WASHINGTON, Dec 10: India did not get all it wanted from the nuclear deal as the outgoing US Congress has retained some of the conditions New Delhi had described as “deal-killers.”

On Saturday, the 109th Congress reconciled the House and Senate versions of the nuclear bill and approved the final version with an overwhelming margin of 330-59 votes. Before the reconciliation session, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sent a letter to Senator Richard Lugar, the outgoing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, conveying India’s objections to both the House and Senate versions. Contents of the letter, published in the US media, show that she urged the lawmakers to remove objectionable conditions from the final version because India viewed them as “deal-breakers.”

But a review of the Henry J. Hyde United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of 2006, as the final version is officially known, shows that some of the conditions that India found objectionable are still there. In New Delhi, opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, which ruled the country between 1998 and 2004, also noted these conditions and described them as “humiliating.”

A BJP statement said the bill did not deliver full civil nuclear cooperation, imposed "rigorous" assessment obligations, failed to guarantee uninterrupted fuel supplies for civilian reactors and prevented India from reprocessing spent fuel. It also banned future nuclear tests and rendered the weapons’ programme "subject to intrusive US scrutiny".

India was particularly upset about a provision urging the US president to lobby against nuclear fuel supplies to India if Washington terminates nuclear cooperation with New Delhi. Ms Rice suggested changing the wording to say that the United States "should not seek to facilitate or encourage the continuation of nuclear exports to India" by others if the US ends its exports.

The Congress rejected her suggestion. Statements of Policy, Section 103 (a) (6) states that the US shall "seek to prevent the transfer to a country of nuclear equipment, materials or technology from other participating governments in the Nuclear Suppliers Group or from any other source" if the US terminates its exports under the US-India Act or any other US law.

New Delhi also had objected to the bill's suggestion that India could not receive US assistance for enrichment, reprocessing and heavy water production.

The final version kept this restriction, although it replaced the word "prohibition" from the title of the relevant clause with "exports, re-exports, transfers and re-transfers to India related to enrichment." The final version re-framed the clause to highlight what is permissible rather than what is not. Thus, 104 (d)(4), like the earlier Senate Bill, allows the sale of such equipment only to multilateral or bilateral facilities on Indian soil intended to provide "alternatives to national fuel cycle capabilities" or a "proliferation resistant fuel cycle.”

India had also objected to the requirement that the Indian safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency should have already entered into force before the US lifts its restrictions on nuclear commerce with New Delhi.

Section 104 (b) (2) of the final version, however, stipulates that "all legal steps prior to signature" by India and the IAEA must have been completed, which means approval by the IAEA Board must have been secured. This obviously requires India to place the safeguards even before the US completes all its legal steps to allow nuclear commerce.

India had also objected to the provision that nuclear cooperation would be automatically terminated if the country violated the guidelines of the NSG or Missile Technology Control Regime. Ms Rice had urged lawmakers to modify it into a statement of policy or a reporting provision since India considered it a case of "moving the goalposts."

The final version, however, retains the US "determination" of Indian missile exports as a trigger for the termination of nuclear cooperation but incorporates an exception that would allow the cooperation to continue if the Indian government has had no role to play in the impugned export and is taking corrective legal action. This, however, means that India cannot export missiles with a range of more than 300 km to other countries — including those which are MTCR adherents — without triggering the end of nuclear cooperation.