New Delhi, July 11
The Bharatiya Janata Party and the four Left parties have separately rejected the text of the nuclear safeguards agreement the Government has circulated among the members of the board of governors of the IAEA.
Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) general secretary Prakash Karat said here on Friday, “It is clear the text was hidden from the Left parties and the Indian people to suppress the fact that India is about to bind its entire civilian nuclear energy programme into the IAEA safeguards in perpetuity without getting concrete assurances for uninterrupted fuel supply, right to build strategic reserves and right to take corrective steps in case fuel supplies are stopped.”
Karat asked, “The key question is: how to ensure that once India’s civilian reactors go under safeguards in perpetuity, the country would not be blackmailed by withholding nuclear fuel supplies, as the United States did in Tarapore after Pokharan-I?”
He demanded to know from the government, “What are the corrective steps India can take if fuel supplies are interrupted by the US/NSG countries?
“What are the conditions that India must fulfil if the corrective steps are to be put in operation?”
BJP spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad also said, “Contrary to what was stated by the government this safeguards agreement is not India specific.” He also felt that the text does not guarantee any supply of nuclear fuel in perpetuity.
He said this text does not recognise India as a nuclear state, least of all a nation possessing nuclear weapons. “We have been treated as any routine non-nuclear state,” Prasad lamented.
