Menon, Burns

Washington, Jan. 7: India is engaged in secret nuclear negotiations with the Bush administration, casting aside objections from the Left parties and reservations among the UPA’s own constituents to the Indo-US deal.

Foreign secretary Shiv Shankar Menon secretly met Nicholas Burns, the top US negotiator on the deal, in Madrid in the last week of November, Bush administration officials here told The Telegraph.

The meeting took place even as the joint committee of the UPA and the Left parties was being assured on behalf of the Union cabinet that the panel was fully in the picture on all steps being taken towards implementing the deal.

US officials said the meeting with the foreign secretary took place while Burns was in Madrid from November 27 to 30 as leader of a US delegation to the annual ministerial meeting of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Earlier, in exchanges with the Indian embassy here, Burns had offered to travel to New Delhi to demonstrate the Bush administration’s continued commitment to the deal.

He was also keen to compare detailed notes with Menon on the fate of the US negotiations with the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and the Indian talks with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which had just concluded its board meeting in Vienna.

But New Delhi shot down the idea as it feared that a visit by the high-profile, media-friendly US official would exacerbate the rift with Left parties and create new focus on the UPA’s problems in the run-up to voting in Gujarat.

Two options were then considered: a meeting with Burns in Madrid or later in Paris on December 1 while the US diplomat was in the French capital to discuss with the permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany the text of a new UN Security Council resolution for sanctions on Iran.

It was agreed at the highest levels of the government that a meeting in Paris would be disastrous if word got out since Menon’s trip to France could become associated with western efforts to rein in Iran over its atomic programme.

The rationale in favour of Madrid was that even if the news leaked, the meeting could be disguised as consultations associated with the OSCE’s efforts to strengthen democratic institutions, human rights and election monitoring in Afghanistan.

These issues were on the agenda of the OSCE’s Madrid meeting. Although India is not a member of the OSCE, the organisation’s members have severally acknowledged New Delhi’s role and interest in Afghanistan.

A source in the Intelligence Bureau in New Delhi, which monitors airport movements, confirmed that Menon did travel out of India in the last week of November.

However, his trip to meet Burns was organised in such secrecy that even the two secretaries in the ministry of external affairs, Nalin Surie and N. Ravi, were not told where the foreign secretary was going.

When they discovered by chance about the manner in which the secret trip was put together and its substance, Surie and Ravi were fuming, sources in South Block said.

The Americans kept their part of the bargain to keep the Madrid meeting secret.

However, as a protection in the event of a leak, US officials associated with the deal suddenly began to talk about it once again.

They had been relatively quiet for several months since Prime Minister Manmohan Singh precipitated a political crisis in August in an interview to The Telegraph about the nuclear deal and the Left parties responded in equal measure.

Burns had assured visiting Indian MPs at the height on the crisis that he would not add to New Delhi’s problems by talking about the deal and would also ask David Mulford, the US ambassador in New Delhi, to do the same.

However, on December 3, within days of his meeting with Menon, Burns told reporters in comments that attracted little attention in India that the “123 Agreement” for operationalising the deal was final and could not be reopened.

“That agreement is finished, it is done, it is completed, it just stands to be approved finally by both governments.… I do not foresee it being reopened, by either side. Not by the US and I don’t think by India either.”

Those comments by Burns, who is more forthright than many Bush administration officials, is said to accurately reflect the sum and substance of the Madrid talks, notwithstanding any demands by the Left parties and others in India who are opposed to the nuclear deal.

The following day Mulford joined in urging India in a speech in New Delhi “to move forward to complete the process that President Bush and Prime Minister Singh have delineated.”

External affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee’s statement to PTI last Thursday that the government has “not given up” on the nuclear deal and that “we are working on how we can proceed” can be interpreted as a reference to the secret talks in Madrid. Mukherjee, however, continued to keep Menon’s meeting with Burns heavily under wraps.