The Manmohan Singh government has invested a lot of its prestige in pursuing the proposed civil nuclear energy cooperation agreement with the United States over the last two years. It would be naïve to believe that the government would give up its efforts just because negotiations over the deal have not progressed as anticipated. It would indeed be a major foreign policy setback for the government if it cannot firm up the deal after apparently making so much progress on it and devoting a lot of time and attention to the negotiations since the Prime Minister’s July 2005 visit to Washington. The July 18, 2005 joint statement envisaged international cooperation, including one with the United States, in the development and expansion of India’s civil nuclear energy sector without the country giving up its declared nuclear weapons programme. All that was required for India to do was to isolate its weapon programme-related facilities from the civilian facilities that would be opened for international cooperation, facilitating India to access nuclear fuel and technology from abroad.

However, this widely shared understanding of the provisions of the statement seemed to have become a subject of divergent interpretation by the two sides in their latest round of negotiations in Delhi for firming up what is commonly known as the 123 agreement. As a result, the official level negotiations between Indian Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon and US Under Secretary for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns over three days virtually hit a dead end, requiring a  fresh political brief from their leadership.

The problem seems to be that the US side is reinterpreting the July 18 statement in the light of the Hyde Act, enacted by the US Congress last December, which ironically was meant to give affect to the agreement between the two heads of largest democracies in the world. The hype created over the agreement soon gave way to serious misgivings, especially among nuclear scientists in the country, as the Hyde Act seemed to reflect the views of the nuclear hawks in the United States. Manmohan Singh government cannot accept the non-proliferation prescriptions of the Hyde Act since the July 18 statement was never intended to promote non-proliferation. Apparently, Burns has assured that the Hyde Act was not a constraint on the US Administration to fulfil its obligations under the July 18 statement. The test of sincerity of this claim, however, lies in delivering the 123 agreement.