Ahead of a scheduled round of Menon-Burns negotiations in the capital next week to hammer out the agreed 123 draft agreement to operationalise the proposed Indo-US civil nuclear energy cooperation, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Wednesday asserted that India won’t deviate from agreed parameters to make the elusive deal possible.
India would continue to stick to the agreed parameters of the proposed deal as laid down under the July 18, 2005 Bush-Singh joint statement, the March 2, 2006 Separation Plan and commitment Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh had made to Parliament last year, Mr Mukherjee asserted in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday.
The finalisation of the crucial 123 agreement to operationalise Indo-US civil nuclear cooperation has hit hurdles after four rounds of negotiations, including the last one between Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon and his US counterpart Nicholas Burns in Washington just over a fortnight ago.
Mr Burns is scheduled to be here next week to resume negotiations with a view to narrow down differences and clinch a draft agreement.
The External Affairs Minister’s assurances, given in the course of question hour in the House, set at rest for now speculation that Delhi might be open to making “realistic compromises” in order to make the deal possible.
The speculation was inspired by Mr Mukherjee himself earlier this month when he addressed a gathering of Indian and US legal luminaries here. In that speech he had indicated that possibilities of some deviations from the bench-marks when he said that India was “committed to implementing the understanding (with the US) expeditiously in a way that it adheres as closely as possible to the framework of the July 2005 Joint Statement and the March 2006 Separation Plan”.
Mr Mukherjee’s “no-deviations” assertion on the one hand and his clarification to the members that the deal was not in “jeopardy” on the other has aroused curiosity about the next week’s negotiations as both the sides have also expressed their desire to expeditiously clinch the negotiations. Sources said that it would be difficult for the US to strike an accord without India making some concessions.
This is because the US negotiators are seemingly bound by the framework for the agreement set by the Hyde Act enacted in the US Congress in December last.
The Hyde Act has denied India the right to reprocess spent fuel, seeks to bring India within the non-proliferation framework and seeks rollback of the entire cooperation retrospectively if India chose to conduct another nuclear test. Some of these requirements clearly run counter to the assurances given by the Prime Minister to Parliament.