US lawmakers have warned Bush administration of “inconsistencies” in the 123 agreement after reports that Washington has agreed to allow India to reprocess spent nuclear fuel under civilian nuclear deal with New Delhi. The warning came after the agreement between the US and India was finalised in extended talks in Washington last week.

In a letter to President  Bush, as many as 23 Congressmen-led by Democratic lawmaker Edward Markey expressed their concern that perhaps Washington may have “capitulated” to India’s demands on the agreement.
The Congress passed the Hyde Act less than a year ago, settling minimum conditions that must be met for nuclear cooperation with India, as well as the non-negotiable restrictions on such cooperation, Merky said. Stating that these conditions and restrictions were not optional or advisory, Mr Markey warned: “If the 123 agreement has been intentionally negotiated to side-step or bypass the law and the will of Congress, final approval for this deal will be jeopardised.”

In the letter, the lawmakers stressed “the necessity of abiding by the legal boundaries set by Congress” for nuclear deal.

“The Agreement is subject to the approval of Congress, and any inconsistencies between the Agreement and the relevant US laws will call congressional approval deeply into doubt,” lawmakers told the White House.

They also picked upon India’s growing economic and military ties to Iran as a factor which could imperil congressional approval of the deal. “The President cannot re-write laws during a closed-door negotiation session with a foreign government. Though some of us disagreed during last year’s debate over nuclear cooperation with India, all of us are intent on defending the prerogatives of Congress and reinforcing that the law must be followed without exceptions,” Markey said.

The Bush Administration has to get Congressional approval on the bilateral deal before any nuclear cooperation can commence.

Concerns still unaddressed
New Delhi, DHNS: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday tried to assure Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee that the Indo-US nuclear cooperation agreement reached in Washington last week would not adversely impact the strategic programmes of the country, but the BJP insisted that its apprehensions were not allayed and it was not privy to the daft agreement.

The also PM sought to clarify “misgivings” on the Indo-US nuclear deal when a high powered delegation led by  Mr Vajpayee with senior colleagues Rajnath Singh, Jaswant Singh, Yashwant Sinha, Arun Shourie and former national security advisor Brajesh Mishra  met him here at his residence.

The government has approved the draft Indo-US nuclear agreement, saying “all concerns” of India have been adequately addressed. The BJP fears that once the deal comes into effect, India loses forever its option of conducting a nuclear weapons test.

, even if any other country tests. According to the party leaders, it not only makes Indo-US civil nuclear cooperation contingent upon India not testing but also envisages that the US would insist on the right of return of nuclear material and equipment provided to India.

The top BJP leaders first assembled at Mr Vajpayee’s residence to discuss the issue before driving down to 7, Race Course Road, the prime minister’s official residence. The BJP has been demanding that the  government  take the opposition into confidence on the progress in the agreement.

Soon after the two-hour meeting with the prime minister, Mr Sinha said his party’s apprehensions on the nuclear deal were “not allayed completely”.

“We have no reason to distrust him, but we would like to first go through the text of the draft agreement”, he said.

He added, “the text of the agreement is clearly frozen, neither India nor the US can now make any changes in it. But they (government) have not shared with us the text of the agreement, They tried to share only the main elements of the agreement”. Mr Sinha has recently been appointed as head of a BJP  committee on foreign policy on the neighbouring countries.

He said the party told the prime minister that in absence of the text “to which we are not privy at this stage, it will be difficult for us to respond in detail to the provisions of the bilateral agreement.”

The prime minister, in response told the saffron delegation that the country’s concerns were adequately met in the 123 agreement signed in Washington last week.

Former deputy prime minister L K Advani could not attend the meeting with the prime minister, as he is away on a visit to Singapore.

Earlier on July 6, Vajpayee   expressed “serious concern” over  the  constitution of a task force with the prime minister’s approval about a month ago to  allegedly reverse  “existing policy on disarmament and non-proliferation”.

The confidence of the US Secretary of State that the Indo-US nuclear deal would be concluded before the end of this year “may also be linked to the review of India’s policies”, Vajpayee  had said.

“The establishment of this task force at this juncture is nothing more than a thinly veiled move towards reversing our nuclear related policies with a view to bringing them in conformity with many of the highly objectionable provisions of the Hyde Act; and then to pretend that the changes have been undertaken by us autonomously,” Mr Vajpayee said.

According to the former prime minister, amongst the various measures included in the Hyde Act, “designed to stymie” the development of India’s nuclear weapons capability, the two which will have “the greatest adverse impact” on the country’s national security are those pertaining to the ban on nuclear tests by India and its “working actively with the United States for the early conclusion” of a “multilateral” Fissile Material Cut Off Treaty (FMCT).