New Delhi
19 November 2007
Barely 72 hours after the Left parties allowed the UPA Government
to hold talks with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Atomic Energy
Commission Chairman Dr Anil Kakodkar is set to travel to Vienna for negotiating a
safeguards agreement with IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei and his team.
Department of Atomic Energy's Strategic Planning Group Director Ravi B Grover will
accompany him.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh sought to downplay New Delhi's urgency. "We are just
going there, we will discuss," he told reporters on the sidelines of a function held here to
present the Indira Gandhi Prize to Prof Wangari M Maathai of Kenya. Prof Maathai is an
environmental activist who became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize
in 2004. "We are going to IAEA, let us see," he said when asked whether any timeframe
has been fixed for the negotiations.
Foreign Secretary Shivshankar amplified by saying that India will talk to the IAEA "very
soon." He was evasive about how much time the safeguards negotiations will take. "I
don't want to guess what's going to happen," is all he would say. "There is no timeline to
be reworked .... For us the issue is to actually go out and we've always said the next
step is to do a India specific IAEA safeguards agreement which is what we are about to
do and we will now do. After that it then has to go to subsequent stages before we start
hoping [about] civil nuclear cooperation with the rest of the world including with the US,"
he told a reporter who wanted to know if the timeline for operationallsing the nuclear deal
has been revised.
To a question whether India needs only to freeze the text of the IAEA safeguards
agreement for the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) to consider an India-specific
exemption, Mr Menon shot back: "How does it matter? Frankly, these are levels of
detail which we will work our way through as we come to [it.] I don't see how it
contributes very much right now to say look this is where we will dot the i's and cross
the t's. We will work it through."
To another question whether the need to bring the IAEA text back to the UPA-Left
committee is a constraint, Mr Menon replied in the negative. "It is a normal process in
any negotiation and this is an unprecedented negotiation. I don't think anyone has any
experience, certainly among ourselves, [of] doing it. We will try to build as broad a
consensus within India for a major step like this." He asserted that building of
consensus at home and abroad are necessary. "I don't see one as being a constraint on
the other. In fact I think both are necessary and you need to do both. So I'd rather look at
it positively," he added.
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