of nuclear power and energy. Yet it is opposed to the Indo-US nuclear deal, which will enable India to bring supplies to its starving reactors. The BJP’s opposition to the deal is inexplicable unless one draws the conclusion that the BJP is opposed to the Congress doing the deal. If a BJP government signed such a deal, obviously there would be no problems. This only highlights the point about national interest made earlier. To be fair, it needs to be pointed out that there is no guarantee that had the Congress been in the Opposition, it would not have objected to a similar deal if it were being made by a BJP government.

In the case of communists, the matter becomes more complex, since in their ideology, the national interest is made to intersect with other interests, specifically those of class. It has made the assertion that the deal will undermine India’s sovereignty, but has never substantiated the claim. Critics of the communists could also point out that communists in India have not always supported policies that are incontrovertibly beneficial to the national interest.

The phrase national interest has thus become an item in the politicians’ rhetorical baggage. It is fished out whenever some group of politicians finds it convenient to do so. Politicians are not the sole guardians or repositories of national interests. Politicians only make what are matters of national interest into electoral issues.