India says 'gaps' in finalisation of N-deal no major problem

WASHINGTON: The "gaps" in finalisation of the civil nuclear deal with the US do not pose any major problem, India has said but cautioned against any interference with its strategic programme as it would "undermine" the agreement.

Amid fresh round of parleys on the 123 agreement, India's key negotiator S Jai Shankar made it clear that the Indo-US civil nuclear deal is not an arms control agreement or a trade off for New Delhi's strategic programme.

"Basically, I do not think there are many problems in the gaps. The issue is how you take broad political principles and make them into legal language," Jai Shankar, Indian High Commissioner to Singapore, said at the Carnegie Endowment Conference International Non-proliferation Conference here.

While translating the March 2006 and the July 2005 understandings into the 123 agreement, the two sides are working on a legal document with "a worst case contingency approach", said Jai Shankar, former Joint Secretary (Americas) in the External Affairs Ministry who has been involved in the negotiations since the start.

"You have to find very exacting, very rigorous language to reflect that. And that is where the challenge lies," he said.

Emphasising that India's strategic programme is clearly outside the purview of the Indo-US understanding, Jai Shankar said "any attempts to intrude into that domain or determine externally what India regards as its national prerogative would obviously undermine the basis of the agreement."

Jai Shankar is officially here for the Carnegie Conference but privately he is said to be carrying on the dialogue on the 123 agreement with senior officials of the Bush administration.

He underlined that the Indo-US understanding focuses exclusively on civil nuclear energy cooperation and New Delhi has no expectation that the agreement would contribute to its weapons programme.

"We must be equally clear that this is not an armscontrol agreement," he said, adding "extreme and one-side interpretations of commitments cannot reasonably become a yardstick for judgement."

Pointing to suggestions that the US negotiators could have demanded tougher conditions, including a moratorium on fissile material production, the Indian official said "in that situation, there would have been no agreement."

Jai Shankar made it clear that New Delhi was looking fora "clean and straightforward" exemption to the NSG guidelines on enrichment and reprocessing.

"Our understanding with the US is that we will work withit not to transfer enrichment or reprocessing technologies to states that don't have, the operative part is don't have. We have been reprocessing since 1964 and we have been enriching for at least about ten years," Jai Shankar said.

He stressed that everything India was willing to do was to be covered by the July 18 statement. "There is no commitment outside that statement. We frankly don't envisage anything outside that statement," he said.