US ties not dependent on N-deal, says India

The bilateral Indo-US ties will not fall apart if the civilian nuclear deal does not move forward, Mukherjee has said.

The bilateral Indo-US ties will not fall apart if the civilian nuclear deal does not move forward, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee has said.

“I’m afraid that I do not pin hope only on – this particular arrangement (nuclear deal), because this arrangement we started talking off during the visit of Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh (to the US). But our relationship — you talked of 60 years relationship. That means from the very beginning, we have good relationship with USA. Sometimes there have been — in every relationship, there may be things that may be don’t work, but nonetheless, we have good relations from the day one,” Mukherjee said on the Charlie Rose Show on PBS.

The United States, he said, “is the single largest country to us, the single largest industrial and technical collaboration we had with one country, that is the United States of America. Therefore, this is not the only matter on which our entire relationship depends. Of course, it is an important milestone, but I do not feel that if this will collapse, or if this will fails we’ll go back to the negative situation. It’s not like that.”

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Mukherjee brushed aside a notion in the US that the nuclear deal is a complete capitulation to existing American laws that helps India reprocess fuel from a reactor to produce plutonium, which could be used in bombs, and it dilutes strict conditions that Congress has placed.

“So far the US laws are concerned, we are fully aware of US laws. But here, I would like to make one point quite clear: When we did not agree to sign Non-Proliferation Treaty, it is not that we disagreed with the ultimate objective of non-proliferation.”

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