Indian and US officials worked to hammer out the contentious details of a landmark civilian nuclear cooperation pact, a deal touted as the cornerstone of an emerging US-India alliance -- but one proving to be anything but.
Both sides had hoped to finalize the deal before US President George W. Bush visits India next week. Instead, problems concluding the agreement are exposing deep differences in how each side perceives India's role in the world's nuclear community.
US Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns met for a second day on Friday with his Indian counterpart, Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran, to discuss the deal, which was signed in July and faces approval by a skeptical US Congress.
Following the talks, India's Foreign Ministry said in a statement that "there was greater clarity on the issues under discussion," and that "progress has been made."
Burns told reporters that there were issues the two countries have to resolve and that might take some time. He didn't elaborate.
"The two governments are trying very hard to see our way through to the finish line. The deal hasn't been accomplished yet," he said.
Indian and US officials have in recent days expressed doubts about completing the deal before Bush arrives on Wednesday.
Even Bush appears to have given up on that goal -- he said that he now hopes to finalize the deal while in India.
But once completed, he said the deal would help create an international nuclear community where supplier nations, such as the US, provide nuclear fuel to countries "developing civilian nuclear energy programs," like India.
The supplier nations would then handle the reprocessing of spent fuel, he said in a speech on Wednesday to the Asia Society in Washington. Reprocessing can be used to make weapons-grade nuclear material.
But India has nuclear weapons, and has long been able to reprocess its own spent fuel -- in fact, reprocessing is key to its tightly entwined civilian and military atomic programs. India's nuclear establishment also does not consider the country a developing atomic power, even if its nuclear program is modest in size.
"We have had the ability to reprocess since 1965, but Bush is proposing that our right to do so be taken away," said M.R. Srinivasan, a member of the Indian government's Atomic Energy Commission, which has played a support role in the talks on the nuclear pact.
"That is not acceptable, we are not a `developing' nuclear nation," he said.
The pact marks a major policy shift for the US, which imposed sanctions on India in 1998 after it conducted nuclear tests. The restrictions have since been lifted.
Apart from being hailed as a symbol of the growing ties between India and the US, the deal is also considered to be part of a broader effort by Washington and New Delhi to balance China's growing economic and political influence in Asia.
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
A Sherpa guide was found crawling to base camp on Mount Everest a week after he went missing and was reunited with his family, who had given up hope he would return. Dawa Sherpa was last seen on Friday last week descending the mountain, but he did not reach base camp even though his client did. The pair were among the last climbers on the mountain as the climbing season came to an end and the route was dismantled. Dawa was located by a cleaning crew on Thursday morning as he was crawling down the snowy slopes around the Khumbu Icefall, just above
Chinese authorities are snuffing out any remembrance of the deadly 1989 military crackdown on student-led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, which happened 37 years ago yesterday, in a further tightening of a years-long campaign to erase what happened from public memory. Police told relatives of the victims they would not be allowed to visit a cemetery in Beijing on the anniversary of the crackdown, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Relatives of the victims visited the cemetery on the anniversary for more than 30 years to read memorial statements with police keeping watch, Amnesty International said. Hundreds of people,
RSS