NEW DELHI, 17 August 2006 — India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh yesterday met with the country’s top nuclear experts, two days after some leading scientists raised concerns about the impact of the India-US nuclear deal on the country’s strategic program.
The meeting took place right before the prime minister’s response on the deal in Parliament today.
Manmohan held nearly two-hour-long discussions with Anil Kakodkar, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and R. Chidambaram, principal scientific adviser to the prime minister, on various aspects of the nuclear deal and specific anxieties expressed by eight top nuclear scientists about the autonomy of India’s nuclear program.
National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan, Principal Secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office T.K.A. Nair and Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran also attended the meeting.
“It was a formal review meeting. All apprehensions and doubts on the deal would be dispelled by the Prime Minister (in his statement on Thursday),” Anand Sharma, minister of state for external affairs told reporters after the meeting.
In his statement in Parliament today, the prime minister is likely to assure critics of the nuclear deal that the bilateral nuclear cooperation agreement, also called the 123 agreement, will contain no deviations from the July 18, 2005 joint statement inked by him and US President George W. Bush later this year.
He is likely to focus on the centrality of the July 18 understanding and allay anxieties of the critics who suspect the US of a design to constrain and shackle the country’s nuclear weapons program through a ban on nuclear testing and a moratorium on the production of fissile materials, official sources said.
Under the agreement India will open most of its civilian reactors to international inspection but keep pre-selected military nuclear facilities out of public scrutiny.
The nuclear scientists, who are regarded as pillars of the country’s nuclear establishment and were involved with the indigenous nuclear program right from its inception in the fifties in the face of hostility of major powers, have raised specific objections about the provision in the nuclear legislation for an annual certification by the US president on whether or not India has tested a nuclear device.
In an appeal to the MPs, the eight scientists, including former chairmen of Atomic Energy Commission Dr. H.N. Sethna, Dr. M R. Srinivasan, and Dr. P. K Iyengar and former chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, Dr. A Gopalakrishnan, have also raised concerns about the impact of the deal on India’s indigenous nuclear research and development and have pressed for a “sense of Parliament resolution” that will set out parameters for the government’s future negotiations with the US on the nuclear deal.
Manmohan has already conveyed India’s concerns on these issues to Bush at their meeting on the margins of the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg last month. Later on, Saran discussed these issues with US undersecretary of state for political affairs Nicholas Burns in Paris last month.
The prime minister is likely to make a forceful statement in a bid to convince MPs, specially the leftist allies of his government that the July 18 statement remained the bedrock of the nuclear deal and any deviation from it would lead to the unraveling of the deal. The left parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party and a section of the opposition, including the Samajwadi Party, have been pressing for a “sense of Parliament” resolution that will ensure there is no divergence from the July 18 understanding in the final legislation.
