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Senate Vote on India Deal Not Expected Before Recess By David Ruppe WASHINGTON — Despite encouragement by the White House, the U.S. Senate is not likely to vote before its summer recess on a key step that would enable controversial U.S. nuclear trade with India, a senior U.S. senator said yesterday (see GSN, July 11). “No. I hope after that,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) told reporters following a speech to an Indian lobby group, according to the Press Trust of India. Spokesman Andy Fisher today confirmed that Lugar does not believe the legislation, which the senator co-sponsored with Senator Joseph Biden (D-Del.), would be voted on before the Senate goes into recess during the first week of August. “Given appropriation bills scheduled for activity, it is apparent that the bill will not come up in the next two weeks,” he wrote in an e-mail message. Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Richard Boucher said during a press briefing Monday, “We look forward to seeing votes in the House and the Senate, maybe this month. I think the House will be acting, perhaps in the next week, and we hope the Senate will as well.” The scheduled congressional legislative period after the recess, beginning Sept. 5, is expected to be abbreviated to free members to campaign for the November elections. That places congressional approval of the legislation this year in jeopardy. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) recently said he planned to end the Senate’s session before October, which would be unusually early. The proposed legislation, approved by House and Senate committees last month, would waive for India decades-old nuclear export control restrictions. Congress approved the controls, which bar nuclear exports to countries that have unsafeguarded nuclear facilities or that test nuclear weapons, in 1979 in response to India’s first nuclear test in 1974. That device used plutonium device produced by a Canadian reactor and allegedly U.S. heavy water. India conducted five more tests in 1998. Any specific trade arrangement would require further approval by Congress, according to the proposed legislation. The Bush administration is said to be negotiating such a deal. The proposed legislation, Lugar said at the event, “presents a set of issues which are difficult for many in the Parliament in India to debate and they certainly have been very difficult for members of our Senate and House of Representatives to resolve.” He attributed the difficulty in part to efforts to address concerns by “very, very vigorous persons who I respect in the nonproliferation community.” Though prized by administration officials and the Indian-American community, the proposed legislation is “simply another hazardous issue for the leadership in the House and the Senate to try to determine how debate time will be found, how majorities sufficient to override filibusters or other parliamentary objections can be found,” Lugar said. U.S. Ambassador to India David Mulford reportedly said this week that Indian leaders were unhappy about some changes the House and Senate foreign affairs committees made to the waiver legislation proposed by the administration. He did not elaborate. Indian politicians and commentators have reportedly criticized inclusion of a nonbinding policy objective in the House bill of “India’s full and active participation with the U.S. to dissuade, isolate, and, if necessary, sanction and contain Iran for its efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction.” Many U.S. analysts believe India has a cooperative military relationship with Iran. Lugar told the Indian American Friendship Council gathering in the room of the Senate Hart Building that the U.S. Congress needed to amend the original deal as proposed by the Bush administration, to address nuclear nonproliferation concerns. Otherwise, “Congress would have left it.” “There was a feeling that the whole idea of nuclear proliferation in this world is taking a very bad turn,” he said, citing North Korea and Iran, but also “Japanese statesmen” and “South Koreans” who have suggested their countries might build nuclear weapons. There are a number of elements of the legislation that the administration might seek to change, such as a requirement for monitoring U.S. nuclear transfers and restrictions on exports of uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing technology, said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. “If the administration attempts to water down the bills coming out of these two committees which in our view are already too weak, they will risk losing support from key members who worked extremely hard to cobble together the compromise that each bill represents,” Kimball said. At a dinner banquet hosted by the Indian organization last night, Representative Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.) said he was optimistic the House would approve the legislation as soon as next week. “We are on the verge of a tremendous policy breakthrough,” he said. “Keep the wind in our sails for the vote next week, and we’ll see.” GSN reporter Jon Fox contributed to this report.
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