Pranab returns from US to welcome Rice

NEW DELHI: Foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee returned from New York on Friday, just in time to lay out a red carpet for US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice who flies in on Saturday.

Mukherjee and Rice could well have signed the India-US civil nuclear co operation agreement while he was in New York, but decided to do so in the Indian capital, possibly in Hyderabad House.

Rice will also call on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and meet leader of the opposition LK Advani. Her meeting with Advani will be significant, considering that the BJP has been a bitter critic of the nuclear deal. Ironically, it was the BJP coalition led by former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee that set the ball rolling on the nuclear negotiations between India and the US.

But the Opposition is critical of the voluntary moratorium on future testing. Pranab Mukherjee tried to clear the air, “...India has the right to test, others have the right to react. I have already stated that we have voluntarily declared moratorium on further tests and will continue to bind ourselves by this book,” he said. But he made it clear that: “We would not like to convert this voluntary moratorium into a treaty-bound obligation. That position has been maintained.”
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