Vienna, March 12: Their ears well tuned to the political brinkmanship over the nuclear deal in New Delhi, top IAEA bureaucrats believe there is still “good enough time” for the safeguards agreement to be taken to its logical end.

“Even if the Americans have set a June deadline, there is enough time. The agreement between the IAEA and India is done and drafted; what is required from here now is a half-day session of the IAEA board of governors to put its seal on it,” one of them said.

They were speaking to The Telegraph on condition of anonymity at the IAEA headquarters located in the glitzy Vienna International Centre by the Danube river.

The IAEA board of governors isn’t scheduled to meet now until the first week of June but sources in the agency said a meeting could be called at 48 hours’ notice. “It is not unusual for such a session to be called,” a source said, adding: “We only need to give enough time for board members resident outside Vienna to arrive.”

The IAEA board of governors has just concluded its most recent meeting and there is some disappointment here that it could not take up the Indian agreement for approval because of delays in New Delhi.

IAEA sources would not comment on the sharp differences over the deal in India, but they are keen to see the safeguards agreement through.

Without revealing any details of the agreement, a source said: “This is one of the best agreements we have had, it was achieved after very hard and detailed negotiations. It’s more comprehensive than the previous ones and could well become the blueprint for all such future agreements.”

IAEA chairman Muhammad El Baradei has himself been a strong advocate of both the safeguards agreement and the civilian nuclear deal, having stated several times that it will end India’s nuclear isolation and “become a trigger to liberate India from restrictions imposed by nuclear suppliers”.

On a visit to India last October, the IAEA chief had made it clear, though, that he was not necessarily advocating the Indo-US nuclear deal, only “batting as a friend of India”.

Arguing that he was for India getting access to nuclear fuel, he had said he wanted to see India “regularised and integrated as a full partner of the nuclear body” as it “cannot be an outsider in efforts to eliminate all forms of nuclear weapons”.

The safeguards agreement — the 66th between the IAEA and individual nations — is slated to be placed before the UPA-Left committee on March 17. That meeting will probably determine both the future of the nuclear deal and the prospect of premature elections.

Should the government decide to go ahead with the nuclear deal, the next stage would be to seek approval from the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), which will next meet in Vienna on May 19.

It is expected that India’s case will come in for some hard scrutiny at the NSG. Not only because some of the Scandanavian countries have reservations, but also because the NSG is currently chaired by a man believed to be an anti-nuclear hawk. He is the South African ambassador to Austria, Abdul Samad Minty, known in diplomatic circles here as “the God of non-proliferation”.

“South Africa, to begin with, is extremely proud to have given up its nuclear options and wants other nations to follow suit, and Minty, in particular, could be a hard man to bargain with,” a diplomatic source here said.

They quickly added, though, that if the US is as keen on the 123 Agreement with India as it appears, it will “pull its vast influence” over the NSG. They don’t even see “too much of a problem” with scheduling a meeting of the NSG beyond or before May 19, should the need arise.