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N-Deal
Pawar offers a guarantee
Faraz Ahmad
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, June 24
The Left parties are going to the meeting of the coordination committee of the Left and the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) on Wednesday evening with an “open mind,” even as they do not put much store by it.

Communist Party of India (CPI) general secretary, A.B. Bardhan told The Tribune, “There are no new facts, there is no new proposal before us. Let the meeting take place. Let us see what they offer. We will examine it then.”

The CPI general secretary however dismissed the reported offer of agriculture minister Sharad Pawar, a leading member of the UPA alliance and the coordination committee.

Pawar met Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) general secretary Prakash Karat on Tuesday night and reportedly offered to provide a written guarantee to the Left allies.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is keen to sign the nuclear safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which will facilitate India to approach the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG), including the US, for seeking nuclear fuel.

The Left however wants the Government to show it the text of the agreement which the Government promised before it went to negotiate with the IAEA November last year. It refuses to allow an agreement it has not seen.

The CPM was more categorical. A member of the Central Committee of the CPM said, “What happened to the guarantee given by the Prime Minister that ‘we will only negotiate with the IAEA but not sign any agreement without Left consent?” The UPA allies should first persuade the Prime Minister to honour his agreement,” he said adding, “There is no question of accepting any fresh counter guarantees.”

The CPM also believes that once the IAEA clears it, “It will be an American pre-decision paper before the NSG. For all you know they can include the clauses that India has resisted in the NPT. At that stage even the Prime Minister cannot do anything.”

The CPM leader stated candidly, “We don’t want a government, dependent on our support to be a pawn in the hands of the US.”

Forward Bloc general secretary Debabrata Biswas who met Karat on Tuesday expressed similar sentiments. He said, “As long as the Left is supporting this government it will not allow operationalisation of this deal.”

Meanwhile the UNPA has also approached the Left assuring its support. On behalf of the UNPA former Telugu Desam MP K Rama Mohan Rao also met Karat and said later, “We are meeting at our senior leader Om Prakash Chautala residence on July 3 to take stock of the IAEA safeguards agreement. After that we will convey our support to the Left.”

Top scientists oppose N-deal
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, June 24
Amid the raging political debate on the Indo-US nuclear deal, senior scientists today came out strongly against any step by the UPA government to proceed to seek the IAEA approval of the safeguards agreement until its implications were debated within the country or at least within the UPA-Left committee.

“At this critical juncture, when the government is about to rush the safeguards agreement to the IAEA without giving its details even to their own UPA-Left committee created specifically for a joint evaluation of the deal, there is a great deal of disquiet among the scientific community at large in this country,’’ they said in a joint statement here.

The statement signed by former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission P.K. Iyengar, former head of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board A. Gopalakrishnan, and former director of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre A.N. Prasad said the agreement should also be discussed with a group of experts, who were not party to the IAEA negotiations. “There are several key safeguards-related issues of importance, for which no one, including the UPA-Left Committee created by the government, has been provided answers,” the scientists said.

They said none of the issues raised by them could be addressed adequately “unless the entire safeguards agreements and its associated papers are made available to the UPA-Left Committee for their evaluation.” They were also of the view that the documents should be made available to a set of independent national experts, who have so far not been part of the government’s negotiations with the IAEA.

The scientists apprehended that once the deal was in place, India's commercial nuclear interactions with the US as well as with any other country would be firmly controlled from Washington via the stipulations of the Hyde Act, 2006, enforced through the stranglehold, which the US retains on the Nuclear Suppliers Group.