Dr Singh briefs BJP leaders about Indo-US N-deal

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday assured the Bharatiya Janata Party that India's strategic programme would not be impacted by the nuclear deal with the US but the opposition party maintained that its apprehensions have not been allayed completely.

The assurance was given to a delegation of top BJP leaders led by former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee during a two-hour meeting during which Singh apprised them of the salient features of the 123 agreement reached in Washington last week.

"Our apprehensions have not been allayed completely," former External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha, told reporters after the meeting at the prime minister's residence in New Delhi but did not elaborate.

"We have no reason to distrust him, but we would like to first go through the text of the draft agreement," he said.

"The text of the agreement is clearly frozen. Neither India nor the US can now make any changes in it. But they (the government) have not shared with us the text of the agreement. They tried to share only the main elements of the agreement," he said.

Sinha said the BJP delegation told the prime minister that in the absence of the text "to which we are not privy at this stage, it will be difficult for us to respond in detail to the provisions of the bilateral agreement".

During the meeting, the prime minister told the BJP delegation that India's concerns had been adequately addressed in the 123 agreement reached in Washington last week. The agreement was approved on Wednesday at a joint meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs and the Cabinet Committee on Security.

Besides Vajpayee and Sinha, the delegation included former Union ministers Jaswant Singh and Arun Shourie and BJP chief Rajnath Singh. Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha L K Advani is away on a trip to Singapore.

External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee, National Security Advisor M K Narayanan, Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon and Atomic Energy Commission chief Anil Kakodar were also present.

The BJP, which has been opposing the pact, has been demanding the government take the Opposition into confidence on the progress in the agreement.

In a statement on July 6, Vajpayee said no bilateral agreement with the US should be concluded on this issue till Parliament has had a chance to discuss it thoroughly.

"Once the nuclear deal comes into effect, (America's) Hyde Act will ensure that India loses forever its option of conducting a nuclear weapons test, even if any other country tests," the former prime minister had warned.