NEW DELHI: India’s foreign minister appeared to reject yesterday any new conditions imposed by nuclear supplier nations for the lifting of an atomic trade ban, a crucial step for a landmark deal between Washington and New Delhi, a news report said.
The Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG) bans nuclear exports to countries such as India and Pakistan that have atomic weapons but have refused to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). However, it has appeared willing to consider a waiver for India, in part because of lobbying from Washington.
The group ended a two-day meeting in Vienna on Friday without reaching agreement on a US-proposed draft statement that would allow India access to nuclear fuel and technology from other nations. The 45-nation group is expected to meet again on Sept. 4 and 5 to discuss proposed amendments to the draft. With the NSG’s two-day meeting having concluded, without giving a green signal to end the 34-year-old isolation of India in civil nuclear commerce, prospects of Indo-US civil nuclear deal being actually finalized in the coming weeks seem dim.
“We have to see what kind of amendments come. Then only we can decide. But we cannot accept prescriptive conditionalities,” Mukherjee said yesterday. He was briefed by Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon about developments in Vienna, Mukherjee said. He was accompanying President Pratibha Patil on a two-day visit to West Bengal. Menon, however, described the meeting as “constructive and useful.”
Some members of the group are eager to sell nuclear fuel and technology to India and appear to back a US argument that the waiver would bring India into the nonproliferation mainstream, but others are concerned that it could set a dangerous precedent.
A number of member nations appear to be backing an amendment that would revoke the waiver for India if it resumes nuclear weapons testing. The group’s approval of an Indian waiver is essential for the finalizing of a separate civil nuclear cooperation pact between New Delhi and Washington.
The pact would reverse more than three decades of US policy by allowing the sale of nuclear materials to a country that has tested nuclear weapons but has refused to sign nonproliferation treaties. Earlier this month, India fulfilled another prerequisite for the US pact by completing an inspection agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency that would allow UN monitors access to a total of 14 Indian civilian nuclear reactors by 2014. Six of the reactors already fall under existing safeguards agreements.
— With input from agencies
