With word that the US Senate, scheduled to close on October 6, may wrap its current session in just 10 days, the Bill enabling civil Indo-US nuclear cooperation could be tabled for vote on Friday.

That’s the indication from Washington to a tense New Delhi as a vote this week is necessary to ensure that the entire process is completed before the newly elected Congress takes over after elections in November. Otherwise, it will have to start from scratch.

Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran, the chief interlocutor on the n-deal, is in New York with Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee at the UN General Assembly. He will meet US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns on the margins of the UNGA. It’s learnt that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been in touch with the Senate leadership, including Majority leader Bill Frist, to schedule a vote this session.

While this Congress will meet again in November, a vote then would mean hardly any time for reconciliation of the Bill with the one that has been passed in the House of Representatives.

A vote this week will give time — the whole of October — for the Reconciliation Committee to address the portions with which India has problems and arrive at a common version of the Bill that could be put through an “up and down” vote in both chambers of the Congress.

The problem for India is that US Congressional rules don’t allow for any carry forward to the newly elected Congress.

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