Firstly, Indian newspapers had, several months ago, reported not only the fact of the US state department responding to a series of questions from the House committee, but also that the correspondence was being kept from the public domain since some of the language might have been found embarrassing by the Indian government. So why the surprise? On the substantive side, there does not appear to be anything new in the answers provided, whether on testing, on enrichment and reprocessing technology or on dual use items for the ‘design, construction or operation of sensitive nuclear technologies’.

To start with, in an eerie echo of a debate which has taken place in India, a question was posed by the Committee “Does the Administration believe that the nuclear cooperation agreement with India overrides the Hyde Act?” In response, the answer is that “the proposed Agreement is consistent with the legal requirements of both the Hyde Act and the Atomic Energy Act.” There is no direct response to the issue of what overrides which piece of legislation; clearly the last ‘expression of sovereignty of the US will prevail, according to their own Constitution — if the 123 Agreement is approved by the US Congress, that would obviously be the ‘last expression’; till that time, it is the Hyde Act and the Atomic Energy Act, as amended by the Hyde Act.

It is also interesting to note that the administration has repeated the assurance that the agreement is fully consistent with the “legal” requirements of the Hyde Act, not the political or other requirements.

... contd.