Barack Obama’s declaration to lead the human race into a nuclear-free world was an eye-opener — not about his administration or about American policies, but about India. Obama’s speech in Prague ten days ago was remarkable for the unexpected opportunity it threw up for a shocking demonstration of how deeply cynicism has taken root in India’s political and diplomatic discourse. Few in India among the country’s strategic thinkers, analysts, editorial writers and opinion-makers were willing to credit Obama with having made a historic turn away from the hitherto unilateralist Washington approach to nuclear matters. Instead, almost every Indian who commented on the biggest foreign policy initiative of his nascent presidency chose to dwell on the fact that there was no time-frame to Obama’s plan for universal nuclear disarmament. Most surprising of all, South Block, which rushed to issue a statement that was implicitly protective of North Korea within 24 hours of Kim Jong Il’s missile test, was completely silent on Obama’s speech, which touches the core of India’s national security policy.

The silence was disturbing because Obama had actually brought views inside the White House on disarmament closer than at any time before to Indian policies that have fundamentally remained unchanged since the time of Jawaharlal Nehru. This was proof, if any were needed, of how far India had moved away from the roots of its one-time national consensus on foreign affairs. It is true that Obama said in Prague that the goal of ridding the world of its nuclear arsenal will not be reached “perhaps” in his lifetime. But on a historic enterprise like this, he has to begin somewhere, especially when the biggest challenge of this initiative will be for an American president to convince his sceptical nation that its security can be guaranteed without a huge stockpile of nuclear armaments.

New Delhi is behaving as if the fight for India’s yet-to-be-realized status as a globally recognized nuclear weapons state no longer matters, now that the Indo-US nuclear deal has been signed and sealed. The steady arrival in New Delhi and Mumbai of top decision-makers from the French and Russian nuclear industry in the wake of permission by the Nuclear Suppliers Group to trade with India may be adding to this complacency.

The Carnegie Endowment’s International Non-Proliferation Conference that is held in Washington every two years is to global disarmament what the World Economic Forum’s Davos summit is to the world of business. The Carnegie conference is the kind of place where the British foreign secretary announces policy or the director- general of the International Atomic Energy Agency speaks within days of being awarded the Nobel peace prize. Even Israel, which pretends that it has no nuclear weapons and has not even completed the fuel cycle, finds it necessary to send a senior official of its atomic energy commission and a member of its inter-ministerial steering committee on arms control and regional security to speak at this conference.

But alas, India was not represented either officially or at the track-II level at this year’s Carnegie conference, which took place on April 6 and 7. A session of the last conference that drew high attendance was addressed by S. Jaishankar, India’s high commissioner to Singapore, who was then a member of the official team that negotiated the nuclear deal with the Bush administration. Jaishankar’s speech, in which he pulled no punches, was the first time India made it clear in public that it would not go into the deal unless it got what it wanted. India’s curious absence this year must be seen against the backdrop of participation as speakers by top officials from Brazil, Argentina, Norway, Indonesia and Egypt, not to mention the big powers who control the nuclear future of our world.

If India’s absence from the Carnegie conference was an aberration, South Block would only have been accused of an act of omission. But the absence fits a pattern. Last month, the board of governors of the IAEA held five rounds of voting to choose a successor to Mohamed ElBaradei as director-general of the agency. The post of IAEA director- general is one that is key to India’s nuclear ambitions. The Indo-US nuclear deal could not have been operationalized without the public support for it by the current IAEA chief, ElBaradei. And yet, for India, the search for a new IAEA director-general could be taking place in another planet.

Between the second and the fifth rounds of voting, the Japanese governor to the IAEA, Yukiya Amano, increased his lead over South Africa’s governor, Abdul Samad Minty, to just one vote short of the two-thirds majority among the agency’s 35 members of the board. If a Japanese is elected to succeed ElBaradei, it will put the clock back by several years on what India has achieved since its second Pokhran nuclear tests in 1998 simply because of Japan’s familiar opposition to anything that smacks of nuclear expansionism.

India should have been out there vigorously campaigning for Minty, using not only its new clout in the nuclear world, but also its special position in the IAEA as permanent chair of an influential group within the board. South Block should have anticipated the lackadaisical attitude of Saurabh Kumar, its permanent representative to United Nations organizations in Vienna, to this vote from its experience during the IAEA and NSG negotiations on the nuclear deal in Vienna. Then, the United Progressive Alliance government had to rush reinforcements of officers from Geneva to New Delhi and to Mumbai to make up for what Kumar could not deliver. This ambassador’s lethargy, according to the Vienna grapevine, has only increased because he has only six months to retire and he couldn’t care less who leads the IAEA for the next four years from November 2009.

But the choice matters critically to India. If Minty is elected at the next board meeting in May, India can count on him to promote energy development through the agency and the sharing of nuclear technology, which are at the heart of the nuclear deal between India and the United States of America. On the other hand, a victory for the Japanese will mean an overemphasis on the IAEA’s non-proliferation work. Besides, India is now tied up with Brazil and South Africa in the IBSA grouping and should have done more for its ally in the run up to the Vienna vote. The gravity of the situation for New Delhi becomes apparent on scanning the list of potentially new candidates if Amano and Minty bow out of the race, having exhausted their goodwill in five rounds of voting. If a new slate of candidates is deemed essential by May, then a possible front-runner is Tibor Toth, the executive secretary of the preparatory commission of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization. That speaks for itself.

Conspiracy theorists are spreading the word that India’s low profile on nuclear matters is actually by policy. Their theory is that when India agreed to the nuclear deal with the US, it was also agreed that New Delhi would not stand in the way of what the five recognized nuclear weapons states want to do with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty at its review conference next year, and that India would not upset the apple cart of the big powers on non-proliferation. The silence in New Delhi on Obama’s call for universal nuclear disarmament, an idea that is dear to India, may well be the result of such a deal. In which case, India has abdicated its rightful place in global arms control that was carved out by Nehru, advanced by Rajiv Gandhi and exercised by Atal Bihari Vajpayee.