By Arun Kumar, IANS
Washington : US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, dropping a string of international dates, met a high-level Indian team Wednesday amid hard negotiations to break the logjam over a "couple of tough issues" stalling the India-US civil nuclear deal conceived this day two years ago.
As the meeting went into its second day, a spokesman for the US state department said: "We believe that we can get a deal; we can get an agreement."
The unscheduled meeting with Rice came after a day of hard marathon talks at the state department and some dinner diplomacy Tuesday with the Indian team, which includes Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon, National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan and Department of Atomic Energy Chairman Anil Kakodkar.
After the meeting with Rice, who dropped a trip to Africa and postponed visits to Israel, Palestine and Congo to be at hand for the talks, Narayanan was to go into a one-on-one meeting with US National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley at the White House.
Meanwhile, Menon and his foreign office team continued their parleys with the US team led by Washington's chief interlocutor R. Nicholas Burns. The full delegations will then join Menon and Hadley and carry on the business talk over lunch.
Earlier, as the team began the first formal round of hard negotiations on the so-called 123 agreement to operationalise the deal, state department spokesman Sean McCormack struck a hopeful note.
"There are a couple tough issues that we have left to resolve. We believe that we can get a deal; we can get an agreement," he said.
The Indian side would not say anything beyond "the talks are continuing" as Narayanan and Kakodkar, whose nod would be important to seal the deal, later joined Menon's negotiating team at a dinner hosted by Burns, under secretary of state for political affairs.
Menon was backed at the formal round by Deputy Chief of Mission Raminder Singh Jassal, India's High Commissioner to Singapore S. Jaishankar, an expert in nuclear diplomacy, and Joint Secretary (Americas) Gaitri Kumar. The Department of Atomic Energy was represented by R.B. Grover.
Also with Burns were Robert Stratford, director of the State Department's Office of Nuclear Security and Cooperation, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Richard Boucher, and Ashley Tellis, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"…It's really just trying to make a push to get this agreement over the finish line," said McCormack as talks with what he described as a "serious, high-level delegation" from India began.
"…We're going to take stock of where we are in negotiating the so-called 123 agreement. … There are a couple tough issues that we have left to resolve. We believe that we can get a deal; we can get an agreement," he told reporters.
"I think it really comes down to a matter of timing; when is that going to get done? This meeting will provide us a good indicator as to the answer to that question: When can we get that deal done?" he added.
Asked how Washington expected to resolve their long-standing differences on India's insistence on its right to conduct nuclear tests and reprocess US supplied nuclear fuel, McCormack said, "We'll see. We'll see in the coming – coming hours and over the next couple of days."
"We'll see if we're able to bridge the differences. Certainly there is a willingness on our part to work in a constructive manner to get a deal done, and I suspect that you would hear the same thing from our Indian partners, but you can ask them where they stand," he said.
Apart from an insistence on reprocessing and test rights, New Delhi is seeking guarantees for continued supply of fuel for the 14 civil reactors it has agreed to place under international safeguards under a separation plan. Eight other reactors designated military would not be subject to inspections.
India swears by the July 18, 2005 and March 2, 2006 joint statements by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President George W. Bush and considers such restrictions placed by the Henry Hyde act passed by the US Congress last December to approve the deal in principle as beyond their pail.
The US side, on the other hand has been pleading its unwillingness or inability to sidestep the Hyde Act as making any changes in the law now is considered an uphill task with the Democratic controlled Congress at loggerheads with President Bush though the India deal has broad bipartisan support.
To break the impasse, the Indian side has come up with an out-of-the-box proposal for setting up a fully safeguarded stand-alone dedicated facility for reprocessing US-origin fuel alone as Washington would neither permit reprocessing nor is it willing to take back the spent fuel.
The US Congress has to again approve the final 123 agreement in an up or down vote before the nuclear deal is implemented. India also needs to sign an additional protocol with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and get the approval of the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group.
The ongoing round of talks is considered critical as there is only a small window left to present the final deal to Congress before it goes into another election cycle and President Bush leaves office in January 2009.