NEW DELHI: Describing India's bid to gain the NSG waiver as "another surrender", the CPI(M) said on Sunday that its fight against the Indo-US nuclear deal was not over and it would work now to see a new government in power which would terminate the 123 Agreement.
"Our political battle is here and not in Vienna or Washington. Earlier we withdrew support on this issue and we are now fighting against this ruling coalition. The struggle to rescind or reverse this deal is agreement is not over.
"After the next elections, our goal will be to see that the new government take step to terminate the 123 Agreement. ... We will work for this," CPI(M) General Secretary Prakash Karat said here.
He said his party had told the Congress to take the people's mandate before going ahead with operationalising the deal, for which the UPA Government has "converted its voluntary moratorium on nuclear testing into a multi-lateral commitment".
India would not get any better terms from any other country supplying nuclear fuel or reactors as all of them would now align with the 123 Agreement, Karat said.
Maintaining that the NSG waiver was "neither clean nor unconditional", Karat said it reflected the "continuous concessions" that India has made on the nuclear issue.
"Starting from the joint statement of July 18, 2005, India has given in steadily to US pressure, starting with the 123 Agreement, the IAEA Safeguard and now finally the NSG."
He said all these steps to get the waiver from an organisation (NSG), set up by the US itself, were in conformity with the provisions of the Hyde Act.
Besides, the government had also entered into the Defence Framework agreement and gave commitments to the US on economic policy as quid pro quo, thereby entering into a strategic alliance with Washington, the CPI(M) leader said.
Observing that the draft waiver had undergone three revisions, he said in the final revision, India had "accepted restrictions on transfer of sensitive technology, including those for reprocessing and enrichment".
Through this, "India is now fully a party to the non- proliferation regime, which it has always held to be discriminatory and therefore unstable. Like all other nuclear weapon states, India will henceforth pay only lip service to the disarmament agenda," Karat said.
Referring to External Affairs Pranab Mukherjee's statement on Friday, he said India has now committed itself to aligning with international efforts to limit the spread of enrichment and reprocessing technologies to states who do not have them".
This, he said, was "an obvious reference to Iran and it committed India to join the US efforts to deny Iran the fuel cycle."
