Bush was inviting India out of the doghouse, which it had inhabited since first testing an atom bomb in May 1974, and into the world’s most exclusive clubhouse: the nuclear-weapons states. India, for its part, was promising that it would move away from its outmoded Third Worldism and become a reliable partner of the United States. To make this happen, of course, would involve a difficult series of reciprocal steps by New Delhi and Washington. Singh agreed to separate India’s civilian and military nuclear programs and place the former under international safeguards. He also committed India to strongly support the United States’ nonproliferation initiatives toward other countries, such as Iran. And Bush promised to persuade Congress and the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group to facilitate civilian atomic cooperation with India. After three decades, India would regain international access to high-technology trade.

Bush’s decision to spend so much political capital on India was rooted in a few simple propositions: that a rising India could not forever be kept away from the global high table. The president recognized that U.S. attempts to roll back India’s nuclear program hadn’t worked and had also prevented the world’s most powerful democracy and its largest one from forming the kind of genuine partnership that was in both their interests.

By any measure, it was a sweetheart deal for India. The agreement–which was not offered to other outlying nuclear states like Israel and Pakistan–did far more than just ratify India’s nuclear status. It also fundamentally altered Asia’s geopolitical balance in India’s favor. In a stroke, Bush abandoned Washington’s traditional policy of evenhandedness toward India and Pakistan and agreed to start treating New Delhi on par with Beijing. No wonder then that China and Pakistan have emerged as the principal opponents of the deal.

Given all this, one would have expected the agreement to be a hard sell in America but to be quickly embraced in India. In fact, the opposite happened. Despite some resistance from Washington arms controllers, Republicans and Democrats soon rallied behind the president. But India was plunged into one of its gravest foreign-policy crises ever.

The initial resistance came from India’s atomic scientists, who had suffered American sanctions all their adult lives and refused to believe that the United States had given up on trying to take away their nuclear assets.

It took Singh nearly two years to disabuse them of their fears, which he eventually managed by addressing all their technical concerns through tough negotiations with the United States. Yet just when he succeeded this summer, the opportunistic Indian right and the Stalinist left dramatically raised the ante, with the communists threatening to bring down the government. Sensing weakness, many in Singh’s own party began to maneuver to replace him as prime minister.

Singh was forced to choose between his job and the deal with Bush. The political jockeying in New Delhi frustrated India’s supporters in Washington and left them wondering whether India was truly ready for the big time.

The most remarkable thing about this story is not that India suffered self-doubt before grabbing a deal that is so patently in its favor. The real shocker is that Singh, widely seen as one of India’s weakest prime ministers, came so close to succeeding in radically reorienting India’s world view.

In a country where it has been a political taboo for decades to talk about good relations with the United States, Singh has put the prospect of a strategic partnership at the top of the national agenda.

And he now seems set to prevail. After stepping back to reposition himself, Singh now seems to have stared down the left and won some space to revive the agreement. After Singh implied he might intervene in the communists’ West Bengal power base (where communist cadres had attacked peaceful protesters), the left has agreed to let Singh begin talks with the International Atomic Energy Agency–the next step toward implementing the deal.

    With the Congress Party now rallying behind him, Singh has reversed his fortunes and might well go down in India's history as the man who revolutionized both its economic and foreign policies. In the early 1990s, he initiated a root-and-branch overhaul of India's moribund economy. He is now within striking distance of transforming India's relationship with the United States and the West as well.