THE Modi government has suffered a humiliating setback in its frantic efforts to acquire membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). The diplomatic effort to enlist support for the NSG membership was led by Prime Minister Modi himself. In the run-up to the Seoul meeting of the NSG, Modi visited Switzerland and Mexico to muster support from these countries. The 48-member NSG works on the basis of consensus. In the Seoul meeting, ten countries did not agree to take up India’s membership in the NSG at this stage. Most of them were of the view that the existing criteria for membership of being a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) warrants a discussion whether a non-NPT member like India could be admitted to the group. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his close advisors miscalculated the prevalent view among these countries and were confident that they would be able to bring everyone around to the idea of accepting India’s membership. It adopted a flawed strategy of trying to isolate China and then pressurise it to accept India’s position. But all this ended in a fiasco. The miscalculation stems from the fact that the Modi government thought that becoming a strategic ally of the United States would ensure the overcoming of the reservations harboured by many countries. The Modi government has openly allied with the United States’ strategic goal of containing China. In the last two years, one step after the other was taken to signal that India is on board the United States rebalancing to the Asia-Pacific region. The Joint Vision Statement with President Obama, the trilateral talks with Japan, USA and India and the recent Malabar naval exercises being extended with Japan’s participation in the East China Sea were all hostile moves towards China. It required a degree of arrogance and hubris to do all this and then expect China to fall in line with India’s desire to join the NSG club. The Modi government has wrongly singled out China as the only country which opposed India’s membership at the NSG. Nine other countries, including New Zealand, Austria, Ireland, Brazil, South Africa, Switzerland and Turkey raised issues about the criteria for admission and other procedural problems. There is nothing much India would gain by becoming a member of the NSG. It should be remembered that this group was constituted by the United States after the Pokhran test by India in 1974. The NSG was meant to check proliferation of nuclear technology and to impose sanctions on countries like India to prevent them from acquiring nuclear technology. Even after getting a waiver in 2008 from the NSG for buying of nuclear equipment, the NSG then proceeded to impose a new guideline that enrichment and reprocessing technology cannot be made available to non-NPT members. By this, the promise made by the United States during the Indo-US nuclear agreement was reneged upon. Even if India becomes a member of the NSG, we would still be treated as a second class member for not being a NPT member. The judgment and sense of proportion displayed in this desperate quest for NSG membership reveals the distortion and narrowing of the foreign policy vision of the Modi government by hitching India on to the US bandwagon. The Modi government acquired a false and illusory idea of India’s importance. Apart from Narendra Modi himself, the pro-US elements in the foreign policy and national security establishment are also responsible for this debacle.