Pranab Mukherjee and Shiv Shankar Menon on board an Air India flight to New York on Friday. (Jay Mandal/On Assignment)

Washington, Oct. 10: A cosy club of Indian and American frequent fliers was broken up today when external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee and US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice operationalised the Indo-US nuclear deal at a ceremony in the state department’s Benjamin Franklin Room.

The ceremony followed the ratification of the so-called 123 Agreement by the cabinet committee on political affairs at its hurriedly convened meeting on Thursday at the residence of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, ahead of Mukherjee’s departure for the US.

Indian and American officials have collectively chalked up hundreds of thousands of airline miles in their frequent flier accounts in the last three years in hectic transcontinental travel not only to negotiate the agreement under Section 123 of the US Atomic Energy Act, but also to make the deal acceptable to the 45 member countries of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).

Frenzied jet-hopping such as the one by foreign secretary Shiv Shankar Menon from Vienna straight to Washington — instead of going home to report to his minister — on the outcome of the NSG meeting in August or Menon’s undercover visit to Madrid earlier for meeting the Americans when the UPA was misleading the Left parties on its intentions on the nuclear deal ended when Mukherjee and Rice sealed the deal today.

So did the Prime Minister’s special envoy Shyam Saran’s hopping flights across half the globe to sell the Indo-US deal to member states of the NSG in direct talks with governments and to strategic communities in locations such as Tokyo.

Indian officials were at hand at NSG meetings in Brasilia in June 2006 and in Cape Town in April 2007. They made a presentation at the group’s meeting in Berlin in May this year.

They went to Vienna on several occasions for NSG meetings and for negotiations with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). For these meetings, Indian officials were drawn not only from the headquarters of the ministry of external affairs, but also from Indian missions in Geneva, Washington and Singapore.

For several meetings, the teams were led by officials of the department of atomic energy, joined by men and women from South Block, and on occasion by commerce ministry officials.

At one point, S. Jaishankar, although based in Singapore as India’s high commissioner, was hardly in the city state because he was the key negotiator for the 123 Agreement, repeatedly the nemesis of his US counterparts when every paragraph in the agreement was under the microscope.

On one occasion, Jaishankar landed in Singapore from India and was on his way home when national security adviser M.K. Narayanan phoned and asked him to return to New Delhi forthwith for a meeting with the Americans who were arriving in the capital the following day.

Once Air India introduced non-stop flights from New Delhi to New York last year, Indian officials preferred that route to save time on their hectic travels to the US for nuclear talks even as they maintained a barrage of visits on other issues to keep up the appearance that Indo-US relations were not hinging on the nuclear deal alone.

At one point, there were so many Indian ministers, MPs and officials on these non-stop flights to New York every week that the then chairman of Air India, V. Thulasidas, issued a blanket rule that no passenger — no matter his rank — should be upgraded.

Wives of officials and ministers benefited from the hectic Indo-US engagement, however. Air India had an interim promotion which allowed full fare economy and business class passengers to bring a companion along on a free ticket. This facility was frequently used by the wives.

Actually, US officials travelled around the globe much more than Indians did in the last three years. Teams of Americans went to NSG states. They made many more trips to Vienna than the Indians and, of course, frequented New Delhi. They also met Indian officials in London, Geneva and other locations.

Unlike in the Indian government, however, frequent flier miles chalked up by US officials on government travel are the property of the state to be used for future official travel without paying for tickets on taxpayer money. American officials cannot claim these frequent flier miles for personal travel.

Of course, implementation of the rule has been lax and there have been many cases where officials here have been caught using such miles for travel on private business.