India-US hold secret nuke talks in London

JYOTI MALHOTRA

New Delhi, May 22, 2007 : The nuclear endgame between India and the US has begun, with both sides making a last-ditch effort to smoothen out the rough patches in their bilateral nuclear negotiations over the ``123 nuclear agreement’’, by holding secret talks in London today.

India’s lead negotiator S Jaishanker, ambassador in Singapore, was in the capital over the weekend, from where he left yesterday with a small delegation, for talks with his US counterpart Richard Stratford, director of Nuclear Energy, Safety and Security.

Key officials from both sides continue to be very keen to tie up most loose ends before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US president George Bush meet on the sidelines of the G-8 summit in Germany in early June, to finally wrap up the nuclear deal.

Considering the stakes are so high, Foreign Secretary Shiv Shanker Menon and his US counterpart Nicholas Burns spoke to each other a day or so ago, to take the process forward, before the top leadership meets again.

Despite the fact that Burns scrapped his visit to Delhi, scheduled to have taken place any time now to finalise the nuclear deal, the government is keen to dispel the impression that it is playing ``spoiler’’ at this very sensitive, last-minute stage.

Today’s London talks, sources said, are therefore ``not a technical-level discussion,’’ as reported by the news agencies, but a ``full-blown dialogue’’ that takes forward earlier rounds in New Delhi, South Africa and Washington DC.

Burns is also scheduled to make a major speech tomorrow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, a conservative-minded think-tank, where he is expected to outline both America’s interest in bringing India on board the nuclear high table, as well as the basic minimum that the US must set itself according to law.

The London talks, therefore, are an attempt to sort out the three major issues still bedeviling the final negotiation : The clause on the ``right to return’’ that the US is bound to invoke if any country conducts a nuclear test (for eg India), guarantees about the uninterrupted supply of nuclear fuel to Indian nuclear reactors, as well as New Delhi’s insistence that it be allowed to ``reprocess’’ the spent fuel sent by a foreign country (for eg, the US) in its own reactors.

Sources said both sides seemed to have come to ``conceptual agreements’’ on all these issues when Menon and Burns met in early May in the US, but it remained to suitably finesse the language that would be passable to both establishments.

That’s what the London talks are meant to do.

If both negotiators succeed at their level, it will be left to Manmohan Singh and Bush to give it one final political push in Germany, so that the nuclear deal is amenable to both Parliament and Congress.

At a time when the UPA government seems beset with political travails, success in pulling off the nuclear deal, will definitely come as a shot in the arm, political sources said.

ENDS