It seems that the Head and the Body are singing to different tunes with a wide divergence between the White House and the Bureaucracy entrenched in the State Department. Alliances are not built in a day and definitely statements like these don’t make it any easier. The issue is in a sense cultural too. Statements like these have a large playing field in India where even words emanating from a State Department non-entity strengthens the scepticism about the benefits that Prime Minister Singh has been trying to sell. Indians may ask what’s all this hue and cry about the “nuclear deal” when the same kind of statements that have been the bane of US-India relationship continue to be aired in public.
There are three possibilities here, viz.
:=: the spokesman was caught off-guard and he gave the stock reply of negativism;
:=: he was really unaware of the fact that clauses regarding Indian commitments do not kick in till the Bush Administration amends Federal Laws and changes NSG Rules or that Tarapur Nuclear Plants are already safeguarded by IAEA, so technically they already fulfil the standards of the joint agreement. Perhaps he also forgot that a previous Administration broke an agreement with India to supply fuel for Tarapur and it is because of that fact that France and Russia have been forced to supply nuclear fuel interminently to prevent a nuclear incident. [The agreement stipulated that US shall supply fuel as long as India kept the plant under IAEA safeguards; In spite of US breaking its commitments, India still keeps the reactors under IAEA safeguards];
:=: his statement was an Administration sop to the non-proliferation hawks; and to demonstrate that US was not endangering or deviating from its non-proliferation goals;
:=: the Administration is nervous about Russia taking the lead and reaping the benefits of Bush’s vision, especially in light of the close ties between Russia and India.