All well with N-deal, start moving: US

Under the agreement signed by President Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on July 18, India agreed to separate its civilian and military nuclear facilities and place the former under international safeguards. The US, on its part, promised to change its domestic as well as international nuclear rules in favour of India.

“We are committed to work with Congress to change US laws and policies. In Vienna this week, the US will ask its friends and allies in the Nuclear Suppliers Group to enable full peaceful civil nuclear energy cooperation and trade with India,” Burns said.

However, the devil, as always, is in the detail. The remarks of Burns on the timing and sequence of the implementation of mutual commitments under the nuclear pact leave considerable ambiguity.

Removing those ambiguities would be the main theme at the talks between Burns, who has emerged as the Administration’s pointman on Indo-US relations, and the Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran here on Friday and Saturday.

“Part of the purpose of my visit to Delhi this week is to work with the Indian government on a plan that would separate the civil and military nuclear states of India over the coming years,” Burns said.

“Once that plan has been clearly enunciated and once it has been committed to by the Indian government and we begin to see its implementation, it will be a short time before the US Congress enacts the necessary legislative changes to bring this into being, and that will be a welcome moment, indeed,’’ he added.

On its part, India would like to be certain that the Bush Administration has the legislative authority to sell nuclear reactors to India, before New Delhi puts its own unsafeguarded civilian nuclear facilities under international control. While there might be no question of India front-loading its commitments, Delhi has also said the separation of its civilian and military facilities cannot be seen as a “one-shot” event.

India would like to see this as a process in which it would “phase in” the division of its current nuclear programme into civilian and military components and place the former under international safeguards in an incremental manner. The US, on the other hand, would want a reasonable timeframe to complete this process.

Getting a sense of how Delhi wants to go about implementing its commitments, the Bush Administration has suggested, will be key to getting domestic and international support to the nuclear pact.

Burns underlined the importance of mutual trust in moving forward on the nuclear pact. “Since too many in the US and India long viewed each other through the lens of the Cold War, we must first work to overcome certain lingering prejudices and suspicions in our own countries,” Burns said.

Emphasising the importance of maintaining the momentum, Burns described the diplomatic style that will guide the negotiations with Saran.

“Our ongoing diplomatic efforts are not simply exercises in bargaining and tough-minded negotiation; they represent a broad confidence-building effort grounded in a political commitment from the highest levels of our two governments.”

While both Singh and Bush are strongly committed to implementing the nuclear pact signed by them on July 18, the two governments might have to take some interim nuclear steps in order to generate that mutual confidence.