By Arun Kumar, IANS
Washington : The White House has lent its weight to ongoing US efforts to push India to move forward with their civil nuclear deal stalled by opposition from the Indian ruling coalition’s leftist supporters.
“The President (George W. Bush) feels that we have a very good relationship with India on a variety of levels, and that includes the civil nuclear programme,” White House spokesman Dana Perino said Tuesday. “We would like to have cooperation with India.”
“We realise that there are internal politics that need to be worked out, and that’s one of the things that (US Treasury) Secretary (Henry) Paulson is talking about,” she said when asked if the US official now visiting India is carrying any special message from Bush.
“But we cooperate with India on a variety of topics, and hopefully they’ll be able to sort out their internal politics and move on,” Perino said.
Meanwhile, the State Department again repeated its formulation that the US continued to support the deal and encouraged the Indian government to move forward with it after working through its intense domestic political debate.
“Same answer,” said spokesman Sean McCormack Tuesday when asked to comment on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s reported remark that the nuclear deal was delayed but not yet dead. “We continue to support the deal, continue to support moving forward with it. We have encouraged the Indian Government to move forward with it.”
“But they are working through an intense domestic political debate. That is going to play out on the terms defined by the Indian people and their elected representatives. But we continue to support the deal,” he said.
McCormack said he was not aware of any high level contacts other than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s telephonic conversion with External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee Monday.
US Ambassador to India David Mulford is in frequent contact with the Indian government about it, he said, “but in terms of the State Department, the phone call from the Secretary yesterday is the most recent high-level contact that I can report.”
Rice had spoken to Mukherjee to underline US support for the agreement, McCormack said Monday ruling out the possibility of renegotiating the agreement. “I don’t believe that there’s any consideration of that or any discussion of that on either side at this point,” he said.
The deal that would resume nuclear commerce between the two countries after three decades has run into trouble with the Indian coalition’s leftist supporters threatening to withdraw their support for the government if it goes ahead.
To operationalise the deal, India must reach a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for its civilian nuclear reactors and get clearance from the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) that governs global civilian nuclear trade.
The implementing 123 agreement then goes for an up or down vote to the US Congress that had passed the enabling Hyde Act last December.
There is no formal deadline, but Washington is particularly keen to complete the process before America gets into an election mode next year so that President George W. Bush may leave office in January 2009 with a major foreign policy victory.