Washington: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said that signing the nuclear deal with US would be 'great contribution' to end India’s isolation from the world nuclear order.
The Prime Minister, in an interview to Charlie Rosetelecast on the Public Broadcast System, hoped that the agreement on the nuclear pact would be finalised.
Asked if he considered separation of India’s civilian and military nuclear facilities under the nuclear deal as a major dividing factor between India and the US, Singh said, “I would not call it a dividing issue. It is an important issue. I recognise the United States government has to sell this deal to the Congress. But we also have a Congress. And I have always told our Parliament, as I mentioned it to the President, this deal is not about India’s strategic programme, what is in discussion is our civilian nuclear programme”.
“We have agreed we will have a credible separation between our strategic programme and the civilian programme. Whatever we have committed in our July 18 statement, in letter and spirit, we will fulfill our obligations,” he said.
Asked if there was a 90 per cent chance of hope of an agreement, Singh replied, ‘I certainly hope that’, adding that an agreement would be a ‘great contribution’ of Bush ‘to ending India’s isolation from the world nuclear order’.
The Prime Minister said he had mentioned to Bush the last time that people of India, particularly the scientists andtechnologists ‘rightly or wrongly nurse the grievance’ against the US--that the United States has joined with other countries to erect a system of controls which deny our country access to global dual use technology, to prevent us from leap frogging in the race for social and economic development’.
“Our Parliament is also sensitive about this issue. I have promised our Parliament that I will do nothing which will hurt India’s strategic programme and our programme is a modest programme,” he said.
Singh emphasised that although India is not a signatory to the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), it abides by most of the guidelines that are in operation like the export of technologies. “India is a unique case and you need to accept to incorporate India into the world nuclear order,” he said.
Singh said he has had extensive dialogue with Bush on energy issue and in different settings like the UN and the meeting of the group of eight at Gleneagles, and at one point the US President had told Singh that if oil prices went up that would not only hurt a country like India but also the US.
“So we must work together to help get India its nuclear security by increasing the availability of nuclear power,” Bush is said to have told Singh.
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