NSG meet: Who are the holdout nations actually targeting?

Vienna: Fronting for a band of six countries that are holding out against the grant of waivers to India to trade in nuclear fuel and technology, Austria said Friday that "some work still" needed to be done in the draft circulated by the US for approval by NSG nations.

Austria wants some "auxilliary measures" to be incorporated in the document. "Some work still needs to be done. Number of mirror images need to be added to the current talks and ideas in the draft...we want to have more effective and qualitatively improved security architecture," said Peter Launsky, an Austrian foreign ministry official.

Reports emerging at the end of the second round of the second day of the crucial meeting of the 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) quote an unnamed western diplomat as saying that the outcome may be a ''surprise''.

Asked if the decision would favour India, he said, "I can't say. It can be for... it can be against."

An interesting conjecture may be that the holdout nations are actually thrashing out matters with confirmed deal supporters, such as  Russia, France and the UK in an attempt to secure commitments from them or at least ensure that any future punitive course of action against India would ensure their compliance. This is important as the NSG acts on a consensual basis and nations with greater commercial interest in this whole issue may not wish to act in sync with others if India should be perceived to be infringing in someway.

Apart from the USA, at least two other countries, Russia and France, have potential nuclear deals with India in the pipeline. It may be important for nations with no genuine commercial clout, such as Austria, New Zealand and Ireland and a few others to tie down genuine fuel and technology exporters such as Russia and France to some ground rules.