Washington, Sept. 27: Pakistan’s elevation today to the chairmanship of the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) may be a milestone in Islamabad’s slow but steady progress towards parity with India, which recently won a hard-fought battle for the right to freely engage in nuclear commerce.

Pakistan was unanimously chosen without a formal vote to head the board after it was consensually nominated by the IAEA’s Middle East and South Asia (MESA) group: diplomats who attended the meeting in Vienna said the nomination was approved by acclamation.

Pakistan’s rise to head the IAEA’s governing body was a clear indication of how much things had changed on the global nuclear stage following India’s four-year struggle to end New Delhi’s long nuclear winter which began in 1974 with its “peaceful” nuclear explosion.

It is one of the ironies of rule-based international diplomacy that today Islamabad became an unintended beneficiary of an all-out effort by India to end nuclear apartheid after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and former US president George W. Bush announced their nuclear deal in 2005.

The choice of Pakistan with strong US support for the IAEA’s key post for one year is ironic in other ways too.

In 2002, when India announced its candidature for the chairmanship of the board, it was the Bush administration which lobbied hard to ensure that the post did not go to Anil Kakodkar, then chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission.

The Americans used their clout in the IAEA at that time to force India to step aside, although the country was then chairing the MESA group. At that time, the Bush administration persuaded Kuwait, a staunch US ally, to take India’s place.

The chairmanship of the IAEA board is rotated each year between regional groups and the turn of the MESA countries comes once in eight years.

India has twice held the post since the IAEA was founded in 1956. When Vishnu Trivedi was ambassador in Vienna in 1970, New Delhi viewed the chairmanship as a foreign service post, but by the time R. Chidambaram, Kakodkar’s predecessor, took up the position in 1994, India had changed to the view that the job must go to a nuclear scientist.

In part, it was this change which resulted in the US campaign against Kakodkar as the Americans felt that a man who was key to the 1998 nuclear tests should not head the IAEA board.

It is yet another irony that the new chairman of the board will be Ansar Parvez, the chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, and not Khurshid Anwar, Islamabad’s permanent representative to UN organisations in Vienna.

Parvez, a US-educated nuclear scientist, was instrumental in setting up Pakistan’s controversial Chashma nuclear project.

The only alternatives from the MESA group to Pakistan as the new chairman would have been India, Jordan, Tunisia or the United Arab Emirates. Of these, the last three were elected to the board only last week.It is the tradition in the IAEA, in the interest of continuity, that the chairmanship of the board does not normally go to a country which has just been elected, and therefore, unfamiliar with the intricacies of the business on the governing body’s table during the immediate past year.

When Pakistan announced its candidature for the chairmanship, there were whispers of anxiety within the IAEA not only because it is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), but also because it has recently been the hub of a thriving global nuclear black market.

However, as a matter of principle, India could not have opposed Pakistan’s candidature because New Delhi shares the view with Islamabad that the NPT is discriminatory and that countries like itself and Pakistan have the sovereign right to reject such treaties.

Besides, it is India’s view that the role of the IAEA is to promote atomic energy for peace and that it should not become a watchdog for the NPT. Therefore, New Delhi had to take the principled stand that Pakistan has a right to its new post unmindful of whether it had signed the NPT or otherwise.

Expressing delight at Pakistan’s elevation in the IAEA, the US permanent representative to UN organisations in Vienna, Glyn Davies, told reporters that his country “looks forward very much to working with the Pakistani governor as chairman of the board”.

There has been pressure on the Obama administration in recent months from the Pakistani government and its lobby in Washington that it should get the same nuclear deal that the US worked out with India since 2005.

But equally, there has been opposition to such a deal not only from non-proliferationists, but also from those who value Pakistan as a US ally on account of Islamabad’s sordid record as a proliferator of nuclear weapons and technology.

It is the Obama administration’s hope that if Pakistan can demonstrate as chairman of the IAEA board that it is a responsible nuclear power, the idea of the deal similar to India’s could be eventually pushed in the US Congress.

There are precedents of Pakistan heading the IAEA board. But the first time it was elected chairman was in 1962 and predates the NPT. The second time was in 1986 when it had not yet tested a nuclear weapon.

Parvez indicated today that his top priority would be to use the IAEA to resolve the nuclear stalemate between the US on the one hand and Iran and North Korea separately on the other.

Pakistan has represented Iran in the US since diplomatic relations were broken between Washington and Tehran more than 30 years ago. North Korea and Pakistan have been partners in an illicit trade in components for weapons of mass destruction.

But if Islamabad could use its influence in Tehran and Pyongyang to end the stalemate, it would earn the gratitude of Washington, which may then look more favourably at the idea of the US-Pakistan nuclear deal.

The UAE’s interest in having got on the IAEA board is that it is pursuing a civilian nuclear programme which requires a deal broadly resembling the agreements India has signed with the US, France and Russia.