New Delhi, June 11
With the time running out, the government today intensified efforts to give a push to the Indo-US nuclear deal with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee asserting that the pact was in India’s supreme national interest and would help the country meet its long-term energy needs.
Manmohan Singh and Mukherjee used different forums to strongly argue in favour of the nuclear deal, which has been projected by the UPA government as the centrepiece of its achievements during its four years in office. Significantly, their comments came just a week before the UPA-Left committee on the nuclear deal meets to take a view on the pact.
Frustrated with the Left parties over their attempts to block the deal, the Prime Minister sought to set the record straight, saying there was no pressure from Washington on India to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or any other international arrangement of that sort to enter into nuclear cooperation for civil energy.
“The nuclear agreement that we signed with the US has run into some difficulties, but it protects our national interest and our capacity to use the nuclear power to protect our strategic interests,” he said, addressing IFS probationers at his residence here this morning.
This evening, Mukherjee, while releasing a book “The ultimate prize: Oil and Saddam’s Iraq” written by former ambassador R.S. Kalha, said given the oil price scenario, there was need to seriously consider how the country’s energy basket could be expanded so as to meet the deficit of its energy requirement.
Later, when asked by reporters how confident the government was of taking the Left parties on board with regard to the deal, Mukherjee said: “We will meet on June 18. Let us see what happens.”
The Prime Minister, who has constantly come under sharp attack from the Left parties for his insistence on going ahead with the deal, gave full credit to the Bush Administration for coming to India’s rescue by offering such a pact to help the country meet its growing energy needs. India was not a signatory to the NPT and it had also said if the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) came into being, New Delhi would not sign it.
Manmohan Singh and Bush are expected to review the progress on the operationalisation of the deal finalised between them amid much fanfare in July 2005, at a bilateral meeting in Japan next month on the margins of the G-8 Summit.
The Prime Minister indicated that he was still hopeful of building a national political consensus on the deal, which, he said, had run into difficulties due to domestic politics. “I still continue to hope that we will make progress in the months that lie ahead.” It was very important for India to move forward to end the ‘nuclear apartheid’ that the world had sought to impose on it.
Manmohan Singh also spoke at length about relations with India’s neighbours, saying it was his government’s endeavour to create an environment conducive to the country’s national goals of sustained economic and social development.
