WASHINGTON, Aug 26: A historic nuclear cooperation agreement between the United States and India appears to be unravelling as opposition parties urge the Indian government to scrap the pact while US officials say the deal is final and cannot be renegotiated.
“We can’t renegotiate it because the agreement is done,” says Under-Secretary of State Nicholas Burns who was the chief US negotiator for the deal.
“Neither government wishes it to be renegotiated because it is now complete,” he said. Philip D. Zelikow, former counsellor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a key player in the accord indicated that Washington might find it difficult to offer further concessions to India.
“The Indian negotiators were as tough as or tougher than anyone that the US has encountered in recent years,” he said. “India won a great deal.”
The proposal to seek renegotiation came from some lawmakers in India as a means to save the agreement after a broad spectrum of political parties urged the Indian government to scrap the deal which they said was unfair and limited India’s sovereignty.
The lawmakers said the agreement includes a condition that requires India to cooperate with the United States in foreign policy matters. Their objection, however, focuses on a clause which says that the US would stop fuel supply and nuclear cooperation with India if it resumes nuclear tests.
An earlier clause called for an automatic cessation of nuclear cooperation after a test but after several months of negotiations India and the US agreed on an operative pact known as the 123 agreement, which give the US president the authority to reconsider the deal after a test. But on Aug. 14, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told a briefing in Washington that “the proposed 123 agreement has provisions in it that in an event of a nuclear test by India, then all nuclear cooperation is terminated.” His comments reignited the debate over the nuclear agreement in the Indian parliament and several political groups, including members of the ruling coalition, urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to scrap the agreement.
A day before the State Department restated its position on the deal; Mr Singh had told his parliament that the agreement would not affect India’s plans to test nuclear weapons. “The agreement does not in any way affect India’s right to undertake future nuclear tests, if it is necessary,” Mr Singh said. “There is no question that we will ever compromise, in any manner, our independent foreign policy. We shall retain our strategic autonomy.”
“The brouhaha over the deal has surprised some nuclear analysts in Washington, partly because the Bush administration was widely perceived as having caved in to key Indian demands,” Washington Post observed in an article published on Sunday. The newspaper said that the Bush administration had assured India that it could receive uninterrupted nuclear supplies from the United States and maintain the right to reprocess spent nuclear fuel -- a potentially dangerous prospect because reprocessing technology can also be used to make weapons-grade plutonium.
