Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s chopper about to land at the defence ministry helipad in Colombo on Friday. Singh, who is in Sri Lanka for the Saarc summit, is expected to meet his Pakistani counterpart on Saturday. Picture by Jay Mandal/On Assignment See Nation

Washington, Aug. 1: The board of governors of the International Atomic Energy (IAEA) was today nudged into approving a safeguards agreement with India by consensus only after the IAEA’s director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei, assured Pakistan on record that Islamabad could also keep its weapons programme and sign a similar pact with the UN’s nuclear watchdog.

ElBaradei’s assurance was couched in diplomatic nuance, but it was enough to persuade Mohammad Shahbaz, Pakistan’s permanent representative to the IAEA, not to press his opposition to the India-specific safeguards agreement that was elaborately outlined in his four-page letter to IAEA governors days after today’s board meeting was formally summoned in the third week of July.

“Such an ‘umbrella’ approach”, that produced the safeguards agreement with India “could also be used for the conclusion of other 66-type safeguards agreements”, ElBaradei assured Pakistan today in his opening statement to the board of governors. The figure 66 is a reference to the IAEA’s information circular 66 (INFCIRC-66), the basis for safeguards in a non-nuclear weapon state — and from today in nuclear weapon states which, like India, have not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The director-general, who has a reputation for diplomatic finessing that was in spectacular evidence in his disagreements with the US in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, did not name Pakistan in his address to the board in Vienna.

But the implication of this one sentence in his speech was that Pakistan also had the right to separate its weapons programme from any civilian programme for nuclear energy — like India — and sign a similar safeguards agreement with the IAEA.

Before today’s meeting, ElBaradei sent one of his aides, Vilmos Cserveny, the director of the IAEA Office of External Relations and Policy Co-ordination, to Shahbaz.

Sources at the IAEA said Cserveny briefed the Pakistani ambassador in plain language what the director-general could not put more bluntly lest it reinforced worries among hard core non-proliferationists on the IAEA board, who already had reservations about ‘umbrella’ agreements such as India’s.

ElBaradei told reporters after the board meeting that “I have always maintained that if we were to move forward toward... a world free from nuclear weapons, that dialogue has to be universal and inclusive”.

He then assured Islamabad that “we cannot exclude from that debate India or Pakistan or Israel -- the three countries who remain outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty”.

For New Delhi, a victory that was as significant as the approval of the safeguards agreement today was in ElBaradei’s diplomatic nuancing elsewhere in his statement.

“Finally, I should note that India and the IAEA have already begun discussions on an additional protocol to the draft safeguards agreement,” ElBaradei said at the end of his speech.

It is India’s contention that it will sign AN additional protocol to the safeguards agreement, not THE additional protocol, the standard model which has been approved by the board of the global nuclear watchdog for 125 countries.

AN additional protocol is a term, which India’s ambassador to the US, Ronen Sen, had slipped into the joint statement by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US President George W. Bush on July 18, 2005, just before its final draft was approved, insuring India’s nuclear programme against surprise, intrusive inspections.

By acknowledging today that India will not sign THE model IAEA protocol that applies to non-nuclear weapon states, ElBaradei has set at rest speculation about the next step in the operationalisation of the nuclear deal and nipped in the bud controversies that could have derailed negotiations on the protocol that have already begun in Vienna.

The setting for today’s deliberations of the board was somewhat bizarre from an Indian point of view. Everyone of the IAEA governors trooped past a bust of Homi Bhabha, the father of India’s nuclear programme, that was at the entrance to the room in which they met to approve the India-specific agreement.

But the meeting was not as much of a smooth affair as India’s permanent representative to the IAEA, Saurabh Kumar, had sought to assure South Block that it would be.

Contrary to earlier expectations that the Board would wrap up its approval in the morning itself, the Governors had to reconvene for a second, post-lunch session to hear out those who had reservations about certain provisions of the Agreeement with India.

At the end of the day, there were worrying signals for India that the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) may only convene towards the end of the third week of August and not within 10 days as the US has been lobbying for.

That may well upset the Bush administration’s time-table for sending the nuclear deal back to the US Congress for final approval in early September, especially if the NSG, which must change its rules for global nuclear commerce, decides that it wants a second meeting to take a decision.