Crucial Left-Govt talks on nuke deal deferred

“We were informed that the foreign minister is busy with the Syrian president’s visit and will be unable to attend the meeting today.”

Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee is a key intermediary in talks with the left over the proposed civilian nuclear cooperation deal. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is currently in India, but it was unclear why the scheduling clash was only discovered at the last minute.

Basu could not confirm a new date for the key meeting, but television stations said it would be June 25.

The communists have opposed the deal, saying it compromises India’s sovereignty and security, and have threatened to withdraw vital support from the ruling coalition if the government moves ahead with it..

Indian shares fell 1 per cent after the news of the postponement broke.

The communists have allowed the government to discuss but not to finalise an India-specific safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a crucial step in putting the deal into effect.

Sources had said India’s government would try to persuade the communists during Wednesday’s slated meeting to at least allow it to conclude negotiations with the IAEA, something the communists had already indicated they would not agree to.

“The window of opportunity is closing and if the dogmatic wax is not cleared from the ears of the communists then the deal is off,” Naresh Kumar, a former Indian envoy to Washington said before the meeting was postponed.

“Whether the next governments of India and the US negotiate it or renegotiate it, these are things that are in the realm of conjecture.”

The agreement is the centrepiece of a new strategic relationship between New Delhi and Washington, and seen as crucial to ending India’s isolation in international nuclear trade after it conducted a nuclear test in 1998.

The deal is also viewed as vital to the huge energy needs of Asia’s third-largest economy, whose growth is being threatened by soaring international crude prices and high inflation.

But unless rapid progress is made in the next week or so, the agreement has almost no chance of being finalised before U.S. President George W. Bush leaves office and India heads for elections by next May.

TIME RUNNING OUT

Realistically, both governments realise this but are reluctant to publicly abandon a deal in which both have invested heavily, analysts and diplomats say.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the pact was vital to end India’s long exclusion from global nuclear trade, and Mukherjee has described it as the “most potent means” for achieving energy security.

But the government has ruled out signing the agreement as a minority one, in other words without the support of its communists. That makes immediate progress unlikely.

“The blunt fact is that it will be an Obama or McCain administration — and a new government in New Delhi — that will have the final say on the deal,” wrote strategic analyst Brahma Chellaney in The Indian Express on Wednesday.

While time runs out, the deal still needs clearances from the IAEA board of governors and the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group.

Then the deal, which promises India access to American nuclear fuel and technology, would have to go to the U.S. Congress for final approval.