WASHINGTON, Feb 14: The man appointed to assist the Bush administration’s chief negotiator for India-US nuclear deal firmly believes that Washington needs to recognize India as a nuclear power.

“The US cannot have a transformed relationship with India that treats New Delhi as a partner on one hand while it continues to remain a target of the US-led global nonproliferation regime on the other,” argues Ashley J. Tellis.

Mr Tellis, a strategic affairs analyst at a Washington think-tank, has been appointed senior adviser to Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns for a period of two months during which both India and the US hope to finalize the nuclear deal.

Mr Burns is Washington’s point man for the US-India civilian nuclear agreement and as his assistant Mr Tellis is expected to play a key role in clenching a deal for India.

A senior State Department official, while talking to Indian journalists in Washington, described Mr Tellis as an unambiguous cheerleader for the envisaged US-India nuclear deal.

Prof Tellis, who testifies regularly before the US Congress, has been in the middle of this strategic partnership between India and the US from when he was working at the US Embassy in New Delhi.

During a recent interview to Indian journalists in Washington, Mr Tellis said that the implementation of the US-India nuclear deal would be a ‘critical landmark’ because it “will mark the end of what former Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh once famously called ‘nuclear apartheid’ against India.”

“Implementing the agreement is vital for the continued transformation of this (Indo-US) relationship,” Mr Tellis said.