By IANS
New Delhi : The main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Thursday termed the Indo-US nuclear deal as humiliating for India and asked Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to either renegotiate it or quit.
BJP vice president and former foreign minister Yashwant Sinha described the Hyde Act governing the 123 agreement between the two countries as a document of “humiliation” and warned that it was aimed at forcing New Delhi to cap, roll back and eventually eliminate its nuclear weapons programme.
There was no point in building “castles in the air” as the majority in both houses of parliament were opposing the deal, he added.
Unlike the 123 agreement that the US had signed with China, the deal with India will be governed by the US national laws, including the Atomic Energy Act, 1954, Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Act, 1978 and the Hyde Act, 2006, Sinha said.
“The pedigree of the 123 Agreement is derived from these three US national laws,” Sinha said and asked how India could escape from these US laws.
The entire nuclear architecture built by the US in the wake of India’s first peaceful nuclear test in 1974 was aimed at curtailing India’s strategic nuclear programme, he added.