No curbs on nuke sovereignty: Rajnath

New Delhi, Sep 8: BJP President Rajnath Singh today said India could not accept a situation where the country's nuclear sovereignty and weaponisation programme was undermined by any international agreement.

Mr Singh's comments come at a time when the Indo-US nuclear deal issue is witnessing Congress, Left and the NDA pursuing different lines which led to disruptions of the proceedings of Parliament for the whole of last week.

The agreement was seeking to supress indigenous nuclear programme and treat India as a 'client state' of the US, and and the BJP, as a national party, was opposed to the accord, Mr Singh told the Organiser, the RSS mouthpiece, in an interview.

Asked if the deal in its present form would make India an energy dependent country with the US holding nuclear keys, the BJP president said, ''No wise country will give this energy supply keys to somebody else and Indian scientists, researchers and industries will be left in the cold.'' Dwelling on the provisions of the Hyde Act, a bone of contention between the Congress and the Left parties, he said no US Presient would be able to bypass it and even if the incumbent President were to push through the deal, there was a certainty about what the moves of the future President would be. Under section 103 (7) of the Hyde Act, the US can withhold and restrict transfer of equipment related to uranium enrichment supply in the event of India conducting a nuclear test.

''I am of the personal view that no US Executive can overrule this Act,'' he said.

He said the BJP was not opposed to India having strategic relationship with the US, but the country should not be barred from reprocessing spent fuel. Like the US wants to have laws to safeguard its interest, India too should have a law to protect its atomic interests, he opined.

UNI