New Delhi, July 8
America’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will arrive here on July 18 to co-chair the second Indo-US strategic dialogue with External Affairs Minister S M Krishna the next day.

The dialogue will be held against the backdrop of the recent decision of the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG) to deny access of enrichment and reprocessing (ENR) technologies to countries which are not signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The NSG decision has caused anxiety in India which got a clean waiver from the 46-member nuclear cartel in September 2008 to undertake nuclear commerce.

Official sources here were quite confident that the US would reaffirm its commitment to fully implementing the provisions of the Indo-US civil nuclear deal at the strategic dialogue, notwithstanding the NSG move. The US has already assured India of its help in becoming a member of four multilateral nuclear export regimes -- the NSG, the Wassenaar Arrangement, the Australia Group and the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR).

An official announcement today said the strategic dialogue on July 19 would be preceded by a meeting of the Indo-US high technology cooperation group (HTCG), to be hosted by Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao on July 11-12. Established in 2002, the HTCG is the principal forum for advancing cooperation between the two countries in advanced technologies, including in dual use and strategic trade. The industry component of the meeting would be held on July 11 with the support of chambers on commerce. The third meeting of the Indo-US joint working group on civil space cooperation would be held on July 13-14 in Bangalore.

The first round of the strategic dialogue between the two countries was held in June last year. The second round was earlier scheduled to be held in early April. However, it was postponed in view of the assembly elections in India and developments in West Asia and North Africa.

Clinton is expected to be accompanied by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and other top US officials for the dialogue, which will be the first major interaction between the two countries since President Barack Obama’s visit to India in November last year.