New Delhi, Dec. 19: India will not give up its right to conduct nuclear tests when it signs the nuclear energy deal with the US, Pranab Mukherjee told the Rajya Sabha today.

The foreign minister stressed that Delhi would negotiate hard to remove extraneous and prescriptive clauses from the bilateral 123 Agreement with Washington that will define civil nuclear trade between the two countries.

Mukherjee faced a tough ask as questions rained on him from all sides, with the MPs worried that India might be giving away too much.

From the CPM’s Sitaram Yechury and Samajwadi Party’s Jaya Bachchan to Independent member P.C. Alexander and nominated member Rahul Bajaj, they all told the government to keep an escape hatch open.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who had taken on the Opposition yesterday in the Lok Sabha, sat through the marathon discussion silently, a victim of toothache.

As the MPs accused the government of mortgaging India’s sovereignty to the US, Mukherjee said this wasn’t the first time he was facing the charge in a long political career.

“I don’t know how many times I have mortgaged India’s sovereignty,” he quipped, citing similar attacks over a patents bill when he was commerce minister in the early 1990s, and on the acceptance of IMF loans when he was finance minister.

Asked why the US waiver bill did not treat India as a nuclear weapons state, Mukherjee said Delhi had not sought the status. He felt the criticism that Washington might set India’s foreign policy was unfair.

On fears that the US might stop fuel supply in the future, the foreign minister said the deal did not block Delhi’s option to go to another country.

Amendments were being made to Nuclear Suppliers Group guidelines so that other countries could have civil nuclear trade with India.

The restriction on reprocessing of spent fuel — which the MPs feared would lead to a stockpile of nuclear waste as was happening in the Tarapur plant — applied only to fuel supplied from America, he explained. There was nothing in the waiver bill to stop India from reprocessing fuel supplied by other countries.