NEW DELHI: Caution appears to be the guiding principle in South Block as Indian and U.S. officials grapple again with the text of a possible civilian nuclear cooperation agreement between the two countries in Cape Town, South Africa.

"It's hard to say when we'll be able to clinch the [civilian nuclear] agreement," a senior official admitted to this correspondent. "There's no deal until we have an agreed text," the official maintained.

Some of the euphoria associated with the civilian nuclear deal, marked by the July 18, 2005 joint statement and the March 2, 2006 separation plan and the passage of enabling legislation allowing for atomic energy cooperation in December 2006, seems to have vanished.

According to the official, every previous agreement between India and the U.S. on the subject — in July 2005 and March 2006 — came as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was in Washington and President George W. Bush was in New Delhi.

By implication, the official was pointing to a simple fact: that the driving force behind the civilian nuclear cooperation deal was political and if it can be concluded, then the political actors would have to step in again.

For India, the uppermost concern remains the right to reprocess spent nuclear fuel, a facility that the U.S. has granted to a few close allies. At the same time, India doesn't want to give any commitment on not conducting a nuclear test in a bilateral agreement and prefers to keep its moratorium a voluntary one.

Nicholas Burns, U.S. Under-Secretary of State and key negotiator for the deal, told the Financial Times on Wednesday, "We are disappointed with the pace and seriousness of the civil nuclear negotiations with India... it's time to accelerate our efforts to achieve a final deal."

Earlier, Mr. Burns told USA Today on April 11 that there was a "fair degree of frustration in Washington, that the Indian Government has not engaged seriously enough or quickly enough" with both the United States and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

These remarks are in sharp contrast to the ones made by Mr. Burns in the capital in December 2006 that the bilateral civilian nuclear cooperation accord (or 123 agreement in American parlance) merely required a codification of what had been agreed to earlier.

"I think it's extremely problematical [concluding the deal]," said P.R. Chari of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies.

"There are lots of ifs and buts." In his view, the Mumbai-based Atomic Energy Commission and not New Delhi was responsible for formulating the Indian position at the negotiations with the U.S.

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