US to open India’s nuke-case at NSG meet today

The group will deliberate until Thursday, among other things, the proposal for a special status to India which will remove barriers for India to do business in advancing its civilian nuclear programme. In other words, there would be an exemption from NSG guidelines which are now applied against India when it wants to buy nuclear reactors or trade in other ‘‘trigger list’’ items.

Hectic diplomacy has preceded the meeting with India having a made a presentation of its case to the NSG Outreach Group in Vienna. The function of the outreach group is to, otherwise, advocate compliance to NSG’s stringent export control measures but New Delhi has utilised it to give an account of its nuclear safety record and the unilateral measures it has taken to ensure that its reactors are safe.

Washington is said to have concentrated on the broader picture by building India’s case on three key elements — India’s credentials as the world’s biggest democracy, that it is not a proliferator and has transparent safety mechanisms in place, and, India’s huge energy requirement which can be best fulfilled by increasing production of nuclear energy.

The NSG has a tradition of taking consensus-based decisions and it is here that the hurdles lie for both New Delhi and Washington. While major powers like the UK, France, Russia and Canada have welcomed the July 18 Indo-US joint statement, there are other countries like South Africa, Brazil and Argentina which voluntarily dismantled their nuclear weapons programme to join the non-proliferation regime. These countries have been opposing any move to grant a special status to India.