New Delhi: Indian prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh has embarked on a visit to the United States to attend the nuclear security summit which will be attended by leaders from more than 40 countries.
 
During the eight-day visit, Singh will also travel to Brazil to attend the Brazil-Russia-India-China (BRIC) and India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) summits, where the issue of Iran's nuclear programme and impending UN sanctions against it is expected to figure prominently.

In the first leg of the tour, Dr Singh will be in Washington for four days during which he will attend the two-day Nuclear Security Summit on 12-13 April and meet US president Barack Obama and other world leaders.

These will include French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Kazakhstan president Nursultan Nazarbaev and Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper.

The nuclear summit is intended to focus on dangers posed by clandestine proliferation and illicit trafficking of nuclear material and the possibility of terrorists acquiring atomic material.

In his carefully prepared pre-departure briefings, the government let it be known that Dr Singh expected the summit to focus on nuclear terrorism and proliferation of sensitive nuclear materials and technologies.

"These are legitimate concerns which require firm responses," the prime minister said.

Talking about India's well developed and indigenous nuclear energy programme, which dates back six decades, Singh said, "We have an impeccable record of security, safety and non-proliferation which reflects in our conduct as a responsible nuclear power."

If it is his intention to point the finger at Pakistan, and reasonably so, he would find the waters muddied considerably by US secretary of state Hillary Clinton's comments made a day earlier that effectively puts India and Pakistan in the same boat.

In her remarks made at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, Clinton said that the way countries like India and Pakistan have pursued nuclear weapons has''... upset the balance of nuclear deterrent''.

Without mincing words the American secretary of state has made complete nonsense of the Indian position that it is a safe and responsible nation, as opposed to a known proliferator like Pakistan - a nation that is also a haven for the world's most threatening terrorist networks.

This would be evident from a close look at her comments made in a response to a question.

''And other countries that have pursued nuclear weapons, like India and Pakistan, for example, have done so in a way that has upset the balance of nuclear deterrent, and that's why we're working with both countries very hard to try to make sure that their nuclear stockpiles are well tended to and that they participate with us in trying to limit the number of nuclear weapons. And both of them will be in Washington this next week.''

Dr Singh, instead of preening his feathers about the responsible nature of India's nuclear programme, may instead find himself assuring India's recently acquired "strategic partner,'' the United States of America, whether his ''...nuclear stockpiles are well tended to'' and how he proposes to '' ...limit the number of nuclear weapons.''

Once again, the United States, in desperate need to mollycoddle Pakistan, has deemed it fit to play the time-tested hyphenation game between these two sub-continental nations.

Clinton's comments come in the wake of the United States and Russia securing a New Start treaty aimed at further reducing nuclear arsenals of both nations.

The signing of the treaty was timed to precede the nuclear summit and allow the largest holders of nuclear weapons to pontificate about the perils of such weapon systems.

Given its wishy-washy nature the treaty has not drawn much attention. For instance, it does not even bother to touch upon the issue of tactical nuclear warheads, a class of weapons that experts have asserted makes a nuclear conflagration distinctly possible.

The provisions of the treaty do not do much to reduce nuclear weapons numbers that actually exist with both nations either, for through provisions of previous treaties, or through degradation over a period of time, inventories of both nations are fairly close to levels laid down by the new treaty.

In this, the treaty merely recognises facts as they actually exist on the ground and do not signal any fresh commitments to move forward towards global disarmament. While Washington tries to hype up significance of New Start, in Russia it is looked upon as a non-event.

By Clinton's own confession, in the very same address at which she hyphenated India and Pakistan on the nuclear issue, the United States and Russia together account for 90 per cent of all nuclear weapons in the world.

Dr Singh will do well to focus more on the BRIC and IBSA summits, as in his own words, ''These groupings reflect the growing role of emerging economies in shaping the global economic order."

All his attempts at trying to recreate the magic of the George Bush era has come to naught with a new Obama administration desperately wooing Pakistan as its only solution for an honourable exit from the morass of the Af-Pak strategy.