Kakodkar calls NSG guidelines betrayal, Yashwant says PM misled Parliament

NEW DELHI: Anil Kakodkar, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and one of the key negotiators of the Indo-US nuclear deal, has said the decision of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, or NSG, to ban the transfer of sensitive enrichment and reprocessing technologies, or ENR, to non-NPT states was a “betrayal”.

Although the possibility of any country giving India ENR technologies was negligible, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the government have been maintaining that there won’t be any bar on India.

The Opposition, which used the issue to target the prime minister, said Kakodkar and others should not term it as a betrayal by the Nuclear Suppliers Group. “The people of India have been betrayed by the prime minister. It was clear all along that the transfer of ENR technologies was subject to a separate agreement and contingent upon India setting up a separate facility to reprocess the spent fuel of imported reactors,” former foreign minister Yashwant Sinha said.

Sinha said that his party representatives have been maintaining that the government was not forthcoming on the issue inside and outside Parliament. “The Hyde Act was clear that it will not permit non-NPT countries to access ENR technologies. The 123 agreement had said that a separate agreement was needed for the purpose. But the government and the prime minister kept on telling Parliament that it was not the case. We have been saying that there was no clear cut assurance from the US and the waiver that India got from the NSG was not a clean one. Our diplomacy should have been at work over the last two years to prevent the NSG from coming out with its latest guidelines.”

The latest guidelines have said that ENT technologies can be sold to only an NPT member. This would mean that countries that remain outside it, such as India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan, cannot access technology. According to reports, Kakodkar has for the past six months been warning the government about the move to keep technology out of bounds for India. These reports will strengthen the claim of Sinha that the government here did not do enough to prevent it.