NEW DELHI, Jan 21: India and the United States struggled to stitch together the elements of a nuclear agreement as foreign secretary Shyam Saran and US undersecretary Nicholas Burns remained closeted through the day in intensive discussions on Friday.

And if the left parties’ enduring threat of blocking the deal makes the government nervous, the US administration’s ‘flexibility’ on India’s infamous Cirus reactor has been a cause for comfort.

In a statement, the Communist Party-Marxist urged the Manmohan Singh government to make public the separation plan for civil and military nuclear facilities.

Washington’s top non-proliferation official, Robert Joseph, told the powerful US Senate Foreign Relations Committee that there were no clear conclusions whether the Cirus project — a 40 megawatt nuclear reactor - had violated a 1956 US-India contract.

This is a major concession by the administration, and gives the Senate a great deal of leeway while considering legislation to make a nuclear exception of India.

While India has maintained that it did not violate the letter of the US-India agreement, questions have been raised about whether it was US heavy water that was used to make weapons grade plutonium for India’s 1974 test.

This reactor turned out to be a huge hurdle, with the non-proliferation lobby using it as a potent weapon to scupper the deal.

Mr Joseph’s statement was preceded by him telling the Senate recently that Congress could kill the accord by ‘piling on conditions’.

“It would be better to lock in this deal and then seek to achieve further results in subsequent non-proliferation discussions,” he said.—By special arrangement with the Times of India