Menon to visit Washington to iron out differences over nuke deal

By Staff
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Google Oneindia News

Washington, Apr 21 (UNI) Foreign Secretary Shiv Shanker Menon is arriving here on a two-day visit on April 30 in an apparent effort to break the deadlock in the negotiations on the US-India civilian nuclear agreement.

The visit by top Indian diplomat comes after the ''failure'' of the experts of the two countries, who met in Cape Town, South Africa, early this week, to resolve outstanding differences.

Mr Menon will meet Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns and other US officials.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, who made the announcement yesterday, said, ''There were a series of discussions at the expert level in Cape Town and those discussions moved forward, but they did not yield -- quite yield the results that we had hoped for.'' The spokesman did not give details of the Indian demands that had resulted in the stalemate in the negotiations but said, they were ''suggesting solutions that would require us to change our laws, and we are not going to do that.'' ''We are not willing to consider at this point any further changes to our laws,'' he said.

Indications are that the differences are over India's insistence on retaining the right to conduct nuclear tests in future.

Mr McCormack said, ''They (Burns and Menon) are going to talk broadly about US-India relations, but most specifically, they are going to discuss the civilian nuclear deal, and the state of the negotiations,'' Mr McCormack said.

''There is probably some frustration on the part of the administration as well as the Congress on the pace of these negotiations,'' he added, but clarified that ''nobody is questioning the Indian Government'sgoodwill and good faith in this regard and it is a useful opportunity to bump up the level of discussions to take stock of where we are right now, so you have essentially a political-level discussion as opposed to just the experts-level discussion and they are going to explore ways that we can energise the discussion so that we can get this done.'' ''We still have faith that we are going to be able to get this agreement done and we believe that the Indian Government is committed to that, but we are at a stage in these particular negotiations where we think we need to raise the level of dialogue to a political level in order to move it forward,'' he said.

When asked if he believed that all hope is not lost, the spokesman said, ''No, I would not put it quite as that -- you know, in fact, I would put it in the positive. I would say that we believe that these negotiations will ultimately yield an agreement that will allow us to move forward and fully implement the deal previously.'' Asked whether the US has any deadline for settling the issue, he, said, ''Well, we hope to move it forward as quickly as we possibly can, but there are certain realities of the legislative calendar here. This Administration has about 20 months left in office, so we would very much like to conclude this agreement in the Bush Administration. President Bush has been responsible for fundamentally changing the -- at least on the US side, the US-India relationship.'' UNI

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