'Indo-US N-Deal almost certainly dead'

LONDON: The Indo-US nuclear deal that remained stalled due to domestic politics in India is almost certainly dead, a senior American official indicated, adding its collapse would be a 'historic blunder' for India.
    
Asked whether it was now impossible to push the deal through in the dying days of Bushs term, Ashley Tellis told a British newspaper: "That is probably correct." Tellis is one of the original architects of the historic deal and is now an adviser to John McCains presidential campaign.
    
"Even if the Indian government were suddenly to turn around and get the IAEA stage completed, there would be no time for the remaining two stages," Tellis told the Financial Times. The deal has been touted by US President George W Bush
as one of his signature foreign policy achievements.
   
Tellis's remarks came even as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said he still continued to hope that "we will make progress in the months that lie ahead" after admitting that "our domestic politics has prevented us from going ahead."
   
After New Delhi secures the approval of the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency(IAEA), the deal would have to be cleared by the 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group before returning to the US Congress for final approvaL.
    
The newspaper noted that US officials continued to hope that Singh would persuade his colleagues including congress president Sonia Gandhi to face down the communist parties that last year threatened to pull the plug on the coalition government if it pushed ahead with the deal.
    
The newspaper said that senior Indian officials, who declined to comment, say privately that their best chances of reviving the deal would come with the election of John McCain, the Republican partys presumptive presidential candidate, who last month stated his strong support for it.
    
Barack Obama, who submitted a poison pill amendment to the original Senate bill in late 2006, is highly ambivalent about it, in the words of an adviser to the Democratic partys presumptive candidate.
    
The newspaper said that the collapse of the deal would jeopardise Indias access to sensitive US technology which could have an impact on defence sales and civil nuclear development.
   
"If you look at the regime between 1974 [when India conducted its first nuclear test] and 1998 [its second] that would give you some idea of what India would be heading back towards, Tellis said. "This would be an historic blunder."