Excerpt from Advaniji’s speech in Parliament during the trust vote.

‘Strategic Partnership with USA, but on EQUAL TERMS

It is my charge against the Prime Minister that he has reduced an important agreement between two sovereign nations into a private agreement between two individuals — himself and President Bush. He has behaved as a junior partner in this partnership.

Indeed, both the text and the context of the Nuclear Deal right from the beginning have created an uneasy sense among Indians that the UPA Government wants India to accept an inferior position in the world order.

Let me make it clear — and this is where my party differs sharply with the Left — that the BJP wants to see friendly relations between India and the United States. Indeed, as the world’s largest democracy and the world’s strongest democracy, I believe that our two countries should forge a strategic partnership to pursue common goals.

It goes without saying that India should also simulatenously deepen friendship and cooperation with all the other major powers – Russia, Japan and others -- in today’s world, which we want to see as a multi-polar world tomorrow. A multi-polar world in which India itself becomes an important pole, working for the welfare of the entire mankind.

Let me emphasise, however, that we want a strategic partnership with the US on equal terms. The BJP will never support a relationship with any country, howsoever strong and powerful it may be, in which India becomes its client or a subservient partner.

It is shocking that the Prime Minister wants India to accept “strategic subservience” in its relationship with the United States. The aspect of “strategic subservience” is most evident in the restrictions that the Government has accepted on our strategic programme.

The Nuclear Deal in its present form is nothing but acceptance of severe curbs on our strategic weapons programme. All the American interlocutors, whether belong to the Republican Party or the Democratic Party or are independent experts, have made it clear that, as far as their country is concerned, their principal objective is to bring India into the Non-Proliferation Regime. What they want fits in well with the critical stand that Dr. Manmohan Singh took after Pokharan II in 1998. Both want India to come within the Non-Proliferation Regime dicated by the US.

Therefore, the Nuclear Deal in its present form means that India will not be allowed to perform Pokharan III or Pokharan IV, without inviting termination of the agreement and severe punitive action. This is unacceptable to my party, to the NDA, to the majority of MPs in this House, and to the people at large.’