New Delhi, July 10
External affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee is in an embarrassing position with the government giving the go ahead to the IAEA to circulate the text of the draft India-specific safeguards agreement among the 35 members of the global nuclear watchdog and subsequently making the document public.
Congress managers and senior officials were founding wanting in explaining how some of the lapses, which could have been avoided, occurred.
Everyone preferred to remain tight-lipped even as Mukherjee, considered a man for all seasons in the UPA government, found himself in a piquant situation.
Only on Tuesday, the foreign minister had stated that the government would seek the trust vote in Parliament before approaching the IAEA. He also bluntly told the Left parties that the draft agreement could not be shown to them since it was a privileged document and could not be placed in the public domain. Congress spokesman Manish Tiwari yesterday virtually repeated what Mukherjee said on Tuesday, just hours before the circulation of the draft agreement in Vienna, putting both of them in a tight spot.
What may have perhaps made Mukherjee’s position more awkward is the fact that the IAEA was approached before the government had secured the confidence vote in Parliament.
However, the officials claimed that there was no contradiction between what the government said and what it did. “Where is the contradiction…only the draft has been circulated. It will be taken up by the board of governors (of IAEA) by month end…by then the government would have hopefully secured the vote of confidence,” a senior official said.
Meanwhile, speculation was on in the Congress circles on whether the stock of Mukherjee, who heads almost all important group of ministers (GOM) and is a member of all key party committees, was diminishing.
A pointer, a Congress functionary said, was that Mukherjee alone used to always hold informal meetings with Left leaders on the eve of every meeting of the UPA-Left committee on the Indo-US nuclear deal. However, defence minister A.K. Antony was present at the informal discussions on the eve of the last ‘make or break’ meeting of the panel, raising many an eyebrow in the party.
After the last meeting of the UPA-Left committee ended in a stalemate, Mukherjee announced that it would meet again on July 10 after the PM’s return from his overseas visit. But Manmohan Singh told reporters on July 7 on his way to Japan that the government would go to IAEA ‘very soon’, annoying the Left parties, which immediately made up their mind to end their relationship with the UPA regime.
