Burns arrives in India to talk nukes

JYOTI MALHOTRA

New Delhi, May 30, 2007 : The US undersecretary for political affairs Nicholas Burns is arriving in India tomorrow to take forward high-level discussions on the Indo-US nuclear deal, which will take place on June 1-2.

Foreign Secretary Shiv Shanker Menon will lead the talks on behalf of India, but Burns is also likely to meet the PM’s special envoy Shyam Saran, as well as National Security Adviser M K Narayanan.

This is the last high-level dialogue before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US President George Bush meet on the margins of the G-8 meeting in Germany in about a week’s time.

Indian and US embassy officials sounded very positive on the eve of the talks, saying they were confident they would be able to surmount all current obstacles, and that both the PM and Bush would be able to fully keep their word to their respective Parliament and Congress.

Burns postponed visit to New Delhi comes in the wake of secret talks that were held in London last week, during which both sides sought to clarify key issues still bedeviling the agreement : The fallout of a possible nuclear test conducted by India, India’s right to reprocess spent fuel, and fuel supply guarantees.

It seems as if the code to crack the conundrum lies in the kind of language that will be employed for the agreement. For example, India may acknowledge that the ``right to return’’ clause exists in US law, that is, the US has the right to ask for the return of all the equipment and fuel supplies that it has given in case India conducts a test.

However, India will not accept that the US has the right to invoke any such penalties if a nuclear test takes place.

That way, India gets to keep its sovereign right to test, while the US is able to tell its own lawmakers that it has not diluted the letter of the law.

The bottomline, official sources said, is that the two countries would not have come so far if they did not have the political will to undertake the costs required to fundamentally change the relationship.

``The political will exists and it will be manifest when the Prime Minister meets Bush in Germany to wrap up the deal,’’ the sources said.

ENDS