China hardens stand on India’s NSG bid

New Delhi, China today hardened its position and made it clear that it is not in favour of India’s membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).
China said India’s bid had become ‘more complicated’ under the ‘new circumstances’ ahead of the upcoming plenary session of the NSG scheduled to be held in the Swiss capital of Bern later this month.
India, meanwhile, said while it would continue to engage with China on the issue, it also wanted other countries like Russia, which are friends with China, to press upon China to change its stand. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj today in a press conference said the bid to join the 48-member elite nuclear club was an ongoing process and she refused to draw a timeline as to when India could expect to join it.
In Beijing, China’s assistant minister of foreign affairs Li Huilai said: “About the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) it is a new issue under the new circumstances and it is more complicated than the previously imagined.” Li did not get into the details of what the new circumstances and complications are.
He, however, reiterated the well-known Chinese position that China supports the NSG to have consultation for reaching ‘non-discriminatory and universally applicable solution, applicable to all members of the NSG’.
In effect, China once again made the case that the NSG membership for states like India and Pakistan that have not signed the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) should be a two-step approach. The first step being that the NSG members will first need to arrive at a set of principles for the admission of non-NPT states into the NSG, and then as a second step take up discussions on specific cases.
Swaraj in her remarks today indicated to this Chinese position when she said India’s membership should be on the basis of ‘credentials and not criterion’. Prime Minister Narendra is expected to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in Astana on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) later this week where this issue is likely to be discussed between the two.