The consensus decision in Vienna, last Friday, to approve the International Atomic Energy Agency’s safeguards agreement with India was a right decision for the wrong reasons. Of about 30 countries, whose governors to the IAEA spoke at the board meeting, virtually no one told the truth. That should reinforce the conventional perception of diplomacy as a craft, the practitioners of which lie for their country’s best interests.

India’s primary argument in favour of pushing the safeguards agreement was built around the positive impact of the agreement on the environment. “Nuclear energy, which is recognised today as a clean and environmentally-friendly source of energy that can meet the twin challenges of sustainability and climate change, is indispensable to addressing our common energy future,” the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Anil Kakodkar, told the IAEA board. For a man who has devoted most of his life’s work towards developing India’s nuclear programme, and has fought many battles behind closed doors since the historic night of July 17, 2005, in Washington’s Willard Intercontinental Hotel to avoid compromising the country’s nuclear weapons programme, it must have been somewhat galling to say what he had to say to carry the IAEA board with him last week.

Left to himself, Kakodkar would have asked the IAEA governors to accept the reality that the safeguards agreement was the very first time that any multilateral forum — and that includes the Indian turf of non-aligned summits and its backyard of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation — had formally recognized India’s nuclear weapons programme as a non-party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But telling this truth on record might have led to the IAEA not approving the safeguards agreement — not by consensus, at any rate.

The permanent representative of the United States of America to the IAEA, Gregory Schulte, was no different. “India came to the IAEA seeking a safeguards agreement to enable it to place nuclear facilities and materials under safeguards, for the purpose of engaging in peaceful nuclear activity and commerce,” he told the board. Actually quite the opposite is true.

India came to the IAEA to exclude its military facilities from safeguards and carry on its weapons programme as its entitlement under international law, demanding, at the same time, as promised in the 2005 joint statement by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President George W. Bush “that as a responsible state with advanced nuclear technology, India should acquire the same benefits and advantages as other such states”. But if Ambassador Schulte had opted to speak the whole truth and reminded Ireland, for instance, of what Singh and Bush had publicly stated three years ago, there would have been no consensus at the IAEA.

On the US side, the hero of the consensus exercise was not Schulte, but his deputy, Geoff Pyatt, who moved to Vienna exactly a year ago from New Delhi, after an unusually long tenure of five years, first as minister in charge of political work and then as deputy chief of mission on Shanti Path. In New Delhi, Pyatt had seen it all: his stay in Chanakyapuri coincided with the explosive growth in Indo-US relations.

In Vienna, he was able to put to good use what he had learned in New Delhi about the ins and outs of the Indo-US engagement. Even as India was negotiating the safeguards agreement with the IAEA secretariat, Pyatt privately asked fellow diplomats from every one of the IAEA’s board-member countries to consider what sort of ties their governments wanted with India: was it to be based on cooperation or on denial?

In New Delhi, Pyatt had personally handled the sensitive, but successful, bilateral engagement started by Bush and Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 2003 that came to be known as the “Next Steps in Strategic Partnership” and was the precursor to the nuclear deal. He also handled the successful work of the Indo-US High Technology Cooperation Group that turned presumed US denial of dual-use technology for India into one of presumed approval. With passion and conviction, Pyatt campaigned from door to door at individual missions in Vienna for translating that experience in NSSP and HTCG into the safeguards agreement by approving it. Pyatt’s lobbying on behalf of the nuclear deal, again based only partly on truth, played a big part in bringing about the August 1 consensus.

Last Friday, when 35 honourable men and women with years of experience in the give and take of diplomacy took their seats in the boardroom of the IAEA in the Vienna International Centre, looking down at them from the walls on both sides of the assigned place of the board chairman, Milenko Skoknic, in the hall were characters from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Almost everyone in Vienna who has transacted business in that boardroom knows what the panels depicting epic Indian battles represent: the fight between good and evil, and the eventual triumph of good over evil.

If truth were to be told, India’s permanent representative to the United Nations organizations in Vienna, Saurabh Kumar, would have campaigned in Vienna for the safeguards agreement with the symbolism of these panels in the boardroom as the leitmotif for pushing India’s agreement with the IAEA. India has always regarded the NPT as unjust and discriminatory. Successive governments in New Delhi have defined it as the root cause of the nuclear apartheid of which India has been a victim. In Jawaharlal Nehru’s time, Kumar would have been told to frame India’s arguments at an IAEA board meeting, like the one last week, in terms of an epic battle similar to the ones portrayed on the boardroom walls. On August 1, however, India won over the board because the underlying truths about what is ultimately at issue in India’s struggle for nuclear legitimacy were a casualty.

And the effort at dissembling continues at the IAEA. Veteran international reporters in Vienna, who have been covering the agency for years, have written this week that as a follow-up to the approval of the safeguards agreement, the UN’s nuclear watchdog will soon be able to conduct intrusive, short-notice inspections at Indian nuclear sites. The safeguards agreement itself is being interpreted by the IAEA’s spin masters as an improvement in the agency’s ability to check New Delhi’s intentions. But the references this week to surprise checks are an attempt to interpret an additional protocol, now being negotiated between India and the IAEA in terms that are politically correct instead of being truthful.

The rationale behind short-notice inspections under the model additional protocol is that NPT signatories who are non-weapon states ought not to divert any nuclear material towards any clandestine weapons programmes. But India has a military programme that has now been taken note of by the IAEA. So the concept of surprise inspections as they were conceived by the IAEA for non-weapon states has no relevance for India.

It could be argued that inspections under India’s to-be-finalized additional protocol are meant to ensure that material is not diverted from civilian to military programmes. But any such IAEA inspection will remain inconclusive since the agency will have no right to inspect military facilities. The IAEA will have access only to those facilities that India will offer to put under IAEA safeguards.

There is merit in the argument that truth should not have been a casualty in Vienna and that an honest debate about what is really at stake in the safeguards agreement and everything else surrounding it would have been healthier for global non-proliferation and for India’s long-running struggle to correct its faultlines. But such a debate would not have produced the results that the prime minister risked his government for by breaking with the Left parties.