Pittsburgh, September 27: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Friday that President Barack Obama had assured him that this week’s UN Security Council resolution, calling for universal adherence to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), would not prevent America from helping India meet its energy needs as a part of the India-US civil nuclear energy deal.
India’s alarm about the fate of the nuclear deal spiked after Obama surprised New Delhi by presiding over a UN Security Council meeting on Thursday seeking to strengthen global commitment to limiting the spread of nuclear weapons.
“We have been assured by the United States that this is not a resolution directed against India,” Singh told reporters at a closing G-20 news conference, in Pittsburgh.
“The US commitment to carrying out its obligations under the civil nuclear agreement which we have signed with the US remains undiluted. We have been assured officially by the US government,” Singh stressed.
Although, Singh didn’t have any formal bilateral meeting with Obama he had plenty of opportunities to seek clarifications and hold the US president to the deal. “I met him last night and today. I discussed some important issues with him,” Singh volunteered.
Singh and former President George Bush forged the landmark civil nuclear energy deal over three years of negotiations. The Bush administration basically got the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) in Vienna to throw the rulebook out of the window and give India, a non-NPT country, an unconditional waiver to trade with its 45 member countries. The move lifted a 34-year ban on nuclear trade with India despite its refusal to sign the NPT.
The deal is seen as a proxy for India-US relations and augurs well for future geostrategic, defense and economic ties, but Indian officials fret that Obama doesn’t have the same enthusiasm for it as Bush. There are niggling concerns the Obama administration will revisit the nuclear deal with India in one form or another once he reverses America’s own stance on the CTBT and accelerates a new treaty on capping fissile material production. The CTBT has lingered in a diplomatic limbo since a Republican-dominated Senate rejected it, but Obama has pledged to now aggressively” pursue ratification.
The CTBT pact requires full government approval by 44 nuclear-capable countries before it can take effect. All but nine of those have ratified. Besides the US, the holdouts among the 44 are China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan.
India opposed the CTBT as it was being negotiated in the UN in 1996, but after testing its own nuclear devices in May 1998, it started adhering to its terms. “India has observed a unilateral and voluntary moratorium and is committed to its continuance. This is spelt out in the Indo-US Joint Statement of 2005,” said Shyam Saran, special envoy to the prime minister.
Saran added; “It is also our conviction that if the world moves categorically towards nuclear disarmament in a credible time-frame, then Indo-US differences over the CTBT would probably recede into the background.”
Whether that means India is intending to work towards signing the treaty in some form remains to be seen. According to analysts, India could use its indispensability to the CTBT regime to get some concessions from the US. They say India may seek access to simulation data from the US if it signs away its own right to carry out nuclear tests. India says it has enough data from the yield of the Pokhran thermonuclear tests but it won’t hurt to have some US help.
–Agencies–