By IANS,
New Delhi: India Friday said the G-8 resolution restricting the transfer of enrichment and reprocessing (ENR) technology to countries outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty fold was “not a legally binding document” and hoped individual nations would implement civil nuclear pacts with India on a bilateral basis.
It was a “political statement and not a legally binding document”, External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna Friday told the Rajya Sabha while responding to concerns over the recent G-8 resolution in the L’Aquila summit that seeks to curb transfer of ENR technology to non-NPT countries.
Krishna underlined that New Delhi will go by clean India-specific waiver granted by the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) in September last year. He also told parliament that the NSG has not taken any decision on the ENR issue.
“It is India’s expectation that our international partners in civil nuclear cooperation will implement the bilateral agreements that we have entered into,” he said during his reply to a debate in the Rajya Sabha on the working of the external affairs ministry.
Krishna also allayed concerns over the End User Monitoring (EUM) Agreement agreed between India and the US recently, saying it does not limit India’s “sovereign choice of whether, where and what weapons we choose to buy for our national defence”.
He said the India-US relations have been transformed in the recent years and signing of the civil nuclear deal last year was a major development in this regard.