A day after the government deferred the introduction of the bill in the Lok Sabha due to the absence of a sizeable number of Congress members and the consolidation of the NDA, Left and the regional parties against it, national security adviser Shivshankar Menon on Tuesday briefed a select group of Congress MPs and Union ministers on this issue at Parliament House. The meeting lasted nearly an hour.
The government has adopted a twin-strategy. It will first try to convince the Opposition of the necessity of the bill. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may send an envoy — Atomic Energy Commission chairman Srikumar Banerjee or Mr Menon — to Opposition leaders Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley, Yashwant Sinha (all BJP), Sitaram Yechury (CPI-M) and some regional party leaders to remove their “misconceptions” on it. The second strategy involves going openly against the Opposition, especially the BJP and its double talk on the bill.
Mr Menon briefed Jayanthi Natarajan, Manish Tewari, Rashid Alvi, Sandeep Dikshit, Rajiv Shukla, Mausam Noor and Union ministers Kapil Sibal, Pawan Kumar Bansal and Prithviraj Chavan.
Parliamentary sources claimed Ms Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress is not against the bill and that reports suggesting this are incorrect.
Though the PM is said to be keen on the passage of the bill without sending it to the standing committee, Congress insiders said the House would take a view on it once it is introduced and that most probably it would be sent to the standing committee.
Government managers are also working on numbers in case the BJP-led NDA, Left, SP, BSP, RJD, BJD, TDP and others press for a division at the time of the tabling of this bill in the Lok Sabha.
The bill is a key step for the operationalisation of the Indo-US nuclear deal. It deals with compensation in the event of a nuclear mishap and the modalities involved.
Venkatesh Kesari