External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee today said India would not accept any “prescriptive conditions” to get an exemption from the Nuclear Suppliers Group to operationalise the Indo-US nuclear deal.
“We have to see what kind of amendments come. Then only we can decide. But we cannot accept prescriptive conditions,” he said while accompanying President Pratibha Patil on her two-day visit to West Bengal.
He was asked about the government’s future course of action in the face of reservations expressed by some countries. Mukherjee said he was briefed by Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon about the developments in Vienna during the two- day meeting of the NSG.
Menon had yesterday described the NSG meet as “constructive and useful” saying “we met a lot of individual delegates of NSC member-countries and had an opportunity to brief them on Thursday.”
He said the exemption to NSG guidelines for nuclear trade would help civil nuclear cooperation and “is a necessary step for cooperation between India and the NSG. We look forward to working with them”.
Sources said differences between India and the NSG countries had been narrowed in a short span of time and New Delhi expected them to shrink further before the next meeting of the grouping here on September 4-5.
Meanwhile, with attempts to get a quick and clean exemption from the NSG not materialising immediately, India and the US are set to work on changes in the draft waiver text in the light of the reservations expressed by some NSG members.
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Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon left this morning for Washington after the two-day NSG meeting here ended inconclusively yesterday with another round scheduled early next month. The NSG is considering India’s case for an exemption to do nuclear commerce with other countries.
Though officials maintained that Menon’s trip to Washington was pre-planned, the significance of the visit is not lost on observers, who feel that he may utilise the occasion to work with the US on how to come out with a waiver that will be acceptable to all without compromising India’s position.
The 45-nation NSG will meet early next month, possibly on September 4-5, to consider the changes, which US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher said are necessary to accommodate the concerns raised by some countries.
Boucher said in Mumbai yesterday that some countries had “objections” and “we need to listen” to them.
“I don’t want to lie to you...I can’t really lie. There might be some changes that we could accept. But we are pushing for a clean text”, he said.
“The US and India will have to sit together and see what we can accommodate and what we can’t. We will have to talk to the other governments involved,” said Boucher.
India is also firm that it wants an unconditional exemption and a language acceptable to it on all issues, including the right to conduct tests.