Washington, July 3: The director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, has told his associates and governors of the nuclear watchdog in Vienna that he will not go out on a limb to rush the nuclear safeguards agreement with India through the agency’s board.

Sources in Vienna who spoke to The Telegraph during the last two days, as the IAEA gears up to consider the safeguards, described the director general as “supportive” of the process that the UPA government now appears ready to initiate among the agency’s board of governors.

But in private conversations, ElBaradei is emphasising that the safeguards agreement is not his initiative — but New Delhi’s — and that the IAEA board must consider it on merits, sources said.

This raises a big question mark over the timetable for approval of the agreement that New Delhi has worked out with the IAEA secretariat.

If the agency’s board members decide to drag their feet on approving the safeguards pact and pick holes in the “India-specificness” of the agreement, the delay may upset the schedule that the Manmohan Singh government and the Bush administration are working out to get the so-called 123 Agreement for operationalising the nuclear deal to be ratified by the US Congress during its current term.

After clearing the IAEA board, approval of the Nuclear Suppliers Group for nuclear commerce with India has to be gained before the 123 Agreement goes to Capitol Hill.

Sources in Vienna said that notwithstanding the Prime Minister’s canniness in outwitting the Leftists in their opposition to the deal with the US, South Block botched up the effort to make progress on the NSG’s own timetable.

The ministry of external affairs asked India’s ambassador in Berlin, Meera Shankar, to meet the NSG members who had gathered in the German capital at the end of May, but tied her hands in sharing any information about the IAEA negotiations with them.

Because it was an open secret in Vienna by then that New Delhi had successfully negotiated a safeguards agreement with the IAEA, Shankar’s position that the safeguards agreement was not yet ready upset NSG’s core members during the Berlin meeting.

In Vienna itself, not a single member of the IAEA’s board of governors has yet seen the draft of the agreement with India.

The secrecy displayed by the government in not sharing the draft pact with members of the UPA-Left committee was replicated by the Indian Mission to UN organisations in Vienna.

As a result, only members of the IAEA secretariat are privy to what is in the safeguards agreement.

ElBaradei is expected to gauge the mood among the board of governors before making up his mind on how much to push for the agreement’s speedy approval.

His objective will be to maintain an atmosphere that is conducive to his smooth functioning: ElBaradei will, therefore, calibrate his own support for India depending on what each governor says and will not commit hara kiri that New Delhi appears to be taking for granted.

A European diplomat in Washington, who came here from the non-proliferation division of his foreign ministry and has dealt for many years with the IAEA, said the governors are likely to look at any gains for the IAEA’s mandate from the safeguards agreement before approving it.

If some of the governors feel that India has got away with everything by staying out of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and yet by being a nuclear weapons state outside NPT’s definitions, they may question the pact minutely, thus providing a windfall delay for Prakash Karat and upsetting Washington’s calendar for operationalising the nuclear deal.