By Manish Chand, IANS
New Delhi : India was hoping to conclude a safeguards pact with the IAEA this month, but its uniqueness and complexity has delayed the plan. The two sides will now hold the third round of talks next month.
A team of officials from the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and the external affairs ministry will head to Vienna next month to firm up the safeguards pact that will acknowledge the country’s separation plan of its civilian and military facilities, an official source privy to nuclear negotiations told IANS.
The Indian team will leave around mid-January, “but it’s hard to say whether we will have the safeguards pact ready that month”, the source said.
The source added that the country’s coalition politics would ultimately determine when the agreement is readied because the Left parties hold a virtual veto over the nuclear deal that they bitterly oppose.
The Indian team for Vienna will be headed by DAE chief Anil Kakodkar or DAE Director (Strategic Planning) R.B. Grover.
“We were earlier confident of concluding the safeguards pact with the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) by the end of the month, but it turned to be more complex than we thought. Some crucial details are still to be sorted out,” the source said.
The source admitted that the delay might dim the prospects of the deal getting the US Congress endorsement before election fever sweeps Washington.
Given the complexity of the safeguards arrangement, the standard template INFCIRC 66 might need to be modified to suit the nature of the India-specific pact.
The IAEA pact is expected to incorporate fuel supply guarantee, India’s right to build a strategic fuel reserve for the lifetime of its safeguarded nuclear reactors, and the right to reprocess spent fuel under a specially-built facility which will be placed under safeguards.
The next round of negotiations will be keenly watched by global players like France, which have enthusiastically supported the India-US civil nuclear deal.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, who was here recently, underlined his country’s readiness to ink a bilateral pact that will promote civil nuclear cooperation with India during President Nicolas Sarkozy’s trip to New Delhi from Jan 24.
The timing of the IAEA pact, a key step towards operationalising the nuclear deal that aims at ending three decades of India’s global nuclear isolation, will depend on indications the government gets from the Left parties in the weeks ahead.
For now, the rout of the Congress party, which heads the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition, in the Gujarat election has put the party on the defensive vis-à-vis its Communist allies.
With no major party in the UPA ready for early polls, specially after the Gujarat verdict, chances are that the ruling coalition will not be audacious to risk elections, that too over the nuclear deal.
This could mean two scenarios for the nuclear deal: the best-case situation in which the Left, seeing in the BJP as a greater evil, decides to let the government go ahead with the agreement; and the more realistic scenario which entails the government dumping the deal in the face of an uncompromising Left, for its own political survival.
Whatever eventually happens, India’s IAEA pact and the next step of getting the Nuclear Suppliers Group to amend its guidelines in favour of global nuclear commerce is set to take longer than expected.
After giving a partial nod to the government to go ahead with the IAEA talks last month, Communist Party of India-Marxist leader Prakash Karat has reiterated that the Left will not allow the government to go ahead with the deal after the IAEA talks.