Washington, Oct. 16: It was like a political requiem for the Indo-US nuclear deal which has dominated the relationship between Washington and New Delhi for two years and three months.

None other than Gary Ackerman, a founding member and two-time co-chairman of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans, performed it.

Perhaps ironically, he was addressing a group of visiting Indian MPs, several of whom belong to parties opposed to the deal.

“Do not let the radical few hijack what is in your nation’s best interest,” Ackerman said in an emotional outburst that would have stalled Parliament tomorrow in response if it had been in session.

“I say to my American and Indian friends, in order for progress to be made, courage needs to be shown.”

Ackerman threw away his prepared speech as word drifted in at the lunch in honour of the MPs that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had told Bush in a telephone conversation that “certain difficulties have arisen with respect to the operationalisation” of the nuclear deal.

Speaking extempore because “we have been overtaken by events”, Ackerman told those in charge in New Delhi: “Do not cave in.… The ball is back in your court.”

He furiously lammed into the Left parties. “To those who would try to bully from a minority position, to tell the majority of people what is in their national interests and that if they do not do as that group says, that they are being bullied, are themselves the bullies.”

Ackerman’s bitterness and sense of disappointment, political in nature, was in sharp contrast to the sanguine attitude at the state department, where the pointman for the deal, Nicholas Burns, also met Indian MPs yesterday.

Tom Casey, the department’s deputy spokesman, took a practical view of the agreements to be negotiated with the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Suppliers Group. “Each one of these agreements is complicated. They have got a whole variety of things associated with them. I am not going to try and tell the Indians how to manage their own internal process on this,” Casey said.

“We are going to continue to work on our part and we assume they are going to continue to work on theirs and it (the deal) will be done in a time that is appropriate for both sides.”

The venue for the political requiem held infinite symbolism. It was the large Hall of Flags of the US-India Business Council (USIBC), where many strategy sessions were held — including one attended by US Vice-President Dick Cheney and another by secretary of state Condoleezza Rice — on how to take forward the nuclear deal.

Appropriately, Ackerman had a good word for American multinational corporations who are USIBC members, without whose lobbying the deal would never have got past the US Congress during its first stage.

Aiming his thrust at those who accuse US businesses of self-interest in promoting the deal, he said: “The business people who are among us today — under whose umbrella we assemble today — are not just financial mercenaries. They do have the interests of their peoples in mind. There is money to be made in progress, there is also peace and security to be made in progress, if progress is made the right way.”

Ackerman was joined by several businessmen who spoke of their disappointment over yesterday’s developments.

Michael Gadbaw, vice-president and counsel for General Electric, regretted that “the crowning achievement” in Indo-US relations “hangs in a delicate balance as politics complicates consideration” of the deal.

“From what I can tell of the debate, the party of Jyoti Basu — whom I came to know while he was chief minister of West Bengal and who has done so much for his state — that party has failed to appreciate the importance and significance of this agreement to the future and prosperity of our two countries,” he said.

The atmosphere was so charged that B.J. Panda, the mild-mannered and suave co-chairman of the India-US Forum of Parliamentarians (IUFP) tried to cool the temperature by pointing to other bright spots in New Delhi’s ties with Washington.

The MPs’ team has been put together by the IUFP and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

Trade had doubled and the US is now India’s biggest trading partner, Panda pointed out. It was not a one-issue relationship with Washington, he said.

Polite as he was, Panda was not taking anything lying down. He firmly defended India’s right to determine the nature and content of its ties with Iran. In an implied dig at Washington’s protection of Pakistan, Panda said India was the second biggest contributor to development in Afghanistan after the US. But with Pakistan blocking India’s access to Afghanistan, the only route for Indian supplies to that country was through Iran.

Samajwadi Party’s Shahid Siddiqui came to the defence of the Left parties although he pointed out that he was not one of them. Siddiqui said he shared some of the concerns of the Left about the Hyde Act, adding that India would rather work with China in the interest of regional peace than confront it.

To that extent, he said, there were genuine worries about the implications of the Hyde Act on India’s diplomatic freedom.