Delaying the N-deal will jeopardise its getting through Congress and the notion that India will get something better in a new Democratic administration is misplaced.
WASHINGTON: Delaying the Indo-US nuclear deal will "jeopardise" its getting through Congress and the notion that India will get something better in a new Democratic administration is "misplaced", a senior Indian-American community leader has said.
"For Indian leaders to believe that they can wait for the next US President to get a better deal -- and they are hoping that it will be Senator Hillary Clinton -- need to look at the fact that there were 12 US Senators who voted against the Hyde Bill and they were all Democrats with nine of them chairing the most influential committees in Congress," Ashok Mago, Chairman of the Dallas Based US-India Forum, said.
Mago, who has been in the forefront of lobbying for the passage of the Hyde Act last year, said, "Our leaders in India do not understand the system in the US.
They think the President sends a Bill to Congress and it is approved and done. In this case, the Bill which became the Hyde Act is actually not the one that President Bush sent."
This bill was basically prepared by Tom Lantos (currently Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee), Henry Hyde (former Chairman of the House International Relations Committee), Joseph Biden (current Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) and Bill First (former Senate Majority Leader), he said.
"I don't think that the next President can get anything more than what has already been approved by this Congress, because it is not the President alone who decides but also the Congress," he added.
Appealing to leaders of India to seriously look into the issue, Mago said "It is not only one aspect of this bill. You are looking at hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in India and the number of jobs that it will create and also providing for technology that could be used in other areas."
"This Bill needs to go before the US Congress in early March for everyone thereafter gets into the Presidential elections mode. We are jeopardising approval if we keep delaying it," he said.
Mago argued that the deal is only one aspect of the entire US-India relationship "but a lot of people will be disappointed because they have put in a lot of work... It is one of things that both sides want and if does not happen, it does have a negative impact".
"It is more of a negative impact on the minds of the Indian-Americans, the ones who worked so hard to get the Hyde Act passed. I hope leaders of India realise that this Bill did not happen overnight; that there was a lot of hard work that went into it," he said.
"The choice is whether we would like to continue with all the restrictions that this Bill will remove and add a slow progress and growth in the nuclear area or we go ahead and accept the opportunities," Mago said.
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