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India has agreed to repatriate the Indian citizens, if there are any, of the 157 Tamil asylum seekers currently in the Curtin detention centre.
It will “consider” taking back the non-citizen residents of India who fled there from Sri Lanka.
And for this favour to the Australia government, what will it want in return? Nothing.
Four times yesterday, immigration minister Scott Morrison was asked if India had raised a quid pro quo, if they had even hinted at for what they might later come calling.
Mr Morrison’s answers: “Nothing. Nothing. No. No.”
This perhaps is so. But it will not remain this way. India will want something in return.
Narendra Modi is a divisive figure inside India and out. But none of those lining up to criticise him accuse him of being naive, or a callow negotiator.
Mr Modi is a self-made man, he has defied low caste and humble beginnings as a chai wallah – a tea salesman - to drag himself up to become prime minister of the largest democracy on the face of the earth.
He did not achieve this by doing favours for nothing.
Modi is a shrewd and calculating political operative. He has run his home state of Gujarat for a decade with ruthless ambition and he knows that, in this exchange with Australia, he holds all the cards.
Australia is the one who wants something. And Modi is the man who has it within his power to give.
He is not a man to be in hock to.
India will want something back. Right now, India is desperate to be admitted to membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a body that would give it greater access to nuclear materials and technology from across the globe.
Australia, as India’s newest, nascent, nuclear partner, supports its membership (part of a US-led bloc), but China and its allies oppose India joining.
India, doubtless, will expect a renewed urgency applied to diplomatic efforts to get them over the line.
Co-operation with Australia, too, works for India in a geo-political sense.
It pulls Australia a little closer to its influence, and further from the influence of China, India’s great and fractious Asian rival.
And it works for Modi. The controversy of the Godhra riots – a brutal anti-Islamic pogrom in 2002 that left more than 1000 people dead in Gujarat – have dogged Modi’s political career.
Courts have cleared Modi of any wrongdoing but allegations refuse to lie down that he, as Chief Minister of the state, did nothing to stop, and even tacitly encouraged, the spate of killings.
After a decade in which he was refused visas to the UK and the US (he will visit America in September), anything that lends him international legitimacy is political gold for Modi right now.
Even a relatively minor deal on asylum seekers is, for Modi’s global political standing, a significant victory.
