The nuclear pact is about ending India's isolation. Why oppose it? External affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee's statement in Parliament on Monday is a match report on the negotiations between the government and the IAEA as well as a clarification of the government's view of the nuclear deal for the benefit of its allies and the Opposition. He stressed three points. One, talks on an India-specific safeguards agreement with the IAEA are about to be concluded and a happy conclusion would enable the Nuclear Suppliers Group to amend its guidelines and facilitate nuclear trade among member countries and New Delhi. Two, Indo-US civil nuclear commerce will be guided by the bilateral agreement, not by the Hyde Act. Three, the government will try to achieve a broad political consensus on the issue. Mukherjee's statement has come in the wake of a lot of chatter that the Indo-US nuclear deal is as good as dead. That is because there is no sign yet of the consensus that the government is seeking on the issue. The BJP sees the nuclear deal as a political issue to confront the UPA government and nothing else. The Left is blinded by a dead ideology and sees a red herring in improved relations with the US out of fear of

Pranab Aims To Take IAEA Safeguards Pact To US The ides of March may be India's internal deadline for completing the IAEA safeguards agreement on its civilian nuclear facilities. This has reportedly been decided by the government, after the MEA-DAE team returned from Vienna on Sunday with what appears to be the final draft of the agreement. The government's legal brains will now go through the agreement to see if India can "live with' it. This exercise, sources said, should be completed by the middle of this month. The completed Indian safeguards agreement is expected to dovetail into foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee's maiden visit (as foreign minister) to Washington on March 23-25, where he is expected to present this to his counterpart Condoleezza Rice. Politically, sources said, it would make sense for Mukherjee to go to Washington with a concrete document in hand, rather than open himself up to a host of diplomatic harangue. Sources indicated that the crucial UPA-Left meeting will probably be scheduled after his return and after the CPM's party congress scheduled for March 29. This remains the imponderable because it's not yet clear whether the government will take the agreement beyond the Left's veto

The nuclear deal has crawled back into the agenda, triggering fresh confrontation between Congress and the Left and strengthening speculation about early polls. Buoyed by the estimate that it can ride on the goodwill generated by the populist Budget to prolong its tenure at the Centre, Congress on Monday appeared to be getting ready to push the deal again. On a day when officials negotiating with IAEA returned with a draft of the safeguards agreement India needs to sign with the international nuclear watchdog to take the deal forward, the government suddenly upped the ante on the nuclear cooperation agreement with the US. The first sign of new assertiveness came from foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee. Making a statement in the Lok Sabha on foreign policy, he contested the Left's argument that the 123 agreement with the US would render India susceptible to America's domestic laws, like the Hyde Act. Even as this attracted a strong warning from CPM that going ahead with the deal would have "serious consequences' for the government, Congress dropped an even clearer and direct indication of its renewed keenness to push through the deal. Party spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi indicated that in the government's assessment, IAEA had come around to address India's concerns on the draft. "A vast area of divergence has been covered, ironed out in the fifth round of talks,' he said. Though Singhvi

7-POINT DISARMAMENT AGENDA: At Geneva conference, New Delhi calls for 2 multilateral pacts, 2 conventions NEW DELHI, MARCH 2: In anticipation of a Democrat-led US administration pushing for a tighter non-proliferation regime in less than a year's time, India, for the first time after declaring itself a nuclear weapon state, has enunciated a comprehensive seven-point agenda for nuclear disarmament. Listing its agenda of seven concrete proposals at the Conference of Disarmament

Amidst speculation that the government, riding high on

THE CENTRE, which now has the

India has an ambitious plan, the vision 2020, to become one of the most developed and advanced countries of the world. For achievement of Vision 2020, India needs to have development at the rate of 10pc. The country will need a large quantum of energy to run its enormous infrastructures. The present conventional source of energy from the fossil fuel is insufficient to fulfil the future demand of the country. The deposits of the fossil fuel are limited, that too would be consumed in the next 50 years. The fissile element uranium would only be the future source of energy. Uranium is a radioactive fissile element which was named after the planet Uranus by its discoverer Klaproth in the year 1789. In the year 1901, Sir Thomas Holland reported the presence of uranium in Gaya dist and Singhbhumi in Bihar. Unfortunately India has very little deposit of uranium. Nevertheless there is a huge deposit of thorium in Travancore in the seacoast of Kerala. At present thorium cannot be used as nuclear fuel as it requires some scientific processing, hectic researches are going on by the scientists but no dependable method to use thorium has been evolved up till now. It will take many years to develop some process to use thorium as an atomic fuel. But, sooner or later, thorium will become missile element like uranium. India requires uranium and the latest advanced technology in nuclear science which only the US and other advanced countries of the nuclear club can provide. America, on the other hand, has its own post-cold war global foreign policy in which India stands as its natural allay in their assessment. India is going to be the global player in the world economy, next after China and the US. China has a plan to surpass the US in future economic and political scenario and posing a threat to the unipolar status of the super power America. The future nuclear fuel demand of India and the future foreign policy of the US has made the nuclear deal imperative for both big democracies of the world. In this process India and US signed 123 agreement which is a part of the nuclear deal. India needs to have a safeguard agreement with the nuclear watchdog - the IAEA on specific safeguards which is very essential because of the sensibility of the n-deal in order to prevent nuke proliferation. RK Gupta

US lawmakers have said that the nuclear deal with India cannot go through the US Congress if it does not reach there by June. The warning was sounded by a group of influential senators

No, it's not over: PM July 2008 is the very last deadline for the Indo-US nuclear deal to reach the US Congress, according to three US Senators, who met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today. This means that India will have to sew up the India-specific safeguards agreement with the 35-nation IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and obtain the approval of the 45-nation NSG (Nuclear Suppliers Group) before presenting the nuclear deal to the US Congress - and all this will have to be done before July. Or else, the Bush administration will not be able to consider the deal, arguably the centerpiece in Indo-US strategic partnership. The Senators who met Manmohan Singh and national security adviser M.K. Narayanan were John Kerry, Joseph Biden (both Democrats) and Chuck Hagel (Republican). The Senators discussed the entire gamut of Indo-US relations with the Prime Minister, later addressed the media here. The senators were in New Delhi en route from Pakistan where they observed the recent national elections. Biden, who heads the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee, quoted the Prime Minister as saying that the deal was

Atomic point: Dr Anil Kakodkar, Chairman, Atomic Energy Commission and Secretary, Department of Atomic Energy (right), and Dr Anjan Chaki, Director, AMD, at a meeting in Hyderabad on Wednesday.