INDIA/US: Lawmaker's Disclosure May Torpedo Nuke Deal - Analysis by Praful Bidwai

Chances of the United States-India nuclear deal being completed have greatly receded with the release by a key U.S. lawmaker of a so-far-secret Bush administration document which says Washington will not sell sensitive nuclear technologies to India and will terminate nuclear commerce with it if India conducts a test. The disclosures by Congressman Howard L. Berman, who is a Democrat from California and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC), have rattled the Indian government and precipitated a major domestic political crisis. The document, a 26-page response by the U.S. to 45 questions raised last October by Berman's predecessor on the HFAC, the late Tom Lantos, dates back to this past January. It was made public just two days before the Nuclear Suppliers' Group began its meeting Thursday in Vienna to consider granting a special exemption to India from its nuclear trade rules. The NSG, a private arrangement created soon after India's first nuclear test in 1974, is badly divided on the waiver, and failed to clear at its first meeting on the India issue two weeks ago. "It would be a miracle if the NSG now grants India the 'clean and unconditional' exemption that New Delhi insists on," says Sukla Sen, a peace activist and a member of the national coordination committee of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace, a conglomerate of more than 250 Indian peace groups, which opposes the deal on the ground that itgoes against the objective of nuclear disarmament and preventing the spread of nuclear wepaons.