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US, India to discuss N-power deal

The United States appears willing to widen the scope for its current strategic dialogue with India by agreeing, for the first time, to explore possibilities of co-operation between the two countries in the peaceful use of nuclear power.

A state department official said US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who is visiting New Delhi on November 18 and 19, will discuss the issue with Indian leaders, including President K R Narayanan and Prime Minister I K Gujral.

He said the agenda envisaged a discussion on co-operation in science and technology which was expected to lead to a formal announcement about the establishment of a forum, comprising scientists from the two countries, to give a permanent base to the endeavour.

Though old contentious issues, including Kashmir and nuclear missile proliferation, will figure in her talks with the Indian leaders mainly because of their bearing on the security of the region, official US sources say she would stress on institutionalising US-India relations to insulate them from the vagaries of day-to-day developments.

They said Albright would not visit Kashmir during this trip, despite her great interest in the region where her father Josef Korbel, a diplomat, had served as the US representative in the late 1940s. She would like to visit the valley on some other occasion.

Besides, the Clinton administration has often stated that the US would not interfere in the Kashmir dispute, leaving India and Pakistan free to grapple with the 50-year-old problem, taking into account the wishes of the Kashmiri people.

The US position on Kashmir was clarified further by Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs Karl Inderfurth during a speech at the Asia Society in Washington yesterday. He said there were no instant solutions to long-term problems.

"We cannot impose a solution or mediate in Kashmir, but we can actively support the process aimed at normalising relations," Inderfurth said, in an apparent reference to the Gujral doctrine, the prime objective of which is to improve India's relations with its neighbours.

Inderfurth, who will accompany Albright, also said that the Clinton administration would like to help the two countries help solve problems quietly.

The state department official said the US was interested in keeping the current India-Pakistan dialogue on track, lessen tension between the two countries, and to help improve their contacts in trade and other spheres.

He said the US wanted to support efforts to the Gujral and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharief to take their dialogue from procedural to the substantial stage. Kashmir was an issue, the fact, acknowledged by both countries. They had put it on their agenda but there were difficulties in addressing the issue, he said.

Albright, the first secretary of state to visit the region since 1983, will first go to Pakistan where she will take up with Sharief the problem of cross-border terrorism and Islamabad's import of missiles from China.

The Clinton administration, the state department official said, believed China would stick to its comment of May 1996 that it would not provide any assistance to Pakistan's unsafeguarded nuclear installations. The issue also figured at the Clinton-Jiang summit last month.

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