N-deal meeting: Cong hopes Left is ‘reasonable’

On eve of meeting of UPA-Left committee on Indo-US nuke deal, the PM said the Govt was ready to discuss any matter.

On the eve of the meeting of UPA-Left committee on Indo-US nuclear deal, PM Manmohan Singh said the Government was ready to discuss any matter. “We will discuss whatever issue our colleagues will like to raise,” Singh told reporters at Rashtrapati Bhavan on Monday.

According to AICC spokesperson Manish Tewari, the Government has made an honest attempt to address the concerns of the Left. “But the fact of the matter is that the Left has allowed the Government or the Government has been able to persuade the Left to bring the deal to a stage whereby the draft agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is in place,” Tewari told reporters.

He said there were two steps left for the conclusion of the deal and it had come a long way between 2005 and 2008. “Given that we have made an honest attempt to address all the reservations and often they have come out of the UPA-Left coordination committee meeting, mollified enough to allow the Government to take the next step, we would hope that in tomorrow’s meeting the attitude of the Left would be reasonable,” said the AICC spokesperson.

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The Left, however, looked determined to use the UPA-Left mechanism to delay any next step by the Government towards the operationalisation of the deal. On Monday CPI(M) politburo member Sitaram Yechury said the operationalisation of the deal “should not proceed till the committee finds that all objections have been addressed and settled”. The Left is learnt to be keen to delay any further step towards operationalisation till July.

The US Administration has, however, been pushing for a July timeline, as the Congress would go for a recess in August. Anxious to take the Left on board, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee had clarified on April 23 that the Government would take a “sense of the House” on the nuclear deal before it is taken to the US Congress for ratification.

The Board of Directors of the IAEA is currently meeting in Vienna to discuss the agency’s annual budget. If the Left were to give a go ahead to the Government to formalise the draft India-specific safeguards agreement, sources said, it might be easier to convene a special board meeting immediately.

Yechury said on Monday that the 123 agreement was “anchored in the Hyde Act” and the Left did not want the Government to proceed on t with such provisions.

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At Tuesday’s meeting, he said, the Left parties will see “what kind of discussions the Government has had with IAEA”.

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