To give a final shape to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s US visit next month, National Security Advisor M K Narayanan will reach Washington on June 16 for his first formal meeting with his US counterpart Stephen Hadley.Sources said Narayanan will be in Washington till June 20 and is expected to meet US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman and Chief Economic Advisor to President George Bush, Alan Hubbard. The details of Narayanan’s visit were firmed up after India’s Ambassador to the US Ronen Sen met Hadley in the first week of June.While Narayanan has interacted with Hadley over phone, this will be the first formal meeting with his US counterpart since he took over as National Security Advisor. Narayanan is expected to interact extensively with White House officials and give a broad outline of the sensitive issues that are expected to come up in the Bush-Singh meeting.The focus of Narayanan’s visit is to follow up on civilian nuclear energy cooperation and assess the extent to which the US will support India in building its nuclear power generation capacity.The thinking, so far, has been that the energy dialogue would be broken up into five sub-groups, one of which will be dedicated to civilian nuclear energy. The other components will be new and emerging technologies, use of clean coal, hydrogen for producing energy besides oil and natural gas.Narayanan will also review the bilateral agreements that are expected to be signed during the Prime Minister’s visit. Though the talk in South Block is that nearly 20 such agreements are on the anvil, the Indian Embassy in Washington does not want to define the success of Manmohan’s visit by the number of agreements signed. ‘‘This used to happen in Soviet era, now the focus is on the substantive discussions between Bush and Manmohan Singh on global and energy issues,’’ said a senior official.But all defence-related agreements will be signed during Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s visit later this month with a possible protocol on joint production of military hardware.
