People's Democracy

NSG Waiver: Another  Surrender In The Offing

The Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) issued the following statement on August 23, 2008

THE Draft submitted by the US seeking a waiver on sanctions on nuclear trade for India from the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and the subsequent discussions makes clear that the Hyde Act conditions will be built into this waiver. The draft itself has suggested imposition of several implicit conditions on India like the extension of the voluntary moratorium on nuclear tests to a multilateral undertaking, acceptance of any future changes in NSG Guidelines without having any say at the NSG, agreeing to Additional Protocols in IAEA, embedding the 123 and other agreements in the waiver and constraints on enrichment and reprocessing as well as other dual use technologies by referring to various sections of the Guidelines. All of these were to ensure that the NSG waiver conformed to the Hyde Act conditions. Some of the NSG members have now asked for these conditions to be spelt out explicitly.

Whatever wording the US will make in a revised draft, as in the case of the 123 agreement and the IAEA safeguards agreement, the NSG waiver too will be in conformity with the unacceptable conditionalities of the Hyde Act. The whole attempt is to see that a text of the waiver is so drafted that will allow the Indian government to claim that it has virtually got a clean waiver.

The country has to be warned that the Manmohan Singh government after binding itself fully to the Bush administration on the nuclear deal, will now go forward to further compromise India's interests.