By IANS,
New Delhi : The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Monday said the India-specific safeguards pact with the IAEA compromised the country’s interests and accused Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of flouting assurances he gave to parliament on the India-US nuclear deal.
BJP leaders Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie said in a joint statement that the betrayal of India’s interests was reflected in the draft safeguards agreement reached with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The statement said: “The draft Safeguards Agreement has made a mockery of the assurances that Manmohan Singh had repeatedly given to the nation.
“Speaking in the Lok Sabha on July 29, 2005, the prime minister had said: ‘We shall undertake the same responsibilities and obligations as … the US; we expect the same rights and benefits as the US; and India will never accept discrimination.’
“This assurance has been flouted in the agreement, which does not recognise India as a Nuclear Weapons State (NWS) on par with the US, Russia, Britain, France and China.”
The statement added: “The PM has broken the consensus (on India’s nuclear policy), which had existed since the time of Indira Gandhi and continued till Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
“This is because of the duplicity and deceitfulness of the (Congress-led) UPA (united Progressive Alliance) government.
While the government has all along said that the deal was exclusively about nuclear energy, the US administration and America’s “bipartisan political class has left no one in doubt that the deal is all about bringing India into the non-proliferation regime”, said Shourie.