India’s n-fuel storage gets US OK

The text is likely to spell out an in-principle OK to reprocessing and lay down terms for a future agreement.

After these talks, Narayanan and Menon met US Vice-President Dick Cheney for half an hour. The key challenge for both sides is to bridge the divide on how to interpret the consent on reprocessing that would be enshrined in the agreement. For this reason, the technical talks are important.

In fact, it was on this count that the Menon-Burns talks held here in early June failed to achieve a breakthrough. Washington had indicated that it was ready to allow India reprocess the spent fuel but interpreted it as something that would be discussed in the future when the need arises once India would have stored enough spent fuel on the civilian side to reprocess. India, on the other hand, read it as permanent consent. On the last day of talks, this gap over interpretation proved a difficult one to bridge.

Since then, New Delhi has told Washington that both sides must speak the same language and project the same interpretation to their respective domestic constituencies.

India wants to avoid a situation where any statement by the Prime Minister to Parliament contradicts what the Bush administration may convey to the US Congress.

Given that the US has now tabled fresh ideas on reprocessing against this backdrop, the hope is that both sides have covered a significant distance. But sources indicated that neither side is likely to announce completion of agreement without informally getting a sense of whether the final text will be broadly acceptable to the domestic constituency.